To calculate payroll for multiple clinicians in a group practice, you can use the Income Allocation report. This report includes the current payments for your practice, along with past Pay Periods.

In this guide, we’ll cover:

• Accessing the Income allocation report
• Managing Current Payments
• Closing Pay Periods manually
• Closing Pay Periods automatically
• Viewing and exporting past Pay Periods
• Implementing best practices for managing payroll

Note: To learn how the Income allocation report is calculated, see Income allocation: How the report is calculated.

Accessing the Income allocation report

Many group practices calculate their payroll in SimplePractice using the Income allocation report. To access this report:

• Navigate to Analytics > Reports
• Click Income allocation under Income

Note: For more information about your income reports, see Understanding your income reports.

The Income allocation report includes a list of total allocated amounts by clinician within a certain period of time.

To customize your view of this report, you can:

• Adjust the date range to show income allocated over a certain period of time

• Choose to Include Insurance

• Select to view payments for an individual clinician

Managing Current Payments

The Current Payments section of the Income allocation report shows you the total of all allocated payments within a given date range, and is organized into 4 columns.

• The Source column indicates the type of income received and whether it was allocated
• The Description column shows where the income was received from, such as appointments, practice products, or the insurance payer for insurance payments
  • By default, descriptions are divided by clinician and the total amount for each category of payment
• The Clinician column shows the name of the clinician that received the payments
• The Amount column indicates how much each clinician has received, based on allocated payments and the total amounts for each Source category

Clicking Unallocated Client Payments and Credits will take you to a page listing clients with unallocated payments and credits. You can also see the total amounts and navigate to the client's Overview page to fix discrepancies.

This report only displays payments that were added in the selected date range. You can adjust the date range to review the unallocated client payments and credits specific for that date range.

Note: Payments that are entered into SimplePractice need to be applied to an invoice within a client’s file. If an appointment hasn’t been invoiced, the payment can’t be allocated and will remain as an unallocated payment. To learn more about how payments are allocated to invoices, see Unallocated payments.

Tip: We recommend making sure that all payments are allocated. If a payment is added to a client’s file, but that payment isn’t allocated to an invoice, it won’t appear as part of a clinician’s total or on the Total allocated to Clinicians line.

Closing Pay Periods manually

If you’re part of a group practice, you can manually close Pay Periods depending on how often you run payroll. Most Account Owners choose to pay their team members either every two weeks or once a month.

Note: Only Account Owners, Clinicians with Administrative Access, Billers, and Practice Managers who've been granted access to financial reports will be able to view the Past Pay Periods tab. All other team members can only view their own information on this report.

To manually calculate the correct pay for team members for a set amount of time:

• Navigate to Settings > Team Members > Payroll
• Select Manually in the dropdown (this will be the default selection)
• Click Save

• Navigate to Analytics > Reports > Income allocation
• Select the date range of your Pay Period
  • Each date can only be associated with one Pay Period

Note: It's not possible to close a Pay Period that includes the current date. The latest date you can include in a Pay Period would be the day before it’s manually closed.

• Click Close Pay Period at the end of each Pay Period

Important: To include the history of all invoices and claims paid during a specific date range, it’s recommended to close your Pay Periods regularly when calculating manually. If you delete a closed Pay Period, this will result in the deletion of Pay Periods after that date.

Closing Pay Periods automatically

You can also set up Pay Periods to close automatically on a certain schedule. This can help make calculating payroll easier if you’re part of a group practice.

To do this:

• Navigate to Settings > Team Members > Payroll
• Select one of the automatic options from the dropdown menu
• Click Save

The different dropdown options include:

Weekly

Weekly Pay Periods automatically close every week on the night the Account Owner selects.

Biweekly

Biweekly Pay Periods close automatically every two weeks on the night the Account Owner selects.

• Once selected, Pay Periods will begin closing every two weeks from that date

Semi-monthly

Semi-monthly Pay Periods close automatically on the two days of the month the Account Owner selects.

Monthly

Monthly Pay Periods automatically close on one day of the month the Account Owner selects.

Note: If the Account Owner selects the 2nd and the 29th, 30th, or 31st day for semi-monthly and monthly Pay Periods, this message will appear: “Pay Periods will be closed on the [31] day of the month or on the last day for months with fewer days.”

When the Pay Period auto-closes, it can appear differently depending on certain conditions:

• If no Pay Periods have been closed before, the Pay Period will include the last 30 days since it's the default view of the Income allocation report
• If Pay Periods have been created in the past, the start date will automatically adjust
  • This means the Pay Period's end date is the day it automatically closes, and its beginning date is the day after the last Pay Period was closed
• If the automation is set up, the Past Pay Periods tab of the Income allocation report will show the date that the next Pay Period is set to close

Viewing and exporting past Pay Periods

The Past Pay Periods tab shows a collection of financial snapshots of the Current Payments view. A Pay Period snapshot helps you see your payments for a certain time frame to help you manage your payroll.

Adjustments from previous Pay Periods will show in the Adjustments column in the following Pay Period, so you can manually calculate them into your payroll.

See Accounting for Adjustments under Implementing best practices for managing payroll below.

To generate a Past Pay Period report:

• Navigate to Analytics > Reports > Income allocation
• Click the Past Pay Periods tab
• Click the date range of a closed Pay Period

• Select Download Report in the upper right of the page to export the file
  • For more information, see Exporting the Income allocation report as a CSV file

Implementing best practices for managing payroll

Managing payroll varies from practice to practice. For example, some teams pay clinicians an hourly rate, others a percentage, and others based on the total number of appointments they conduct in a given time period.

If the needs of your team are complex and require a full-featured payroll system, we recommend that you use another billing platform. If you pay clinicians a percentage or based on the number of appointments, and want to use SimplePractice to review what you’ll be paying them, we’ve outlined some best practices that have worked for our customers.

Invoicing and client payments

Your ability to identify and allocate payments starts with invoicing. 

Payments will be unallocated and excluded from the clinician's total in the Income Allocation report if an invoice’s total fee is too large and there aren’t enough payments to cover the invoice. Instead, we recommend creating individual invoices for each appointment, rather than one invoice that contains many appointments.

For example, an invoice is created for two appointments totaling $300. A payment is added for $150 (for one of the appointments). The $150 will not appear on the report because it hasn’t been allocated to an invoice yet. The $150 is therefore considered unallocated.

A client’s full payment for an invoice must be recorded in their account for the invoice to be marked as Paid. We also recommend invoicing and collecting full payment at the time of service. If a payment is added to a client’s file, but that payment isn’t allocated to an invoice, it won’t appear as part of a clinician’s total, or on the Total allocated to Clinicians line.

Note: For more information about invoicing, see Creating invoices.

Accounting for adjustments

At the end of each Pay Period, you can view your records to compare changes between Pay Periods. Adjustments happen when you use any payroll system, and comparing your current Pay Period to past ones can help you stay on top of the changes.

If a billing change is made to a past Pay Period, that change will be reflected as an adjustment on the current Pay Period once it’s locked. Adjustments from previous Pay Periods are highlighted in yellow and appear in the Adjusted column in the current Pay Period. They can either be positive or negative amounts.

Note: Adjustments need to be manually added or subtracted from a clinician's payment totals once a Pay Period is closed.

A positive adjustment means income from services rendered have increased for the amount that has already been tracked for a clinician in a previous Pay Period. Positive adjustments need to be added to the clinician’s total. A positive adjustment occurs when:

• An invoice is reassigned to a clinician
• A client payment is added and backdated 
• A manual insurance payment is added and backdated

In the example above, you’ll need to add the total listed in the Amount column with the total listed in the Adjusted column to calculate this clinician’s total.

A negative adjustment will be followed by a CR on a closed Pay Period. These amounts will need to be subtracted from the clinician’s total. A negative adjustment occurs when:

• A refund is issued for an invoice outside of the current Pay Period
• A client payment is deleted, edited to be a lesser amount, or the date is changed
• An insurance payment is deleted, edited to be a lesser amount, or the date is changed
• An invoice is deleted or assigned to another clinician

In the example above you’ll need to subtract the total in the Adjusted column from the total in the Amount column to calculate this clinician’s total.

Reviewing past Pay Periods and checking for adjustments is a necessary process in any payroll workflow. Pay Period snapshots provide a historical record so you know what you paid last time and note any changes. If a clinician asks you where you got the numbers for their payment, or why an adjustment is made, you’ll be able to refer back to your Pay Period history.

Note: We’re working on making it easier to identify adjustments, but there isn’t currently a report that tracks them. We recommend tracking adjustments in your Account Activity. If you have any suggestions on the best way that we can communicate when an adjustment happens based on how you manage payroll for your practice, you can contribute your idea by adding to our Ideas and Suggestions board.

Unallocated client payments and credits

Unlike adjustments, the amounts on the Unallocated client payments and credits report don’t need to be factored into your clinician’s totals. This report tracks the income that was received or removed outside of the Pay Period.

The best way to avoid having clients on this list is to create invoices daily and collect payments at the time of service. You can track the status of an invoice in the Appointment status report.