Free Physical Therapy Invoice Template (And a Better Solution)

A major headache for many physical therapy practices is manually creating an invoice (or superbill) for direct patient billing. This is especially true if you’re running a cash-based or out-of-network practice, where invoicing patients is commonplace. Alternatively, you might be using a very basic EMR that doesn’t link in with your billing system, meaning invoices are handy references for your billing team when they’re inputting data for insurers.

A free invoice template—one you can download and edit—is practical and can save you time in the short-term. But a professional invoice needs to include specific information, including:

• Contact information, such as physician name or supplier name and address
• Physician or supplier Tax ID and National Provider ID (NPI)
• Member and/or patient full name
• PT procedure code (CPT code)
• Date of service/date of purchase and place of service
• Diagnosis/diagnosis code
• Number of minutes spent on treatment
• The charge for each service provided

Here’s an example of a free physical therapy invoice template that we created. You can download your own editable copy for free by clicking “File” > “Make a Copy”. From there, you can customize the template to include the information you need.

With this (printable) free physical therapy invoice template, you can add your company logo and business address and insert descriptions for the services you’ve performed. You can also add your own information about unit rate, payment terms, payment methods, and a unique invoice number. The total cost is automatically calculated from the formulas included in the template.

But don’t forget: there are some major drawbacks to using any free physical therapy invoice or superbill template (even the one we’ve given you above). For example:

• It’s time-consuming to fill in a template. Even with a customizable invoice template, you’ll spend a lot of time filling in the blanks. Made a mistake? You’ll need to remember to go back and correct it—both in your copy of the invoice and the patient’s copy. Plus, as you can see in the template we’ve provided, there’s a lot of information you need to squeeze into one document. It gets messy, fast.  

• An invoice template won’t help you with insurer billing. It can’t be submitted to payers (you need a CMS-1500 claim form, or you need claims to go out electronically). Plus, doing billing manually means you need to keep up with ever-changing modifiers, rules, and processes. Patient-level payer requirements aren’t always clear, meaning you can’t structure your plan of care accordingly. As a result, denials will be common.

• An invoice template won’t help you get paid on time. If you’re sending invoices manually, how can you keep track of them? Your office staff would have to set reminders to follow up with clients about payment due dates; then, you’d have to wait for the patient to mail their payment back. Once you finally receive the payment, you must sync it with your bookkeeping system. That’s a long process with a lot of room for error. 

PT billing is a challenge when it comes to insurers, because the tiniest errors in documentation cause disputes and denials—resulting in lost or delayed revenue for your practice. But these billing errors will impact patients directly, too—because a denied insurance claim can result in a patient being wrongly left with the outstanding balance. Not good for patient satisfaction.

So for PT practices, it’s not always possible to know whether you should be sending an invoice to a patient or chasing the payer to settle a claim—and it’s all too common for patients to receive a bill for treatment that should have been covered by their provider. This can happen because an in-house billing team is overwhelmed, or because the data in your system is incomplete. 

It also happens when you work with a billing service provider who takes the easy route and doesn’t follow up on every denial.

Many physical therapy offices see at least 20% of their revenues go uncollected due to minor billing errors affecting insurer and patient collections. Sadly, that’s normal. But this is why StrataPT built a better solution—to give you full confidence that your billing setup is correct, compliant, and designed to maximize reimbursements while keeping patients happy. 

The rest of this article outlines why our platform, StrataEMR, is a better alternative to creating and sending physical therapy invoices or superbills to your patients. We’ll also explain how it cuts out documentation errors and streamlines your whole collection process. 

What is StrataEMR, and how does it help PT practices?

StrataEMR is an all-in-one platform you can use to run your physical therapy practice. We’ve designed StrataEMR to facilitate a clean claims process and maximize reimbursement rates. 

With our solution, you’ll be able to:

• Save time by using personalized clinical protocols that align with how your practice works, streamlining documentation by automatically transferring patient data from forms and health questionnaires, and simplifying your workload with auto-generated to-do lists.

• Stay compliant with our payer management, compliance, and credentialing service. We also handle Medicare revalidation and therapist license monitoring, providing alerts so you can take preventative action to keep your revenue flowing. 

• Keep track of all your essential data in a single dashboard, from financial metrics, to marketing statistics (like top referrers), to patient satisfaction numbers. We give you the insights you need to make better decisions for your practice. 

• Get paid by relying on our industry-leading billing & RCM platform and service. You’ll be set up from patient eligibility to payment and beyond, and our US-based team will chase insurers for every penny. It may sound too good to be true, but we help PTs get a reimbursement rate of >99%—while also reducing their team’s workload. 

In fact, StrataEMR is helping thousands of PT practices across the U.S. maximize their patient and insurer reimbursements.

For example, Jacquie McAdam, Owner of Copper City Physical Therapy, was initially keen to stick with her familiar in-house billing process—but as her billing, accounting, and reporting needs expanded, she took the leap with StrataEMR. “I have never regretted it,” she says. “The billing agents have been phenomenal with much shorter turnaround time on payment than we were able to achieve in-house.” For Jacquie, the support offered by the StrataPT team has been invaluable: “When delays occur, there is a visible record of follow-up by the billing staff, so there is no question regarding the status of billing or accounts receivable.” 

For Chris, Co-Owner of The Therapy Place, switching from in-house manual processes was also a daunting prospect: “Making a change in both EMR and billing services is likely the scariest thing you can imagine for your practice,” he says. But the payoff was worthwhile. “We have enjoyed a 14% increase in net receivables… and for the first quarter to date we’re up 20%.” This is echoed by Brenton Hanes, Co-Owner of California-based Genesis Physical Therapy, who also reports a “20% increase in profits,” as well as being able to “cut documentation time by 30%.”

Samantha from Chiropractic Physical Therapy felt that transitioning to outsourced billing was a significant decision that her practice was initially hesitant about, but in the end, the switch “was seamless with StrataPT.” Samantha says she has “no doubt that our revenues will increase by going with StrataPT and are now excited that we can turn to our key focus—the patients.”

That’s just a taste of why our customers love us. You can read all of our testimonials here.  

If you’re already convinced, speak to an expert to see first-hand how StrataEMR handles your billing (including patient invoicing) and much more. 

In the rest of this post, we’ll dig into the specifics of how our platform works for physical therapy practices.

Getting paid for physical therapy services through StrataEMR

With StrataEMR, you’ll no longer need to create traditional invoices for your PT services. Our platform is built with billing and revenue cycle management (RCM) at its core. That means it’s designed specifically to get you paid by insurers and patients—on time, every time—while you focus on treating patients and managing your practice. 

(Don’t forget, we get PT practices to a reimbursement rate of higher than 99%.) 

Here’s a high-level overview of how our billing—and invoicing—process works. 

1. Effortlessly onboard patients

The process begins with your front-desk staff inputting the patient’s demographics into StrataEMR’s electronic medical record (EMR) database. 

Before their scheduled appointment, patients are sent an email or SMS link, enabling them to upload all the necessary documentation—and to make a copayment, if required. Alternatively, patients can complete this step in-office while waiting for their appointment.

2. Easily document therapy sessions

With StrataEMR’s EMR interface, the physical therapist can document patients’ treatments and exercises and record units during their sessions. As the session progresses, the system immediately identifies any potential (insurer) reimbursement issues in real-time. 

These issues might include instances where certain services cannot be combined in the same insurance claim for a particular payer or when the service is not eligible for reimbursement. 

Once the session concludes, the therapist presses ‘save,’ and StrataEMRs billing service takes over the rest of the payment process, ensuring the claim is accurate, up-to-date, and compliant. 

Even in rare cases where there are rejections or denials, the StrataPT team will go the extra mile to chase down every penny, making the entire process hassle-free for you.

3. Patients are automatically (and correctly) invoiced

Patients can securely access a customized portal to pay their invoices using a credit card (if you didn’t collect payment at the time of service). This feature significantly reduces the workload of your front-desk staff while making the payment process clear and simple for patients.

StrataEMR can send patient invoices in various different formats. You can send text and email alerts letting the patient know their bill is due. Or you can choose to send invoices through the mail to the patient’s address, which is already on file. Our system will also deliver automatic payment reminders on a bi-weekly or 30-day cadence, whichever you choose. This ensures your office staff doesn’t spend time calling patients or sending email reminders manually. 

Compare this to an invoice template: With templates, you still have to do all the manual work of creating the invoice, sending the invoice via mail (which can take several days to be delivered), and waiting for the payment to be sent back. Not to mention the back-and-forth with your patients via phone or email if they have queries about their bills. 

On average, practices that use StrataEMR’s automated patient collection process improve their collections by more than 40%. They also see a significant decrease in the number of days it takes to receive payment from patients. 

4. Clear and transparent financial breakdowns

The StrataEMR Clarity Panel provides real-time financial reporting on a patient-by-patient basis. 

With this feature, you can easily view the status of each patient’s account, along with a detailed record of their treatments, charges, and payments.

Patients can also see a full, accurate breakdown of the prices of every service provided during their visit. Our data shows this feature has significantly enhanced patient collections for PT practices. By providing patients with up-to-date information about their balance, there is less room for confusion and fewer inquiries about the origin of specific charges. 

Strata’s system also helps to ensure accurate patient statements from the start, meaning there’s less of a chance of carrier denial of coverage where the full bill gets passed onto the patient. 

It’s clear that this is a major improvement over invoice templates (and invoice software).

To recap, with StrataEMR, you can:

• Save time by seamlessly onboarding clients.
• Easily track patient treatment.
• Save money by ensuring billing compliance.
• Automatically bill patients online.

You cannot do these things when you’re relying on invoice templates. 

Other StrataEMR features to look out for

So far we’ve shown how our software simplifies physical therapy invoicing. But there’s so much more that StrataEMR has to offer.

With StrataEMR, you can:

Maximize reimbursement with Plan of Care guardrails 

Clinicians must stay up-to-date with ever-changing rules and regulations, including which CPT codes can be used for certain insurers or patients, how many units can/should be billed, and more. This means checklists are needed for PTs, taking time and focus away from patient care.

That’s why we provide a Billing Plan of Care, which enables you to set up guidelines for each healthcare insurer and/or each patient. Depending on the rules, this can then be applied to all patients under that insurer, all patients with a particular combination of circumstances, or for a specific patient moving forward through their care program.

If a therapist’s report doesn’t comply with the default Billing Plan of Care for a patient/payer, a reimbursement warning gets triggered and the charge won’t be finalized. The therapist can make necessary adjustments to their notes, push the charge through to an extra level of approval, or send the charge with an understanding that the warnings may result in a denial. 

This process can be completely customized to your needs. 

Automatically (and proactively) audit your clinical documents

With StrataEMR, retrospective clinical auditing is a thing of the past. By setting up your own documentation safeguards in advance, you can make sure that your clinical documentation matches everything that’s recorded for billing purposes. 

If documents are missing, the process is deemed incomplete and cannot be finalized. This reduces medical necessity denials and ensures ongoing compliance with payer requirements. 

Track your practice’s performance with real-time financial data

While billing issues are a significant obstacle to profitability, many PT practitioners overlook other sources of waste and inefficiency. Small issues will accumulate, resulting in missed opportunities for revenue. With full transparency into your practice’s performance, you can make informed decisions about revenue cycle management, operations, and marketing. 

With our system, you can keep track of all your practices’ important key performance indicators:

• Accounts receivable
• Billed visits and billed units
• Billed dollars
• Average units per visit
• Insurance payments and patient payments
• The average payment per visit and payment per hour
• Reimbursement averages by payer/insurer
• Patient scheduling data, like no-shows and cancellations
• Marketing data, including conversion rates and top referral channels 

In addition, you can also dive into specific financial information like how and why certain CPT code combinations impact your reimbursements. 

Speak to an expert today

Stop wasting time and money with physical therapy invoice templates. Onboarding your team with StrataEMR is a quick and seamless process that can be completed within hours. 

We handle the secure migration of your practice’s data without downtime, ensuring a hassle-free experience. Our free online training sessions make it easy for your team to learn the system, and we provide support responses within 24 hours. Our average response time is just 22 minutes, and our team is entirely based in the U.S. 

With StrataEMR, you can be up and running in no time, experiencing reimbursement rates of over 99% (yes, really). 

Speak to an expert today and learn more about how StrataEMR works.