Allied health chart of accounts, by funder

Xero gives an organisation two active tracking categories, a limit a practice system vendor restates in its own Xero setup article. Practitioner and location usually take both, because a practice owner wants a profit and loss per clinician and per site. That leaves nowhere for funding source except the account code, and it is the reason this template puts the payer in the account and leaves practitioner and location on tracking.

Bookkeepers writing for allied health practices arrive at the same place from the practice side, and record what happens when nobody does.

separate income accounts for Medicare, private health, NDIS, DVA, and cash/EFTPOS private¹¹

Plan management revenue, support coordination revenue, and direct provider revenue all sit in one ledger account, hiding margin by service line.¹²

Where the published advice stops is at the list of payers. Xero's own healthcare guide, the United States edition, gets as far as separate revenue accounts for each payer type and names United States payers. The practice management integrations map a sales account per billable item or per calendar, and neither says who paid: one standard consult is billed to Medicare, to the NDIS and to a private patient. Nobody publishes the codes, the tax rate per line, or the settlement side.

Most of the chart defaults to GST Free Income, because a listed health service performed by a recognised health professional and generally accepted as necessary for appropriate treatment is GST free. Five accounts default the other way, and each of them fails a different limb of that test.

The other direction matters too. Where the practice contracts with an insurer, a statutory compensation scheme, a compulsory third party scheme or an Australian Government agency, and the service would be GST free supplied to the patient directly, the ATO says the supply to that party is GST free as well. That is what puts DVA, WorkCover, CTP and TAC on GST free accounts. The same page lets the supplier and that party agree not to treat the supplies that way, which is worth checking first.

The settlement side takes ten accounts, numbered from 100, one for each rail that produces a bank line of its own.

Each is a bank type account in Xero, because the fee lines and the sweeps both need one. A balance in one of them is money a funder has approved and the bank has not delivered yet, and it should return to nil once the run lands. Every one of these legs posts as BAS excluded, because the tax question was already settled on the revenue line that earned the money.

Ten is a starting number rather than a rule. A practice with one high volume plan manager can give it an account of its own, and a practice banking card payments directly can drop one. The setup steps are the same either way.

A starting chart is a set of defaults, not advice, and the template says so in the file rather than in a disclaimer. Twelve areas are listed for the practice's own BAS agent to confirm before the chart is relied on.

One decides more accounts than the rest. Whether the practice's services are on the listed service list decides if the GST free defaults hold at all, for NDIS work as much as for private work. The written service agreement each NDIS client should have on file is what a support outside that list turns on, and what the classification and the audit trail rest on either way.

This chart is a file the product applies, not a picture of one. A practice starts from it, works through the questions it raises, and approves a standing map before anything syncs. Each invoice line then resolves to its account and its tax rate through that map, and anything the map cannot resolve becomes a question with both candidate postings shown.

On the settlement side, each deposit is posted as one balanced document set against the rail's own account, with the claims underneath it, leaving one exact match in the bank feed for a person to accept. How it works shows the map and the approval step, and tracking categories by funding source covers the setup this template deliberately avoids.