In a 40-bed facility, accounts payable often belongs to whoever has a free hour. The same person enters invoices, cuts checks, and takes the call when the pharmacy asks about a past-due balance. That works until it quietly starts costing money, and it tends to do it in four ways.
Duplicates come first. The same invoice arrives by email, then by mail, then as a line on a statement, and gets paid twice. Nobody notices until a vendor sends a credit memo months later, if they send one at all.
Late fees are second. Pharmacy, food service, and therapy contractors all have terms, and an invoice that sits on the administrator's desk for ten days during survey week doesn't help.
Third are agency staffing invoices that arrive weeks after the shifts were worked. If they aren't accrued at month end, that month looks more profitable than it was and the correction lands in the next one.
The fourth is the one that ends up in the news: a message from a "vendor" asking to update their bank details. These work because the email looks right and the person processing it is busy. A single redirected payment can cost more than the facility makes in a good month.
The controls are cheap. Pick one place invoices go, a shared AP inbox, and tell vendors to use it. Run payments on a fixed day each week. Keep the person who adds or edits vendor records separate from the person who releases payment, even if that means the administrator approves the batch. Verify any bank detail change by calling the number already on file, never one from the email asking for the change. And keep a short month-end list of the vendors who reliably bill late so they get accrued.
With two people in the office, none of that is easy to staff, and that is the reason LTCPro's accounts payable outsourcing for healthcare facilities exists. The process stays the same. It just stops depending on who is out sick.
Author bio: Written by the LTCPro team. See LTCPro's website for the full list of back-office services built for skilled nursing and assisted living facilities.
