How can a Specialist Medical Accountant Support My Healthcare Practice?

What can a specialist medical accountant do for your healthcare practice?

Hiring a medical accountant to manage your healthcare practice finances isn’t obligatory, and you may consider it an unnecessary overhead. However, with their specialist insight and experience – and considering their fees are a tax deductible expense – outsourcing this responsibility can prove to be a cost-effective benefit to your organisation.

Hiring a specialist medical accountant is likely to prove to be a worthwhile (and tax deductible) expense.

GPs, dentists and other medical and healthcare practices are usually based on a partnership business model, rather than being set up as limited companies. A specialist medical accountant can handle the added complexity that this brings to your practice accounts, whilst ensuring that you stay on top of the healthcare sector’s unique financial requirements. These and NHS pension and tax systems, can be a real drain on a GP or partner’s valuable time and resources, which could be better spent on patient care and career development.

A specialist medical accountant can help in a wide range of different ways, such as:

• Efficiently and accurately process all necessary accounting work
• Offer advice and guidance on financial decisions
• Mitigate risks
• Forecast costs
• Minimise tax liabilities
• Identify and solve financial problems
• Manage the NHS pension scheme

By utilising their in-depth expertise, gained through specialist training and experience, hiring a medical accountant can free up your time for other priorities.

Key ways a medical accountant can lift the financial management burden

Here are some of the main benefits of hiring a healthcare accountant:

1. Keep you abreast of developments that will affect your practice and help to guide your response, providing analysis and bespoke recommendations on matters such as the NHS Long Term Plan, and five year GP contracts.
2. Manage your pensions, calculating partners’ tax liabilities and pension incomes. With the NHS pension scheme constantly undergoing minor tweaks and changes, it can be pretty overwhelming to manage. A medical accountant will ensure your records are accurate and provide advance warning of potential tax liabilities, estimate pensionable profits and submit certificates. They’ll provide timely advice on related tax and help with advance planning to ensure you avoid any nasty surprises and have the available funds to meet your liabilities. They’ll also calculate how much is due in the case of retiring partners and present potential new partners with earnings forecasts to assist with talent acquisition.
3. Ensure the financial clauses in your partnership agreement remain fit for purpose, advising on the agreement and referring to specialist lawyers as and when needed.
4. Help with financial planning, providing timely projections and plans for the financial year – including how much your practice partners can draw each month. A qualified accountant will add value when it comes to challenging proposals and advising on investment decisions. They will be able to guide you on whether costs are justified and projects can be afforded in addition to flagging opportunities for funding, so your practice won’t miss-out.
5. Ensuring compliance with tax obligations while also minimising your liabilities and offering timely tax forecasting and advice on tax matters. They will also be your key contact for HMRC, handling any investigations and enquiries.

Understanding the practice business as a whole

Another key benefit of hiring a professional medial accountant is that they will help you to frame and understand your practice in a completely comprehensive way. From contextualising where income comes from, what the costs are and where you need to invest to earn, to what savings can be made. This in-depth view will be invaluable to your practice.

Here are some more aspects of medical accounting that a reputable professional should provide:

• Overseeing practice income – ensuring you get all the income that’s available to you, keeping you on top of funding opportunities and avoiding missed claims.
• Projecting partners personal tax payments in advance of due dates.
• Balancing each GP’s capital accounts with the partnership accounts.
• Benchmarking – comparing figures with other practices or national profiles to spot areas for improved efficiencies and cost savings and better systems. For example, is your practice spending more on locums than similar practices in your local area? Once an issue is identified, they’ll recommend ways to address those challenges.
• Guiding practice expense claims – advising on what expenses can be claimed by the partners to ensure that only legitimate expenses are claimed, while also minimising your tax bill as much as possible.

Getting outsourced support from a trusted healthcare accounting expert should easily pay for itself in time. If you’d like to speak to one of our specialist medical accountants, please contact us and we’ll be happy to discuss how we can help.