Free tool
What your client gets back on a superbill
Enter your fee, the plan allowed amount and the remaining out of network deductible to see the likely monthly reimbursement and the real cost to your client.
Free tool, no sign up
How many hours your billing paperwork really takes
Count the monthly minutes spent on superbills, corrections and benefits calls, then see the same total as lost client hours and full workdays a year.
Billing work in a private practice hides because it arrives in fragments. Nine minutes at the end of a Tuesday, twenty minutes on a Sunday, a payer call while eating lunch between sessions. None of it feels like a workday, and added together it usually is one, several times a year, entirely unpaid.
This calculator collects the fragments into a single number and then converts that number into things a therapist actually feels: client hours you could have held instead, and full days a year spent on paperwork. Use real timings rather than optimistic guesses, because guessing low is the standard mistake here.
Your result
Hours a month on billing paperwork
6.3
Every minute above added together and converted into hours.
Hours a year
75.6
The same monthly load carried across a full billing year.
Client hours lost each month
6.9
How many fifty five minute sessions that same time could have held.
Full workdays a year
9.4
Eight hour days spent on documents instead of clinical work.
Change one field at a time to see which part of the close is actually eating your month.
The hours nobody bills for
A solo practice rarely notices billing time because it never appears as a block on the calendar. It appears as the reason dinner is late on the last day of the month, or as the Sunday afternoon that disappeared into matching payments to charges. The work is real and the hours are real, they are simply invisible.
Put them in one figure and the decision becomes much easier to make. Six or seven hours a month is close to a full client day, unpaid, unclinical, and arriving at the least convenient point of the month. That is the comparison worth making before deciding whether the current process is fine.
Which fragment to attack first
Corrections are almost always the worst value for time, because each one costs you the rebuild plus an email exchange plus a small deposit of client confidence. If your correction count sits above two or three a month, the fix is upstream in how place of service and session length get recorded, not in working faster at month end.
Benefits calls are different and should not be eliminated. They are genuinely useful work that should simply be recorded properly, so you never make the same call twice for the same plan. Keep the reference number, the date, the deductible and any allowed amount you managed to get, and the second client on that plan costs you almost nothing.
Questions about this calculator
What should I use for minutes per superbill?
Time yourself on three real documents rather than guessing. Most therapists building them by hand land somewhere between six and fifteen minutes once checking against the chart is included. Practices that reconstruct service dates from a calendar run considerably higher than that.
Should I count client emails about their claims?
Put them in the corrections field if they lead you to rebuild or reissue a document. Simple questions you answer in one sentence are not worth tracking here. The figure you want is time spent producing or repairing paperwork, not general client communication.
My total looks small. Is this still worth changing?
Look at the client hours line rather than the raw hours. Even three hours a month is more than three sessions a year you could have held, and the load grows with your caseload rather than staying flat. A process that works at twelve clients often collapses at thirty.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The out of network superbill readiness checklist
Four stages of checks that keep every monthly superbill complete, accurate and ready for a client to submit without coming back to you for a correction.
Turn that figure into a document a plan can read
The number this calculator just gave you stays hypothetical until a complete superbill reaches the client and an explanation of benefits comes back with a real allowed amount on it. In a demo we set the CPT code, diagnosis, fee and place of service for a few of your clients and build one month of documents so you can see the same arithmetic on paper. Nothing is filed with any payer on your behalf, because the client still submits.