Tyro EFTPOS and HealthPoint settlements

There are two ways to get paid under the Tyro Health name, and they settle on different clocks. One is the claiming gateway inside the practice system. The other is the terminal on the front desk, which claims against private health funds through HealthPoint and takes cards. They share a brand, a login and a help centre, so a bookkeeper reading the gateway's settlement article to explain a terminal deposit is reading the wrong page.

A HealthPoint claim is decided while the patient is standing there. The fund adjudicates straight through and returns an approved or declined status inside 45 seconds, the terminal prints the statement the patient signs, and any amount the fund did not cover is taken as an ordinary card purchase on the same device. So the practice knows the exact benefit on the day of the visit, days before the money.

A claim taken in the morning can be cancelled at the terminal that evening, until the fund's cut off. After that the claim is settled and the correction goes back through the fund rather than through the device. For the books this is the good kind of behaviour: a settled deposit is unlikely to carry a clawback from an earlier day, so the day's approved benefits and the day's settlement describe the same set of claims.

One device can carry several practitioners as separate merchants, each with its own settlement arrangement. That is a reason to expect more than one credit a day from the same terminal, and a reason the total on the front desk report may not match any single bank line. Where a practice pays practitioners on a split, those separate settlements are also the cleanest place to read what each of them actually collected.

Add as many practitioners as you like to a single Tyro Health EFTPOS device, and settle funds separately.⁶

The same shape shows up on the other terminal rail. HICAPS settlements splits a visit between a fund benefit and a gap that rides the card batch, so a practice running both devices is reading two sets of the same two questions.

A fund benefit does not change what was supplied. The fund is paying the practitioner on the patient's behalf, which is the case the ATO addresses directly: where the supply is not made to the third party, it is GST free if it falls under the definition of a medical or other health service. For allied health that definition has three parts, and all of them have to hold. The service has to be one of the listed health services, psychology and physiotherapy among them, it has to be performed by a recognised health professional in that service, and it has to be generally accepted in that profession as necessary for the appropriate treatment of the recipient. A benefit paid on a service that does not meet the definition does not make the fee GST free.

The other reading lands in the same place. Where a practice contracts with an insurer to settle a claim, the ATO treats the service as GST free if it would be GST free supplied to the patient directly, unless the two parties have agreed to treat it otherwise. A HealthPoint rebate is usually the first case rather than the second, because the fund is paying down the patient's own account, so the treatment does not turn on which way the arrangement is read.

The card fee runs the other way. It is a taxable expense to the practice and the invoice carries its own GST, so the fee and the revenue it was charged on sit on different tax treatments. That split is why the map holds a row per service category rather than one row per device: a gap on a taxable item and a benefit on a GST free consultation can settle inside the same credit on the same evening.