You have thirty days. Sometimes sixty. Occasionally the letter says the relationship ends at month end and you are reading it on the nineteenth.
The thing to understand first is that the deadline in the letter is not your real deadline. Claims submitted in the last week of the relationship will adjudicate weeks later, and the remittances land after your billing company has stopped working your account. That gap is where practices lose money in a transition, and it is the part almost nobody plans for.
Here is the sequence. Today, this week, before the notice expires, and after.
What do I do first if my billing company drops us?
Get your data out before anything else. Request a full export in writing today, covering claims, remittances, patient balances, payer contracts, and credentialing records. Access ends when the contract ends, and a practice that waits until week three often finds the login already disabled.
Today
Request your data in writing. Email, not a phone call, and ask for a written acknowledgement. Specify what you want: full claim history including submitted and unadjudicated, all remittance advice, patient balances with ageing, payer contracts and fee schedules, credentialing and enrolment records, and any clearinghouse configuration. Ask for a date.
Your contract likely covers this. Find it and read the termination clause before you make the request, because knowing what you are already entitled to changes how the conversation goes.
Find out why. There is usually a reason, and it matters. A billing company that dropped you over volume or margin is a commercial decision. One that dropped you over payer mix, documentation quality, or a compliance concern is telling you something about your own operation that you need to know before you hand it to somebody else.
Ask directly. Most will tell you.
Confirm the last day they will work claims. Not the last day of the contract. The last day somebody actually touches your denials, your appeals, and your posting. Those are often different dates, and the difference is your exposure.
This week
Count what is in flight. Claims submitted and unadjudicated, claims denied and unappealed, remittances received and unposted, and anything sitting past a filing deadline. That number is what is at risk, and until you have it you cannot judge how urgent anything else is.
If you cannot produce it, that is itself a finding, and it is the first thing to fix regardless of who bills for you next.
Check your filing deadlines. Every payer has a window for initial submission and another for appeals. Anything approaching either one is a hard date that does not move because your billing arrangement changed. Work those first, ahead of everything else on this list.
Establish who receives remittances. If remittances flow to your billing company’s address or their clearinghouse account, that has to change before the relationship ends or payments will arrive somewhere you cannot reach. This is slow to fix and easy to forget, so start it in week one.
Decide the shape of the answer. Three options and each has a different lead time. Another billing company, which takes 30 to 90 days to onboard properly. Bringing it in house, which needs a person who has done it before. Or a bridge, where somebody covers the work while you decide.
Do not make the permanent decision this week. Make the bridge decision this week.
Before the notice expires
Verify the export is complete before access ends. Open the files. Count the rows against what you expect. A partial export discovered after your login is disabled is a different problem entirely, and the only cure is asking a company that no longer works for you to do you a favour.
Move clearinghouse and payer enrolments. This is the long pole and practices consistently underestimate it. Payer enrolment for electronic claims and remittance can take 30 to 60 days per payer, and it does not run in parallel with everything else neatly. Start on day one, not day twenty.
Get credentialing records in your own hands. Provider enrolments, effective dates, group affiliations, revalidation dates. These live with whoever managed them, and reconstructing them from scratch is weeks of work.
Agree in writing who works claims already submitted. This is the single most commonly missed item. Claims sent on day 28 come back on day 45. Somebody has to appeal the denials and post the payments. If neither party has agreed to it, the answer is nobody, and those claims quietly die.
After
Watch the first two remittance cycles closely. Payments landing in the wrong place, claims rejected for enrolment reasons, and remittances nobody is posting all surface in the first four weeks and all are recoverable if caught fast.
Reconcile against what was in flight. Take the list you built in week one and confirm each item resolved. Anything that did not is the transition loss, and finding it in month two is much cheaper than finding it in month six.
What actually goes wrong in a transition
Almost never the new billing company. The failures cluster in three places and all three sit in the handover rather than in anybody’s performance.
Claims in flight with no owner. Sent by the old company, denied after they stopped working, appealed by nobody.
Enrolment gaps. Claims rejecting for weeks because a payer enrolment did not transfer, while everybody assumes it is a coding problem.
Unposted remittances. Money arriving into an account nobody is reconciling, so the practice believes it is owed what it has already been paid.
None of those are dramatic. Each one is silent, and each one is why a transition that looked clean shows up as a cash problem a quarter later.
The thing worth doing while you are in here
You are about to have every number in your revenue cycle in front of you, in one place, for the first time in years. That happens during a transition and almost never otherwise.
Use it. Before you hand it all to somebody new, look at what the export tells you. How long visits took to become claims. How much was sitting unbilled. Which payers pay slowly. What share of denials were ever appealed.
A billing company change fixes the half of the revenue cycle a billing company touches. Whatever was happening upstream of them will still be happening next quarter, under new management, and this is the one window where you can see it clearly.
What this means for you
Thirty days is enough time if you spend it in the right order. Data out, deadlines first, enrolments started immediately, and a written agreement about who works the claims already in flight.
Most of the money lost in a billing transition is lost in that last item, and it is the one that costs nothing to prevent.
If you want a second pair of eyes on the export while you have it, grab 30 minutes with us. Prep nothing. You will see what is in flight and what is at risk before the notice period runs out.
Questions people ask
What do I do first if my billing company drops us?
Request a full data export in writing today, covering claims, remittances, patient balances, payer contracts, and credentialing. Access ends when the contract ends, and a practice that waits until week three often finds the login already disabled.
How long does it take to transition billing companies?
Thirty to ninety days to onboard a new company properly, and payer enrolment for electronic claims and remittance can take 30 to 60 days per payer on its own. That is why enrolment starts on day one rather than after the new arrangement is signed.
Who works claims that were already submitted?
Whoever you agree in writing, and if nobody agrees, the answer is nobody. Claims sent in the final week come back after the relationship ends, and unappealed denials and unposted remittances are where most transition losses occur.
What data should I get from my billing company before they go?
Full claim history including unadjudicated claims, all remittance advice, patient balances with ageing, payer contracts and fee schedules, credentialing and enrolment records, and clearinghouse configuration. Verify the export opens and the row counts look right before access ends.
Should I bring billing in house after being dropped?
Possibly, and not on a thirty day deadline. Bringing billing in house needs somebody who has done it before, and making that decision under time pressure is how practices end up with a worse arrangement than the one they lost. Bridge first, decide second.