THE FIRST BUILD

One counselor’s billing week,
rebuilt from the ground up.

A solo vocational-rehabilitation counselor in Ohio ran her entire workers’-comp billing by hand — the same work, retyped four times, four to eight hours on a heavy day. We spent time learning exactly how she worked, then built software that does it for her. Nothing about her process changed on paper; almost all of the typing disappeared.

Before

The manual pipeline

Every billable action — a phone call, a report, a job-site visit — started the same chain, and she walked the whole chain by hand:

  1. Daily billing log. She typed each activity into an Excel sheet: date, client, service code, time units, the rate looked up by hand, the charge multiplied out, and a written note.
  2. Weekly client log. At the end of the week she re-typed each client’s activities into a separate Word document — the narrative log her payers require.
  3. CMS-1500 forms. Then she re-typed the same lines a third time onto the CMS-1500 claim form, splitting onto a second and third form whenever a client went past six service lines.
  4. Folders. Each client had a folder tree she created and maintained by hand — billing info, CMS forms, emails, fax confirmations.
  5. Fax. She assembled a cover sheet, the Word log, and the CMS forms and faxed the packet to each insurer.
  6. Accounts receivable. She recorded what she had billed in a tracking spreadsheet so she would know what was owed — then, when checks arrived, went back in and marked each one paid, hunting down anything short-paid to resubmit.

The information never changed between steps. She was, in effect, being paid to copy the same numbers from one document into the next — and to remember, weeks later, which insurer still owed her.

After

Enter it once

We built her a desktop application that mirrors her Excel sheet exactly — same columns, same rates, same look — and treats that one entry as the source of truth:

The daily log fills itself

She types the day’s work the way she always has. Rates fill in automatically, charges calculate, and the Excel file is written to the same folder she has always used — she can still open and edit it by hand, and the app keeps up.

Weekly documents generate

The weekly Word log and the CMS-1500s — including the second and third forms when a client runs past six lines — build themselves from the week’s entries, into each client’s own folders.

Faxing is one click

The app assembles the cover sheet and every CMS page into one packet, addressed to that insurer’s fax number, and sends it through her own RingCentral account — where it still appears in her Sent list.

Accounts receivable tracks itself

Billing a week starts the clock automatically. When a check arrives she picks the insurer, ticks off what was paid in full, and types any short amount — the app flags underpayments and helps her resubmit them.

The four-to-eight-hour day of copying became a few minutes of entering the work once. Her folders, her file names, her forms, and her insurers stayed exactly as they were — the software adapted to her, not the other way around.

Why it’s custom

Your practice isn’t hers

Her build works because it fits her exactly — her state’s fee schedule, her payers, her folder naming, her Excel layout. Another counselor bills different insurers, in a different state, with different forms and a different filing system. That’s why we don’t sell one shrink-wrapped product: we sit down, learn how you work, and build software that matches it. The engine underneath — CMS-1500 generation, accounts receivable, faxing, reporting, data that never leaves your computer — is proven. What we tailor is the fit.

Book a discovery call How your data stays private