Understanding billing runs
A billing run gathers your agency's approved, delivered work for a chosen period into a DCS-ready (KidTraks) billing file. This article explains what goes into a run, how a run moves through its lifecycle, and — importantly — how to fix a run after you've filed it.
Billing runs are practice-manager only. (If you haven't connected your agency to KidTraks yet, start with Connecting your agency to KidTraks. For the step-by-step of generating one, see Create and submit a billing run.)
What goes into a run
A run is built from your team's documented work, but with two important filters:
- Approved work only. A contact has to be approved before it can bill — approving a progress note is what makes it billable. Drafts and submitted-but-not-yet-approved notes don't appear in a run.
- Unbilled work only. FCR tracks what's already been billed and leaves it out of new runs, so the same work never bills twice.
Within a run, work is grouped by DCS billing stream (for example, family preservation, court, and per-diem) and organized into invoices for filing.
The lifecycle of a run
A run moves through three stages:
- Draft — you generate and preview the run first. Nothing is committed yet; you're checking it over.
- Confirmed — once you've filed the run with DCS, it's confirmed and its work is marked as billed.
- Deleted — a run can be removed (more below).
Correcting a run
This is the part worth understanding well, because it's deliberately simple:
There's no "edit" or "unlock" on a billing run. If a run is wrong — even one you've already filed — you delete it and generate a corrected run. Deleting a run returns its work to unbilled, so the new run picks that work back up and bills it correctly.
Deleting doesn't erase anything: FCR keeps the record of the deleted run (including who deleted it and why), and its billing file stays downloadable. You're freeing the work to be re-billed, not throwing away the history.
The file is always available
A run's billing file is a stable snapshot of exactly what was billed. You can re-download it at any time — months later, or even after the run has been deleted — and it comes back byte-for-byte the same. That makes it a dependable record for audits and re-filing.
Frequently asked questions
Why isn't a visit showing up in my run? Two common reasons: the note isn't approved yet (only approved work bills), or it was already billed in an earlier run (work bills only once).
I already filed a run and found a mistake — how do I fix it? Delete the run and generate a corrected one. Deleting returns the work to unbilled so the new run captures it, then file the corrected run.
Could the same work get billed twice? No. Once work is billed it's excluded from future runs. Deleting a run is what puts its work back in play to be re-billed.
Can I still get the file from an old or deleted run? Yes — a run's billing file stays downloadable regardless of the run's state.
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