Which invoice does this
sponsor payment go against? Is this patient
visit supposed to be paid out?
Each study and each Sponsor has unique
contract billing rules. You may have a
fixed-fee start-up with grant monies for the
initial investigator payments then the
contract may stipulate unit billing as you
head into the nuts and bolts of the study.
However the billing-fixed-fee, unit
billing, or a combination of both-contract
billing can be complicated and it’s often
not automated. We have seen our clients who
have to reference Word documents to find the
contractual milestones and then match these
up with the visits that have been performed
by the investigators in order to determine
if they need to request the next Sponsor
payment. We have also seen companies
performing manual revenue
recognition-estimating-because they could
not pull data on what milestones were met or
how much of the fixed-fee start-up was used.
The AccuNet CRO Accounting & Study Management system based on Microsoft Dynamics allows for all data entry, milestone billing, and revenue recognition to be in one screen. The milestones and subsequent criteria are listed in this screen so that Study Managers can see when a milestone should be hit. The Billing Manager will actually be very hands off in this process. Once the Study Manager releases key payments an invoice is automatically created and sent to the sponsor.
