Inpatient Service Bills

Introduction

An inpatient service bill records services rendered to an admitted patient — investigations ordered by the doctor, procedures performed at the bedside, ambulance and dressing charges, physiotherapy sessions, and similar discrete services. Each service bill is raised against the patient's BHT and accumulates toward the interim or final bill.

Service bills are distinct from pharmacy issues (handled by the pharmacy module) and from accommodation/nursing charges (which accrue automatically from the bed assignment and timed services).

This page covers the finance side of service bills: how they are classified, how they reach the interim and final bill, and how a settled one is found, cancelled or returned. For the data-entry workflow itself — searching the patient, adding items, checking fees, settling and printing — see Add Services and Investigations, which is the single source of truth for that screen.

Where Service Bills Are Created

All inpatient service bills are entered on one screen, Add Services and Investigations. Reachable from:

• Main Menu → Inward → Services & Items → Add Services & Investigations — the normal route; starts with a blank patient search
• Inpatient Dashboard (Admission Profile) → Services panel → Add Services & Investigations — opens with the current admission already selected
• Nursing WorkBench → Service panel → Add Services & Investigations — same, from the ward
• Theatre → patient surgery screen → Add Services & Investigations — for services billed around a surgery

A separate menu item, Add Services & Investigations with Payments, appears only where the application option Enable Collecting Payments on Add Services & Investigations on Inward is switched on; it is the same billing screen with payment collection attached.

Adding items requires the InwardServicesAndItemsAddServices privilege.

The step-by-step procedure, the Bill Items / Tests / Fees tabs, fee overrides and printing are documented on Add Services and Investigations. The bill is created by the Settle button on that screen (there is no Save button).

How a Service Bill Is Classified

Every service bill is stored with:

Attribute	Value
Bill type	InwardBill
Atomic bill type (individual bill)	INWARD_SERVICE_BILL
Atomic bill type (the settle batch)	INWARD_SERVICE_BATCH_BILL
Charge category	The InwardChargeType configured on the item

One Settle produces a batch bill and one or more individual service bills beneath it, each numbered by department and year.

The charge type is not chosen while billing. It is inherited from the item's own charge-type setting in the item master, so where a service lands on the bill breakdown is an administration decision, not a cashier decision. If a service appears under the wrong heading on an interim or final bill, the fix is to correct the item's charge type — see Admin — Inpatient Charge Type Labels.

There are well over a hundred charge types. Some commonly used for services are Laboratory Charges, Laboratory Investigation, Scanning Charges, X-Ray, CT Scan, Physiotherapy Charges, Dressing Charges, Ambulance Charges, Nursing Care, Treatment Charges and Other Charges. The display names shown on printed bills are configurable per hospital, so the wording on your bills may differ from the list above.

How Service Bills Reach the Interim and Final Bill

Service bills are not re-entered anywhere. When an interim or final bill is produced for the admission, the system sums the service bill items for that BHT (and its linked encounters, such as a baby admission) and groups them by charge type — the value used is the item's gross value plus its margin/service charge.

Each charge type that has a non-zero total becomes one line on the bill breakdown. This is why the charge-type configuration described above matters: it determines the shape of the printed bill, not just the reporting.

See Inpatient Interim Bills and Inpatient Final Bill for how those bills are generated and printed.

Viewing All Services Billed for a BHT

From the Inpatient Dashboard (Admission Profile) for the admission:

• Service Summary — every inpatient service billed during the admission, item by item
• All Inward Service Bills — the list of service bills for the admission, from which an individual bill can be viewed, reprinted or returned
• Pharmacy & Services Summary — services and pharmacy issues combined

See Inpatient Admission Profile (Dashboard) for the full set of reports on that screen, and Itemized Service Summary Report for the cross-admission version.

Finding, Cancelling or Returning a Settled Service Bill

Finding the bill

• Main Menu → Inward → Search → Service Bill — the Service Bills search screen; filter by date range, bill number, BHT number, patient name, MRN/PHN, phone or item name. Requires the InwardSearchServiceBill privilege.
• Inpatient Dashboard → All Inward Service Bills — the same bills, scoped to one admission.
• Immediately after settling, the bill list on the print-preview screen has a Manage Bill action that opens the same bill.

Cancelling

Open the bill and click To Cancel. This opens the Service Cancellation screen, where a Reason for Cancellation must be entered before Cancel Service Bill; a confirmation dialog follows.

A service bill will refuse to cancel if any of the following applies:

• It has been marked as checked — "This bill is already checked. A checked bill cannot be cancelled." Use Mark As Uncheck on the same screen first if the cancellation is legitimate
• It is already cancelled, or has already been returned
• The admission's final payment has been finalised, or the patient has been discharged
• A professional/doctor payment from the bill has already been paid out
• The bill's investigations are already in progress in the laboratory, or a lab report has been entered — unless the application option Enable the Special Privilege of Canceling Inward Service Bills is on, in which case the LabBillCancelSpecial privilege is required instead

Separately, where the application option Mandatory permission to cancel bills. is enabled (optionally narrowed to particular department types), the cancellation must first be raised as a request and approved. Until it is approved, To Cancel takes you to the request screen rather than the cancellation screen. See Request Manager.

A cancelled bill is retained for audit — see Inpatient — Bill Cancellations and Refunds (Overview) for what cancellation does to the underlying records.

Returning (partial refund)

Cancellation always reverses the whole bill. There is no way to cancel only some line items — if you need to reverse some but not all items on a bill, that is a Return, not a cancellation. This is a deliberate, application-wide rule (not specific to service bills): see Inpatient — Bill Cancellations and Refunds (Overview).

Open the bill and, on the Service Reprint screen, click Return (sitting right next to To Cancel):

Service Reprint screen — Return (partial, item-level) and To Cancel (whole bill) are separate, adjacent actions.

Tick one or more items in the Bill Item Detail table, enter a comment, and click Refund Bill. The Total Refund figure updates live to the sum of only the ticked items — the rest of the bill stays active and billable:

Return screen — only the ticked item (DENTAL X RAY, 750.00) counts toward Total Refund; the untouched X RAY item remains on the active bill.

Return is unavailable once the bill is cancelled or fully returned (all rows already returned show under Returned and cannot be re-selected). Cancel and Return are mutually exclusive on the same bill — once anything has been returned, To Cancel is disabled for that bill.

Like Cancel, Return also refuses a checked bill — "This bill is already checked. A checked bill's services cannot be returned." Use Mark As Uncheck first if the return is legitimate. This mirrors the existing Cancel guard (see above) and closes a gap where a checked bill's services could previously be returned with no validation at all (issue #23579).

Return blocked on a checked bill — the error message is shown and the flow never reaches the Return screen.

Technical Reference

Item	Detail
Billing page	inward/inward_bill_service.xhtml
Controller	BillBhtController
Bill search page	inward/inward_search_service.xhtml
Bill view / reprint page	inward/inward_reprint_bill_service.xhtml
Cancellation page	inward/inward_cancel_bill_service.xhtml
Refund (return) page	inward/inward_bill_service_refund.xhtml
BillType	InwardBill
BillTypeAtomic	INWARD_SERVICE_BILL, INWARD_SERVICE_BATCH_BILL
Charge model	InwardChargeType enum, taken from the item

Related Pages

• Add Services and Investigations — the end-user workflow for this screen
• Admin — Add Services Fee Configuration — how fees for these items are scoped and configured
• Admin — Inpatient Charge Type Labels — charge categories and their printed labels
• Inpatient Interim Bills · Inpatient Final Bill — where these charges surface
• Inpatient Outside Charges — the equivalent for services obtained outside the hospital
• Inpatient — Bill Cancellations and Refunds (Overview)
• Inward Service/Item Requests — ward requests that feed this screen