Optical Lab Credits

The Optical Credits and Returns Tracker is an Excel document that should be incorporated into your procedures for proper dispensary management. This Excel spreadsheet consists of two separate tabs, one for optical lab credits and one for frame RA tracking. We’ll first review the optical lab credits tab. 

This is something that we should fill out every single time that we’re checking in jobs and reviewing the invoices to make sure we’ve been properly charged. If we’ve been overcharged because of a doctor redo or an employee job or maybe a warranty replacement, it's important that we make note of that and contact the lab immediately, so that we can maintain the proper cost of goods spending within the practice. This spreadsheet is built specifically so that you can track those individual credits that you’re expecting. As you can see here, we put the patient’s name as it appears on the invoice, the name of the lab that the invoice is from, the invoice number and amount, and finally the date of the invoice. Once you’ve spoken to your lab, they should be able to give you the amount of credit that you can expect. Then there is a column for when you finally receive the credit to make sure that we get all of the money owed to us, back from our lab. There is also a section for notes, should you need to explain why we're expecting a credit from our lab. 

It’s extremely important that we follow these guidelines and fill this out every single time that we’re checking in jobs so that when our monthly statement shows up from our labs, we can review it and make sure that we’ve received all applicable credits in order to make sure that we’re not overpaying any of our bills. There’s also a section to the side over here, where you can put the individual name of your labs, their phone numbers or contact number information, your lab account number, your specific rep for that lab, and their phone numbers as well. So that we have one central location to look up all of our contact information.