Patrick Accounting

It's almost here! 🎉 The Texas Association for Home Care & Hospice Annual Bring Care Home Conference kicks off tomorrow in San Antonio, and we'll be set up at Booth #65.

Come say hi and chat about accounting for your home health or hospice agency.
We'd love to talk it through with you.

See you tomorrow!

We're not letting the weekend have all the fun. Debbie's birthday deserves a Monday celebration too! 🎂

As an Accounting & Tax Manager at Patrick Accounting, Debbie is the person clients describe as one of the best parts of working with us. She handles things before you even have to figure out what to ask, and she does it with a warmth you can feel through the screen.

Around the office, she's also everyone else's biggest cheerleader, always the first to celebrate someone's win or big day. Today, it's her turn. 🥳

Hope your birthday weekend was wonderful, Debbie, and that the celebration rolls right on through this week!

If year-end at your home health or hospice agency feels like an archaeology dig through 12 months of transactions, that's a sign.
When the books are structured for cost reporting all year, year-end is just a reporting exercise.
When they aren't, someone has to reconstruct it.
And that somebody is usually you or your office manager.

We wrote about 5 ways a generalist accountant costs home health and hospice agencies money without it showing up on an invoice:

5 Ways Your Accountant Is Costing Your Home Care or Hospice Agency Money Home care and hospice accounting mistakes hurt reimbursements, cash flow, cost reports, and compliance. Learn 5 costly issues generalist accountants miss.

We're heading to the Texas Association for Home Care & Hospice Annual Conference in San Antonio, TX — Sept 1–3! 🎉

Come find us at Booth #65!
Whether your books are in great shape or could use a second look, we'd love to talk through what accounting support could look like for your agency.

See you there!

A hospice agency's books can look healthy right up until an aggregate-cap overpayment notice arrives.

The Medicare hospice cap is an agency-level limit on total Medicare hospice payments. For the cap year ending September 30, 2026, the cap amount is $35,361.44, multiplied by the agency's beneficiary count.

The important nuance: A beneficiary doesn't always count as one full cap amount. Under Medicare's proportional methodology, the count may be fractional based on the patient's hospice days across providers and cap years.

Long stays can increase exposure because Medicare continues paying for eligible care while the agency's aggregate reimbursement may ultimately exceed its cap. And because updated data can change the proportional calculation, a cap determination may be adjusted after the initial calculation.

Our article explains how the hospice cap works, what can increase risk, and five warning signs to watch: https://hubs.la/Q04vfzxX0

Tax season shouldn't be a scramble for receipts and a prayer that you didn't miss anything.
But for a lot of home health and hospice agency owners, that's exactly what it turns into.

These are the five mistakes we see most often, but each one of them is fixable once you know it's there.

Swipe through for all five, and then check out the full article → https://hubs.la/Q04ty7Pq0

5 Tax Mistakes in Home Health & Hospice

Paying your caregivers as 1099 contractors may feel like the easy call.
Lower payroll taxes, no workers' comp, way less paperwork.

What makes it risky is that most caregivers don't meet the IRS criteria for contractor status.

If you..
→ set the schedule and say how the visit gets done,
→ pay by the hour and cover the supplies
→ have kept them on indefinitely doing work that's core to your agency...

That's an employee, and most agencies check all three boxes without realizing it.

We've seen agencies get hit with six-figure assessments once the IRS catches it.
Back taxes, penalties, interest, and audits reaching back years.

It's one of five tax mistakes we see most often in home care and hospice.
The other four are in the article here → https://hubs.la/Q04ty7Pq0

Happy birthday, Michelle! 🎉 When it comes to home care and hospice, she's the reason our clients get answers with confidence, always a step ahead on the CMS changes that could otherwise catch them off guard.
But this year, there's an even bigger reason to celebrate. She's spending this birthday as a brand-new mom, which sounds like the best gift of all. Enjoy every second of it, Michelle! 💙