Healthcare Financing: The Painless Payment Option
Running a healthcare business today requires more cash flow and has higher overhead than most other specialized industries. What that means is that for even the most successful professionals, some method of smoothing over the waiting period for insurance claims and providing for payroll and equipment expenses during the interim is necessary, so that way your money going out never gets bottlenecked by the wait for money coming in. Luckily, there are now credit providers who specialize in healthcare financing, as well as products designed to work especially for medical professionals.
Practice Loans and Medical Equipment Leasing
Two of the more popular methods of attaining the cash flow needed to run a healthcare business are through medical equipment leasing and practice loans. When you lease your medical equipment, most of the time the expense is a tax-deductible business expense, lowering your overhead. Leases also tend to cost less than loans, and they make upgrading easier because the commitment is typically shorter.
Practice loans, on the other hand, provide you with the flexible cash you need to meet a variety of needs, including payroll and incidental expenses. They can also be used to consolidate debt when necessary, making them powerful instruments for both the expansion of your practice and for smoothing over times when payments are past due or before they are due to come in.
Cash Advance Services
For practices that do a lot of direct transactions with customers, merchant cash advance services provide the opportunity to draw a cash advance that is then repaid as a portion of your credit receipts, but unfortunately, there needs to be a significant volume of existing receipts that demonstrates to the lender how repayment will work and how long it will take. If your practice does not engage in a large volume of card transactions, this will be difficult.
There’s also financing your receivables, though, and that works for the entire balance sheet. When you finance your receivables, a factor reviews your accounts—including outstanding insurance claims that need to be paid to you—and advances you a percentage that you are then able to use to meet your expenses. When the payments come in, the factor collects them, deducts the advance and a service fee, and passes the remainder on to you, ensuring that you get paid on both ends of the transaction without sacrificing your ability to put your money to work immediately.
When you need a way to smooth the cash flow in your practice, healthcare financing is the easy, painless way to do it. It’s just a matter of finding the format that works for your business.
