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The Importance of Prior Day BAI Files

November 29, 2022

Every day, countless payments are being deposited into your health system’s bank accounts. From the outside, the process seems simple: a patient makes a payment to their hospital, the hospital then sends this payment to their bank account. But what happens after that? In order for the cash management team to process these payments, they get them back from the bank in the form of a BAI file. These files have all of the deposit information needed to get it matched to a remittance and then to it’s patient accounting system.

These files are sent every day but one piece of the puzzle remains. Which is better, a current day BAI file or prior day BAI file? Think of it this way: a current day BAI file shows you a snapshot of the day. A prior day BAI file would show the entire picture.

 A current day BAI file would contain all of the deposit information for the current day’s bank data. A prior day file, however, would contain all of the information from the day before. At the surface, you would think that receiving a current day file would be more ideal, but that may not be the case. There are a few things to keep in mind. For example, a current day BAI file may not actually contain all of the data you would need for that day. Depending on what time the file is generated, it is very likely that this file will be missing information, creating an imbalance and a lot of trouble for your cash posters. Receiving multiple current day files could be a solution, but ultimately it increases the chance of the opposite problem, duplicate data. It also means your team will be receiving more files than actually necessary. 

Prior day files are much more complete. It eliminates the need to generate multiple files per day and guarantees that all of the data is included in one file. It decreases the chance of incorrect or duplicate data and allows more time for the payments to post, giving your team more time to step in if for some reason there is an error.