The visit was in March. The money turned up in June, at a number the payer picked.

A practice produces a charge, a payer produces an allowed amount, and a payment eventually arrives that matches neither.

Marketing reports in this field are frequently built on charges, because charges are available immediately and are the largest of the three.

That ranks channels by what was billed rather than by what was received, and the difference is not even across payers or visit types.

Collections is the only basis that survives a conversation with whoever runs the practice, and it is the one this report uses.

Where you want a charges view for volume, run it as a second labelled report rather than mixing bases in one ranking.

A patient who arrived in March generates a claim that adjudicates over weeks and pays over months, sometimes twice after an appeal.

Grouping revenue by payment date therefore attributes a March patient to June's marketing, which is simply wrong.

Carrying the date of service through lets the report group by when the patient arrived, which is the grouping a spending decision needs.

It also produces the lag per payer mix, which is a cash-flow number the practice can use quite apart from marketing.

A year of data is the practical minimum, because a shorter file is mostly claims that have not finished paying.

Being in network puts the practice on a list that patients choose from, and a meaningful share of new patients arrive that way.

The cost of that channel is the negotiated rate — real money, agreed in advance, and never compared with what a paid campaign costs per patient.

Ranking directory-sourced patients on collections against search-sourced ones answers a question most practices have only argued about.

The answer varies by specialty and by contract, which is exactly why it has to be measured rather than assumed. A practice that is in network with one payer on good terms and another on poor ones has two different channels wearing the same label.

A self-pay patient pays at the visit, at a price the practice set. An insured patient pays a fraction, months later, at a price a contract set.

Blended, a channel producing self-pay patients looks fast and small while one producing insured patients looks slow and large, and neither reading is about marketing.

Splitting them where the export allows gives two honest rankings and removes most of the timing distortion from the file.

For practices with a cash-pay service line, that split is usually the reason to run this at all.

It also changes what the practice is willing to pay for a patient. A cash-pay aesthetic or wellness patient is worth a multiple of an insured visit at the same appointment length, and a single blended cost per patient hides that entirely.