Consolidated Invoicing: New Features to help you capture more revenue

Consolidated Invoicing: New Features to Help You Capture More Revenue

We’ve built a Consolidated Invoicing platform that’s tailored to the needs of third party benefits administrators and providers, and loaded with features and functionality to help you collect more revenue and streamline your financial operations.

Plus, we just launched a new user interface, built around the key actions you need to complete quickly and accurately to get those invoices out ASAP. In this 30 minute demo, you’ll learn:

  • How we collect necessary member counts and plan elections from any connected ben admin system
  • How you can configure any combo of fees (one time, recurring, commissions and more)
  • How employers have one-click access to their invoices and payment portal
  • How your dashboard is brimming with features to help you collect more revenue – like batches, delayed posting, lookback adjustments, drops/adds reporting and more.

Meet Eric Sukalac, our Chief Product Officer, and Amanda Metes, head of marketing and product experience as we take you through.

Please note, the following transcript is automatically generated and may contain typos. 

Hey, hi there. Welcome to our webinar, Consolidated Invoicing, New Features to Help You Capture More Revenue. I’m Amanda Metes, Head of Product Experience and Marketing here at TPA Stream, and I’m joined today by Eric Sukalac, our Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder of TPA Stream. Hey there, Eric. Hey, Amanda. How’s it going? Great. How about you? Good, good. Can you just introduce yourself for the sake of the audience today and tell us a little bit about your background? Sure thing. So yeah, like Amanda said, I’m chief product officer and one of the co-founders here at TPA Stream. So TPA Stream began a good number of years ago now as a result of my own need for claims harvesting. So we kind of built that up around what I needed to get done as an employee for uh for claims harvesting and we’ve since really expanded the business to cover consolidated invoicing and more recently uh communications very cool thanks eric um and with that I just as a good segue you gave me a good intro on that um we have existing customers on the line to learn a little bit more about the new features that we just launched as well as prospective customers and industry folks so um with that very audience in mind we’re gonna add a little bit of context to consolidated invoicing before we get started. But even before we do that, I just wanted to share with people if you’re new to StreamYard, our webinar platform, you can add any questions to the question box on the right hand of your screen. And Eric and I can both see them. And we’ll do our best to answer any of the questions that we can through the course of our webinar. So please just let it rip as they say. Let’s give Eric a run for his money today. And if it’s a really specific question and we can’t answer or it’s specifically about your use case, we’ll follow up with you, but chances are the others on the line will benefit from you asking your question because a lot of us face the same challenges with consolidated invoicing. So let’s go ahead and jump forward to the agenda slide. We’re going to talk a little bit about, as I mentioned, how consolidated invoicing works. And then we’re going to take a tour of the new dashboard and show you how you can get a member deep dive directly from the invoice. And then we’re going to talk about how you can send invoice emails from your domain and how that works a little bit. as well as give you a reminder of a few of our existing features like look back adjustments and then the employer portal. I deliberately put these at the end, so if we do have customers on the line, we can make sure that we address those questions for our prospects. And then at the end, we’ll wrap up with a preview of what’s coming next, not only for TPA stream consolidated invoicing, but also across all of our products. Now, the one thing that I’ll say that’s super exciting, and Eric, maybe you want to talk a little bit about this too, but we’re in the middle of a full product upgrade to our user interface. And you may hear us use the term UI, UX to describe this. And UI stands for user interface and what you see on the screen. And then user experience is, you know, your experience of the product itself. So as we go through, we’ll highlight some of the beta features like, for example, that dashboard that we’ll spend a little bit of time talking about today. So you’ll see us toggle between the existing experience and also the new experience too. Eric, do you want to add anything to that about the new interface that we’re using? Just that it’s a it’s been a really cool experience for us to be putting this together. We worked with a design firm that does kind of world class application design. And we combined kind of their input along with our product usage data to figure out, hey, what changes do we need to make to make the TPA stream experience as effective as possible for our users. So We’ve got a couple of these main pages out in beta right now. We’re really excited to hear some feedback and then to continue rolling out this overhaul across all the pages within the app. Yeah, thanks. Okay, so I’m going to take you through a little bit of how this works, and feel free to interrupt me, Eric, if you want. I just wanted to make sure I could see the whole screen. So let me talk a little bit about how this works. So we take the enrollment data from some of our integrated partners, like Waxolita’s FirstDollar, and also through vendor units, which allows you to invoice for any type of benefit. And then from there, we can apply different billing rules like product bundles, for example, divisions, different contacts, and look back adjustments, which we’ll talk about today. And then from there, that information is spit out in a variety of different ways. We can generate a summary invoice that can be emailed to the employer, a detailed invoice, which can go to the employer portal, which is secure behind a login. And then that accounts receivable data is sent to the accounting software as we have integrations with QuickBooks, Sage Intact and Oracle for a few examples. And then we can also generate a Notcha file that can be sent directly to the bank for processing. those ACH transactions. So all of this starts at the very beginning. We want to make sure that that source data is accurate and is connected with systems that you’re already using. And our system really comes into power in terms of how those complex billing rules are applied. um so based on that sort of configuration um this is a preview of what our uh what our dashboard looks like um and I’m going to go ahead and hop into the software and show you how how this all gets set up but first I wanted to mention you know when you think about how much data is actually coming into the system it can seem really overwhelming But just as context for those who might be new to TPA Stream throughout the course of this webinar, during implementation, we help you set all of this up. So while those billing rules might be really complex, our software is ready to handle that level of complexity necessary to handle anything that your brokers might dream up in terms of what they’re selling and what they’re having you handle. So let’s go ahead and get started with that demo. Let me share the right tab here. I swear, sharing the screen is the hardest part of these things. So let’s go ahead and view the dashboard. This is our existing dashboard here. Oh, Amanda, we got to add that to the stage. Oh, okay. Thanks for interrupting me. Here we go. Can you see it now, Eric? Yep. All right, cool. All right, so here you can see this is the existing dashboard, but let’s go ahead and take a look at the new dashboard. So let me get in here and view the dashboard. This is our beta preview of the dashboard. So Eric, do you mind taking us through kind of what is included in this overview? Absolutely. So along the top here in kind of the three column layout, what we’re seeing here, what we want this to be is the place you can just go to and immediately see where am I in this month’s invoicing process or this quarter’s invoicing process. And in the three column layout, what we have here on the left side is total invoices generated. And there’s a dollar amount there and there’s a dollar amount representing not generated. So what that does is it looks at the previous billing period and says, how many dollars worth of invoices were generated? And for those subscriptions that were set up, how many haven’t been generated yet? So you can, at a really quick glance, see hey, I normally bill out $200,000. I’ve got 180 billed out so far and 20 is remaining. In the center column, it’ll show you for what has been billed, what’s posted versus what’s not yet been posted. And then the final column reflects the paid status of those invoices. So not only can you do this for your current billing period, But you can go back and select any previous billing period by clicking on the little calendar icon and just choosing your your billing period start date. When you do that, it’ll just everything kind of shifts. You can see some numbers in here now, and that’s just going to give you that that at a glance view of what happened in that billing period. What did I bill? What got posted? What got paid? To just walk through a couple of the other items here, directly beneath that, you can see we have the data import section. This is going to show you, like Amanda talked about earlier, there’s so much data coming into TPA Stream. A lot of these jobs are scheduled to run daily, weekly, monthly. That data being up-to-date and accurate is really critical for your invoicing. Rather than have users go dive into the data import page, what we’ve done is we’ve bubbled up the relevant data import tasks right into here. So you can see, hey, the last time my account member import ran was In this case, you know, May something. But you can see what it, you know, when it ran and what its status was, if it was an info or an error. And that should just give you the, you know, kind of the confidence that you need that everything ran properly. I’m good to start invoicing. Or if there was an issue, hey, let’s go dive into the data import page. Let’s see kind of what the issue was. Work with TPA stream to resolve anything. So that’s another piece we bubbled up. Similarly, on the data exports, you know, hey, did I push invoices out to QuickBooks successfully last month? Or when did I do it last? It’s all right there. And then as we move across over to the right, we now have the activity widget here, which is going to show you kind of a at a glance view of activity done in billing on your account. So you can see when people have generated invoices, when they’ve sent out invoices, you’ll just kind of get a running feed of activity by user And as you click on show details, it’ll give you a little bit more information about what happened, what the batch was posted, what invoices were sent, all those sorts of things. So we’re really excited about this. It really can help with working across larger billing teams to make sure everyone can understand, hey, what’s already been done. Did someone make a change over here? So we’re going to continue to enhance that to show even more detail as people go in and they might edit a recurring fee, update a billing contact. We want that all to reflect there so that you can get the quickest at a glance view of what’s going on with my billing. What did I miss? I think you nailed it all. I don’t think Eric knew that I was going to put him on the spot for that, so I really appreciate it. The other cool thing that if you use TPA Stream today that you might be familiar with here that I’ll just highlight is you can drill down by the date here, but you can also drill down by the teams. We know that it’s helpful to bundle different employers by team, so that’s a good way to get a snapshot of a segment of your overall your overall client base too. So we’re really excited about the new interface. We have some great analytics going on behind the scenes to understand how folks are going to be using this and make some iterations from there. So we really wanted to spend some time kind of letting this sink in because it matters. Like we’re exposing a lot more information to you guys in terms of what’s going on. So if customers have any questions on this or need more information in terms of what information is exposed, please do let us know. Okay, great. So now I’m going to quickly bop over to the next feature that we want to focus on, which is the member deep dive from the invoice. So I’m going to go ahead and get that pulled up. One of the things that we have heard from our customers is, you know, we send these invoices and then we have a question specifically about one of the folks that’s on the invoice. So let’s go ahead and show you kind of how that works out over here. And again, as we’re going through, I encourage you to ask some questions. This is new stuff. So we’re excited and we hope that you guys are too. But let us know if you have any questions so we can get those addressed. So let me go ahead and add. My screen to the stage here. So we can view our next section, which is again, viewing those members from the invoices page. So this is an example of an invoice that we have. Oh, hang on. Again, not sharing my screen. That’s why I’m here. Thank you, man. Thank you. Okay, cool. Now we can see. Alright, so this is an example of the invoice and one of the things that you can do now is go ahead and click on any of these members to view their information. Eric, do you want to talk a little bit about this feature? absolutely so yes like amanda said this is to solve that problem of hey why is this person on this invoice and you know we started by launching it as a really basic level here so what you can see for this particular uh sample member is you can see two accounts that belong to that employer and there’s an hsa and an fsa so this member happens to be enrolled in the hsa And you can see they’re enrolled. They have a balance of zero. They’re active. And it’s going to show you what account category groups are relevant as it relates to billing. So just at a quick glance, then you’re able to see, why was this member in there? Did somebody think they termed them out of a system previously and they didn’t? Here’s where you can see that. Now, the FSA is red to indicate that they are not, in fact, enrolled in the FSA. So as you get into bundled deals, this is just a really quick, easy way to see what the status of the member was. Additionally, We want to have more information here to, again, provide more insight into why someone may or may not have been on an invoice. So things like how many active debit cards do they have? Have they had any lost or replaced debit cards recently? For those that are doing Billing based on checks going out. We can have that information. Cobra communications. We kind of want to build this out. And we thought the simplest place to start was going to be on the plan enrollment level. And so we’re excited to roll that out. And again, you know, always looking for feedback on this stuff. So hopefully this is a helpful feature. And there you have it. so eric on the um on this particular account um this particular member if they had two um two different types of systems that were associated with them those would display here correct correct in this particular case we’ve got two associated with a wex health uh account you know but if they had For example, a different vendor’s Cobra account or anything like that. Those are going to show there with those logos. So you can see across all vendors that they’re associated with, what accounts they are enrolled in and which ones they are not enrolled. Very cool. Thank you. So the next one that we have on our list that we want to talk about is emails sent from your domain. I’m going to go ahead and pull open our communications platform as we talk this through. But if you haven’t heard, or maybe you have, if I’ve been doing uh doing half my job correctly um we have rolled out a new communications platform and what’s super cool about this is if you use invoicing in tandem with a communications platform you’re able to send emails directly from your domain so one of the things that we have um we have uh had in the past is that the invoices are available in a secure portal. And what’s cool about it now is that they’re available for you to send through your custom domain. So this is a big deal because it adds additional authority to the invoices that you’re sending. So it’s something that our customers have been asking for for a while. And we’re excited to have it and be able to roll it out. So I’m going to go ahead and show you a message template for of how this works and again I don’t want to make this a communications demo because I feel like we’ve done a lot of those lately but um and and you know we can certainly send you some more uh supporting documentation around this but I just wanted to quickly show how this could work eric did you want to add anything to that while I pull this up no pressure Oh, sure. Just, you know, the only thing I’d add is getting that set up to be able to send from your own custom domain when you have communications with us. It’s a pretty straightforward process. You know, there are a few DNS record changes that need to be made on your end that we will kind of guide you through. We say, hey, log into your DNS provider and copy and paste these things in and we can verify it on our end. And then all of a sudden everything will work. Yeah, super cool. And then beyond that, we can help support setting up some invoice follow up campaigns sent through communications, which is super, super neat. So that is sharing your screen. Wow. Okay, so here, I’ll go ahead and show you the the template for an example of if your invoice is overdue, as I mentioned. So we can help support by sending these out through the communications platform. All of this is really easily customizable and the builder is available directly in TPA Stream. Okay, and then the other feature that I want to pop into is the look back adjustments feature. So let’s go ahead and hop over there. So we can show that off. Look back adjustments is one of those things that we’ve launched kind of a, I’d say Eric, what would six months ago, eight months ago, a year ago. It’s been a while. It’s been a little bit. Yep. We want to make sure that folks on the line understand, understand this feature and can make sure that they turn it on. So let’s go ahead and hop in here. I’m going to share my screen again. So I want to forget that part. So if we go back into our invoicing instance, we can go ahead and see. You’re still not sharing. Everyone here is getting a front row view into the new running gag with Amanda. I think it’s since COVID. It’s, you know, that phrase, can you see my screen? I think I need a bumper sticker. It says, can you see my screen? The answer is no. All right, so let’s go ahead and hop into look back adjustments. So when you’re setting up, Eric, it’s in recurring fees, correct? Yes, it’s when you’re going to generate invoices. All right, so let’s go ahead and see this. So I’m going to go ahead and generate an invoice for my small business, which is Amanda’s Small Engine Repair. This is for my motorcycle business. So you can go ahead and click generate invoice for this employer from the recurring fees screen, and you can select your invoice period here. You could name your batch, whatever your heart desires, and then add any notes here and then turn on look back adjustments. So this you can you can apply it for credits or debits only or both. Eric, why don’t you talk through the different options here for us? Sure. So all this is doing is it’s looking at your previously generated invoices and then considering the data as it exists today. uh looking to see what differences would happen if you were to generate that previously generated invoice again for the same billing period so if you had a retro ad it’s going to show up as a debit right so if someone got retro added to an fsa from july And they weren’t in there during the July billing period. All of a sudden we’re going to say, hey, there’s an adjustment that needs to happen. It’s a debit. If there was a retro term, they’re going to show up as a credit. And then obviously there’s that little box right underneath of invoice periods to consider. And that’s how many invoice periods we’re going to look back. to try to figure out what changes existed uh between what was build and how it would be billed today with the data as it exists in tpa stream do we have an idea from our customers how many invoice periods they’re going back or does it really just depend you know my feeling on this from some of the data I’ve looked at is that generally speaking, people are going back two to three billing periods because that’s really going to capture the bulk of your retro ads and terms, which your employer calls you up and says, hey, Blair should have been termed out of that account two months ago. And sorry, we didn’t realize it on the last invoice. So that should usually capture enough. If you put in kind of infinity billing periods, um you know we could start to run into some issues with with data over long periods of time but generally speaking a few invoice periods is really going to capture the bulk of those changes that you know employers might be calling you up and asking you hey I need a credit because of this or uh or those sorts of things now it’s just hey it’s automatically going to go going to flow through let’s just get the data corrected in our you know uh card issuing system that makes sense um okay great so once you’ve generated those invoices you’ve looked back you can see that you’ve gotten everyone let’s take a look at how this looks for the employer so I had mentioned earlier on in the um in the webinar kind of how this works overall so if we could just reorient for a moment we talked a little bit about these billing structures and how they are applied We’ve talked a little bit about how that data comes in. Now let’s hop to what that employer experience looks like because we haven’t really spoken to that just yet. For our new prospects online, I think it would be good to quickly show. This is the view for a employer. And this is one of the things that we’ll talk about in a moment from a static standpoint where we’re working through as part of our UI UX update. Here you can see this particular employer can view their invoices. This is a recent invoice for this employer. And what’s cool about this is this is branded your brand itself. It has the brand on the invoice. And they’re able to review this detail directly in this secure portal. Here you can see at the bottom, we have a notice to not pay this invoice. This particular employer is set up with ACH. And so here you can see that it will be debited via ACH. This is called a invoice footer. And in addition to making this branded Sunny benefits for you, you can also add different footers depending on the types of messages that you want to communicate. Because at the end of the day, your invoices are a really good customer touchpoint for you. If I can just interject, those footers, you can apply those by team or down to the individual employer level or have them be global. If you have a message you want to say to everybody all the time, great, put it on global. You know, otherwise you can say, hey, all my ACH clients go on this team. I want them all to see this kind of message. So it’s really easy then to manage that without having to dig into every single employer every time. Right, right. Thank you. And then the other thing that I’ll quickly highlight on this invoice is the open balances. So because they have integrated directly with QuickBooks, we’re able to import that information of things that they haven’t paid. and show for them what the total due is, which will allow you to capture more revenue. If they’re not set up with ACH, that is a good way to go. So again, this is on the employer portal. The other thing that they can do is manage insured employee counts for COBRA. So this is a way that they can do that. We have a mechanism to send a monthly monthly prompt email for doing this directly in the portal if that’s relevant for that employer. Alrighty, so let’s talk what is next. Let me hop over to that and actually share my screen and here we go. So I want to talk a little bit about and put Eric on the spot here for what is coming up next and what’s new. So we talked already about the communications the communications platform a little bit. And when you integrate with communications and consolidated invoicing, you can have that custom domain, which is super cool. We also just launched the ability to email and communicate with members, which is a major plus. And I could talk your ear off about that. And one of the things coming out soon is the template library. So we’ve been talking a little bit about this, but the ability to send legislative updates and other key touch points for those members is gonna be really cool. So Eric, can you tell us a little bit about the knowledge base and the chat assist? Absolutely. So knowledge base, this is kind of a fun, Amanda, I’m going to mute you. OK, you got it. For our knowledge base, we just sort of switched back end platforms on this. So you’ll now notice in TPA Stream, when you click on the Help icon up in the upper right, it’s going to launch a new tab. And it’s going to take you to our newer knowledge base. This is meant for us to keep content more up to date, more relevant. And it kind of integrates well with our overall kind of support process. So there it is. So you can see it fits our brand. We’ve got all kinds of cool things, including release notes. So this is a newer initiative of ours where as we’re releasing big things, small things, we can just put them in there. And those are available for you to see right away. And we’re really excited about it. It fits with our overall look and feel just a lot more nicely and hopefully between the search and the categorization and all that stuff. Um, it should be, um, you know, easy, easy for everyone to use. Um, yeah, we’re super excited about this. Um, how does this integrate with, um, the chat magic? So, uh, You know, a number of us here at TPA Stream are developers and have been all just sort of nerding out over what’s been happening in in the world as it relates to chat GPT and all those sorts of things. And one of the really exciting things that we’ve kind of teed up here is teaching a large language model about our knowledge base. so that it can answer questions to try to direct you better on how to use TPA Stream. Coming very soon, you’ll be able to do things like say, hey, how do I create a bundle? It’s going to take all the information from our knowledge base and it’s going to come up with a customized answer just for you. We’re going to be rolling that out again in a beta program. But we’ve come to realize that Yeah, even though our knowledge base is really easy to search and everything’s categorized, sometimes you just want to be able to type in a question. How do I do this particular thing? And to get a real answer here is going to be exciting. for us that’s kind of a launching point into some uh some more advanced um business intelligence sort of things that we want to be looking towards and uh and yeah just leveraging all of this cool new ecosystem that exists around ai and large language models and uh Yeah, so we’re plowing forward with staying up to date on all that stuff. Yeah, that’s super cool. We have featured on this slide to the business intelligence platform. We recently sent out a survey to our customers asking what you would want to ask in terms of the types of questions that you want to know from your data, because TPAs are really in this really unique position to to have access to a lot of different information and could be a really valuable sort of consultant to their customers around the type of data that they have. So without all of us becoming data scientists, we want to support your ability to access the type of data that you have at your fingertips in a really meaningful way. So there’s more to come around this, but if this is something that you have been thinking about too, we want to hear from you. your feedback is really important in ensuring that we’re headed in the right direction when it comes to BI. The other thing that is kind of exciting, well, I think it’s exciting, is the system ETL load time improvements. Can you decode this and let us know kind of what this means for our customers? Absolutely. ETL is a general, not even benefits industry term, just sort of computer science industry term for extract, transform and load. And it’s what we do a lot of. So this is anytime we’re getting any data import coming in from all of these different benefit systems that you’re all familiar with. There is a lot of data. And as TPA Stream has, you know, advanced over time, we’re processing, you know, quite literally millions of rows of data every day. And we’ve made a concerted effort over the past few months to really address the speed in which that’s processing. And we’ve taken a variety of different techniques and have really kind of hit our stride just in the past month or so, I think. on dramatically improving our load time. So things that are kind of overnight run jobs are now happening really, really quickly. and you know things are all done before you ever get into the app in the morning so you know we hope that’ll be reflected really well on the new invoicing dashboard where you can see oh yeah all my files already ran today so we’re up to date and we’re good to bill um but it has been a step change for um for us in terms of processing time so we’re really excited about that and uh and hopeful that everyone kind of is able to notice just how well it’s working now. That’s great. And then the last piece of the puzzle here is that UI UX improvement. So you saw some of that throughout the presentation today. We’re focused on rolling out those changes to the administrator portal, and then there’s changes to come for the employer portal as well, as well as making some updates to our system notifications and emails to ensure that we have good brand alignment and we’re We’re conveying that sense of trust and security to not only our customers, but also their downstream employers and employees. So some really exciting stuff brewing here at TPA Stream, and we don’t intend on slowing down. So with that, I’m wondering if anyone has any questions. We could keep the line open for just a few more minutes. to allow for any of those questions here at the end. But other than that, I really appreciate everybody’s time and hanging on the line with us. It’s been a really, this has been a really fun deck to put together and kind of put a capstone on some of the exciting changes that we’ve been able to roll out to our customers over the last, I’d call it last six weeks. So it’s been nice to kind of talk through some of these features and I hope it was helpful to see some of the beta previews even before you turn the preview on. Eric, do you have anything else to add before we wrap up today? I’m really glad you were able to share your screen. Thanks. Thanks. I’m not the tech person. I’m glad to be in company with a lot of other geniuses. But aside from that, aside from that material wise. No, I think we covered what we wanted to. I really appreciate everyone dialing in live. And for those that are watching this after the fact, again, please reach out. We love hearing from everyone. And I think from the product side, the more we can hear, the better we can make it for everyone. So yeah. Great. Well, thank you, everybody. Have a great day. Bye.

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