Reconciling payments

Community Pharmacy England recommends pharmacy owners take steps to reconcile their payments – what was processed compared to what has been reimbursed by the NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA) to identify any potential errors.

Community Pharmacy England has made a number of resources available to assist you in monitoring payments (set out at the bottom of this webpage).

Top tips

• The Manage Your Service (MYS) portal has features that can assist your submission such as automated checking that the inputted number of forms is smaller than the inputted items.
• Download the Prescription Item Report for your records each month. See Step-by-step guide to getting Prescription Item Reports. Some specialist IT suppliers may also be able to use these Prescription Item Report spreadsheet files to assist more advanced reconciliation. If more pharmacy owners make use of their Prescription Item Reports this may lead to greater innovation amongst those IT suppliers that can support your analysis.
• Save your submission confirmation from MYS for your records and for use when reconciling payments.
• Check that the number of EPS items priced is similar to that you’d claimed. Refer to cpe.org.uk/epstotals for a short step-by-step process of how to do this.
• Check that service delivery performed is being fully communicated to NHSBSA – even if this involves your CPCF IT services system supplier automatrically transmitting data using MYS APIs. If there are issues with the correct CPCF IT services totals not appearing with NHSBSA MYS, then in the first instance: raise a query using the IT escalation route i.e. contact your system supplier to bottom out the issue.
• Check that Serious Shortage Protocol (SSP) total item numbers claimed aligns with that later reimbursed.
• Download electronic Schedules of Payment each month for your records. These help easier analysis.
• Some pharmacy teams which wish to check the reconcile number of items believed submitted is similar to the number that have been priced by NHSBSA will consider (a) sending all dispense and claim messages by the end of the month and (b) not sending claim messages between 1st-5th of the next month, given five day window logic, if this can ease the reconciliation activity.

Claim acknowledgements

System suppliers which have not already, can choose to set up the ‘claim acknowledgement’ features for EPS and CPCF IT services. This feature confirms within your system those claims which were submitted and received by the NHS. This can provide reassurance that faults have not prevented messages from being sent to the NHS / NHSBSA.

This feature is included on the system wishlist. System suppliers make developments partially based on the ongoing feedback they get from their pharmacy customers. Read more at: cpe.org.uk/systemlist.

Related resources

• Information Services Portal (ISP) by the NHSBSA
• Using your Schedule of Payment to monitor performance
• Dispensing Factsheet: Prescription Returns
• Dispensing Factsheet: Prescription Switching
• Dispensing Factsheet: Using Your Schedule of Payments to Monitor Performance

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