Features
Invoicing and payments
Invoices, deposits, part-payments, credit notes and insurer billing — with the practitioner and CORU number an Irish patient needs to claim on their health expenses.
The money side of a clinic is not complicated, but it is unforgiving: a receipt missing one field is a patient who cannot claim, and a balance nobody can see is a balance nobody chases.
At the till
Take payment at the desk or send a link. Part-payments land against the right invoice rather than floating as credit, so an invoice that has had two of three instalments paid says so, and the patient's balance is the truth rather than an estimate.
Deposits taken at booking are held against the appointment and settle into the invoice when it is raised. A credit note reverses a charge without deleting it, and a void marks an invoice cancelled rather than erasing it — a billing history you can delete from is a billing history nobody can rely on.
Invoice numbering that survives an audit
Invoices carry a sequential number scoped to the year, alongside a human-readable reference. Numbers are not reused and gaps are not created by deleting things, because nothing is deleted.
The Irish claim-ready receipt
A patient claiming tax relief on health expenses, or claiming against VHI, Laya or Irish Life, needs specific things on the document. A generic invoice carries the clinic, the amount and the date — and stops there, which is why patients so often come back asking for "a proper receipt".
Orla's printable invoice carries the parts that make it claimable:
- The practitioner who actually treated the lines billed, resolved from each line's appointment. A course of treatment that spanned two clinicians names both, distinctly, rather than naming whoever raised the invoice.
- Their CORU registration number, taken from the practitioner's own record. For physiotherapy and podiatry this is what turns a receipt into something an insurer will accept.
- The referrer, where there is one — required to make some treatments claimable at all.
- The clinic details, the treatment and date per line, and the amounts.
Two things about this are honestly still in progress, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise: the print layout is a line-item sheet rather than one shaped for photographing on a phone, and the document is generated on demand rather than automatically the moment payment clears. Both are on the roadmap. The fields that make the receipt claimable are on it today.
Billing somebody other than the patient
An invoice records who is paying — the patient, or an insurer with its own reference and name. Insurer-paid work does not distort the patient's own balance, and the clinic can see what is outstanding from insurers separately from what is outstanding from people.
What the clinic sees
Outstanding balances per patient, takings over a period, and what changed against the period before. The figures come from the invoices and payments themselves, not from a separate reporting table that can drift out of step with them.
What the patient sees
Their invoices in the patient portal: reference, date issued, amount, and what is still outstanding.
There is deliberately no "pay now" button there. Orla has no patient-facing payment path yet, and a button that opened a dead end would be worse than none — so the portal tells the patient plainly to settle at their next visit or ring the clinic. When the payment path is built, the button will appear because it will work.