Advance Payments and Superbill Timing

Allow optional session payments before or after an appointment, understand refund and payer considerations, and keep future services off superbills.

Allow clients to pay for a session

In Settings → Billing, enable Allow clients to create an invoice and pay for a session if this fits your practice’s financial policy and payer requirements.

The setting permits eligible clients on manual or daily billing to create an invoice and pay before or after the session starts. Eligibility follows the case’s effective collection policy, including applicable overrides. Weekly and monthly cases stay on their scheduled billing cycle. Enabling the setting does not charge a client automatically.

On both the portal home and billing pages, clients see:

Upcoming appointment, with an optional Pay for appointment action when the next appointment qualifies.
Past sessions awaiting payment, an expandable list of eligible sessions that do not yet have invoices.
Existing invoices with their usual payment actions.

The billing overview does not list every future session. Paying or creating an invoice for the next appointment does not reveal a payment request for the following one.

Payment does not establish that care occurred

Use an invoice to request payment and a payment receipt to acknowledge money received. A payment made before an appointment does not confirm attendance or mean that the planned service was delivered.

A superbill documents services for insurance reimbursement. PracticeRunner excludes appointments that have not ended from new superbills and from draft refreshes. It also checks for future dates before approving, sending, or generating a superbill PDF. Paying in advance does not bypass these checks, even if the appointment is already marked as attended.

After the session, confirm attendance, service, duration, fee, diagnosis, and provider details. An ended appointment must still satisfy the usual superbill requirements, including paid and settled billing. A late cancellation or no-show may have an invoice charge under your policy, but it must not be presented as an attended therapy service on a superbill.

If you see a message about future dates:

Check the selected date range and the appointment’s date, start time, end time, and timezone.
If the appointment has not ended, wait. Give the client a payment receipt if they need confirmation of advance payment.
If the details are wrong, correct the appointment. Refresh an eligible private draft and review its PDF before approval. Create a new draft with a date range ending today or earlier if the original range is wrong.
Do not backdate an appointment or change attendance simply to produce reimbursement paperwork.

Existing finalized documents and imported PDFs have separate correction restrictions. Do not assume a blocked document will be silently corrected. See Superbills for Insurance Reimbursement.

Before offering advance payment

The daily billing setting is a software rule, not confirmation that advance collection is permitted for every client or payer. Review your jurisdiction’s requirements, licensing rules, and applicable payer agreements before enabling it.

Explain the arrangement. Your financial policy should describe whether prepayment is optional, the amount collected, and what happens when either party cancels, an appointment moves, or care ends. Professional ethics call for clear fee and billing agreements; see the APA ethics code, sections 6.04 and 6.06. These professional standards do not replace applicable law.
Plan refunds and credits. Review each canceled or changed prepaid appointment. Decide what is owed under your disclosed policy and applicable rules, then process the appropriate refund or agreed credit. Do not assume canceling an appointment or voiding an invoice returns money. See Managing Invoices, Payments, and Flexible Billing.
Check payer restrictions. Insurer contracts and government programs can limit what you collect and when. For example, Medicare assignment rules differ from private-pay arrangements. Check the applicable contract and Medicare’s provider payment guidance rather than treating portal eligibility as payer approval.
Keep estimates separate. Advance payment does not replace an applicable Good Faith Estimate. CMS explains when estimates are required for uninsured or self-pay care in its Good Faith Estimate guidance.

This article explains PracticeRunner’s workflow and general considerations. It is not legal advice or a guarantee of reimbursement. Consult your professional association or qualified healthcare counsel about requirements specific to your practice.