How to set up RecMan for healthcare procurement

This article describes how to set up RecMan to enable invoicing and reporting for healthcare procurement.

Introduction

As RecMan is applied for logging hours, which again functions as the basis for invoice and payroll, companies that provide personnel to certain industries and institutions must follow the industry standard and their customers' demands regarding invoicing and reporting. Such is the case for staffing agencies that provide personnel within healthcare in Norway. When providing such services, they are to follow the requirements of Sykehusinnkjøp HF, where they are required to report quarterly on invoiced work provided per Helseforetakenes Innkjøpsservice AS (HINAS).

Some RecMan customers seek to add all relevant articles with their appropriate article code, as the name of the article, to the article registry, making reporting easier. However, that approach differs from our recommendation, as it will result in article names that do not make sense for employees and co-workers, resulting in an article registry so extensive that it will become difficult to manage. Below, you may read more about the different types of setups our customers are using, all with their pros and cons. Option 2, called SIMPLE, is the recommended one as this is well implemented. However, option 3, which has newly been possible with the “product override” feature, may work even better as it is an extension to the SIMPLE setup.

1. COMPLEX: Add all exact articles in RecMan and build your collective agreements with these articles. This will provide a correct result for reporting out of the box. Still, it will force you to add an incredible number of articles in RecMan, which also require clarifications when employees ask questions, and could be a practical nightmare to manage. 
2. SIMPLE: Use more general articles, which makes handling in RecMan and for employees much easier, but you must manually match articles to the correct article code within the report. For this purpose, we’ve created columns that include project names and collective agreements in the HINAS report, making matching easier, as you usually have one collective agreement for specific customers and positions. 
3. SIMPLE WITH PRODUCT OVERRIDE: You set up articles similar to the SIMPLE setup, but you enable the product override feature in each collective agreement. This way, you will be able to rename, e.g., the article “Normaltid (SI)” to “1L0717P”, which, with the use of the product override invoice layout, will automate the process. As this data exists in RecMan, it may also be added to the HINAS report.

This article describes best practices for setting up, configuring, and using the application within healthcare procurement in Norway, focusing mainly on options SIMPLE and SIMPLE WITH PRODUCT OVERRIDE.

Setup of articles

Since the report in RecMan BI depends on knowing exactly what articles to look at, it is preferred that you create some articles exclusive for use in collective agreements related to healthcare procurement. In the example below, we have added some usual articles with “(SI)” at the end, which stands for “Sykehusinnkjøp”, so that it is easier to identify the relevant articles.

Setup of collective agreements

You may create collective agreements as soon as articles have been added to the article registry. The collective agreements may vary, and the values for salary and invoice are specified by the contracts you have with your customers and your employees. Note that the example provided below may not reflect your reality, but it could function as a starting point for you to create your collective agreements.

Configurations for RecMan BI

When you have finalized your article registry and collective agreements, you will know what articles may generate an invoice value on projects and jobs under healthcare procurement. You must identify your RecMan client number, relevant department ID(s), and the article IDs for relevant articles. As an admin, you can locate your client number in the top right corner of your settings and the department ID in the URL when accessing department settings and clicking on the relevant department(s). You may locate the article numbers in the article registry either by clicking “edit” on a given article or by exporting all articles to Excel and seeing what number the relevant articles have. In our example, it would look something like this:

• Account number = 867
• Department IDs = 4134, 4135
• Salary article IDs = 8, 9, 10
• Addition article IDs = 15, 16

When your list of relevant information is identified, it should be shared with our support for further processing. Support will collaborate with a technician to set up a custom report in your RecMan BI based on the list of information.

The HINAS report

When configurations in RecMan BI have been completed, you may access the HINAS report. This report generates a list of all invoice lines related to articles in a format that makes it easier to forward the report to HINAS. However, a manual process might be necessary based on your final setup.

As mentioned in the introduction, Sykehusinnkjøp has its article structure, with three options of COMPLEX, SIMPLE, or SIMPLE WITH PRODUCT OVERRIDE setup – all affecting the reporting process.

For the SIMPLE setup, as an example, “Ordinary Hours” for Helse Midt for a nurse could have the code “HMSL1001”. To report this manually, you should have a good naming structure for your collective agreements, e.g., “Helse Midt Nurse 01.01.2023”. This will populate the collective agreement column in the report, so when you find all “Ordinary hours” articles connected to this collective agreement, you could mass-replace the article's name with “HMSL1001”.

The second option mentioned above is our suggested solution, which is also the solution reflected in the earlier chapters of this manual. The manual work needed for each report should not require more than 30-60 minutes for someone with mediocre Excel competence.