Your First Week on NetPractice, Step by Step

The most common reason a practice stays on billing software it has stopped liking is not loyalty. It is the suspicion that changing will eat a fortnight nobody has. That is a fair worry, so this is the honest version: what actually has to happen, who has to do it, and where the real work is.

The short answer is that the work is front-loaded into one short setup and then stops. The longer answer has three parts that are genuinely your time, and it is worth knowing which.

1. Signing up: minutes

Creating the account takes a few minutes and needs nothing unusual. You can add patients, set up your fee structure and look around immediately. Nothing here depends on us.

If you are coming from another system, do one thing before you go any further: ask your current provider for your data export while you are still a customer. Patient demographics, outstanding balances, and your fee list. It is a routine request and a much harder one after you have given notice. We have written the full sequence in switching practice management software, and that page owns the leaving half of this properly.

2. Practice details and schemes: the part that takes a day

Before claims can go anywhere, your practice has to be correctly identified to the schemes: your practice number, the disciplines you bill under, and which schemes you submit to. This is the step that turns a signed-up account into a practice that can transact, and it is why the answer is "live within 24 hours" rather than "live immediately".

Most of that day is confirmation rather than your effort. You supply the details once; the checking happens without you.

3. Your first claim, and the bit that feels different

Submit a claim and the scheme's answer comes back while the patient is still in the room, rather than days later in a batch report. If it is rejected, the reason comes with it, so the correction is a fix rather than an investigation.

That change is smaller than it sounds on the first claim and larger than it sounds by the end of the month, because the work you never do is invisible: no chasing a batch, no discovering a fortnight later that a whole run bounced for one avoidable reason. If you want the arithmetic, real-time versus batch sets out what the delay actually costs.

What does not come with you

Being straight about this saves an awkward conversation later.

• Submitted claims stay where they were submitted. Their remittances come back to that system, so keep access to it until the last one has paid.
• Your banking details with the schemes do not change by themselves. If the account the schemes pay into is changing, that is a separate scheme-by-scheme process with its own forms and verification. It is not part of going live, and it has its own guide.
• Historical reporting stays historical. Your new system reports on what it processed.

The cleanest cutover is a line rather than an overlap: finish the run you are in, start the next one here, and do not capture the same claim twice.

What it costs to find out

Your first 10 claims each month are free. After that it is R9.50 a claim, with no setup fee, no monthly fee, no contract and no minimum term. Nothing is behind a tier: claims, reporting and support are the product, not the upgrade.

Which means a month of genuine use - not a demo, real claims for real patients - costs nothing if you stay under 11 claims, and R9.50 each above that. That is deliberately a small enough number that you can answer the question by trying it rather than by being convinced.

A reasonable first week

• Day 1. Sign up. Request your export from your current provider.
• Day 1-2. Supply your practice number, disciplines and schemes. Wait for confirmation.
• Day 2-3. Load patients. Set up your fee structure.
• Day 3. Submit one real claim and watch what comes back.
• Rest of the week. Run normally. Reconcile the first remittance against what you claimed.

If you manage more than one practice, they sit under the same login rather than one account each, so the setup above happens once and the practices are added to it.

The honest summary: one day of waiting, an afternoon of your time, and the first ten claims free while you decide.

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