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Do you want to become a wedding, travel, marketing, or business consultant? Then, this article is for you. Here’s what you need to do to jumpstart a career in consulting:

1. Educational background. Although some fields of consulting do not require a bachelor degree like wedding and travel consulting, there are those that require a college diploma. Make sure that you have the required educational background before you sink your teeth into this field.

2. Be an expert. Obviously, you need to be an expert to become a consultant. You need to know the ins and outs of the field that you are targeting so you can offer your clients with expert advice. Aside from attending proper schooling, it will also help if you take advantage of relevant trainings and seminars, read online and offline resources, and if you work closely with other experts that can help you boost your knowledge.

3. Communication skills. If you are struggling to articulate your thoughts or if you simply can’t get your grammar right, consulting is really not the perfect job for you. You see, you will constantly communicate with your clients as you need to share with them your knowledge and expertise and this will not happen if your simply don’t know what to say or how to say it. However, there is no need to fret. Communication skill, just like any other skills, is something that you can learn and master overtime. Attend relevant trainings and practice on a regular basis and I am pretty sure that it won’t take long until you become a great communicator.

Debt Consultants of America (DCOA) seemed to just pop on the scene and become somewhat of a major player in the debt settlement industry. They have a professional looking website and regularly run advertisements in the Texas region where their offices are located. But irate clients are starting to post complaints about this company on various consumer advocate websites. We decided to look at why. This will help you answer the question, “Should I Become a Client of Debt Consultants of America?”

DO NOT skip over this step or take this warning lightly; read over the Debt Consultants of America’s contract from top to bottom, line upon line. DO NOT lightly glance over one single solitary line or paragraph. After you read the entire contract, get two other people to read it; if at all possible, one of those persons should be an attorney.

Why do we strongly suggest this step? People who signed that contract and later cancelled essentially stated in their opinion that it contained a full page of client obligations and rights that serve only to benefit DCOA. Here are some basic components of that contract…

#1) Apparently No Creditor Gets Paid Until Debt Consultants of America Gets all their money – People who sign up for debt settlement programs administered by third party companies don’t realize that this is a standard policy. Once you sign up for most of these programs and start making payments, the assumption is – the debt settlement company starts paying your creditors. NOT SO! They don’t start paying your creditors until you have paid their administrative processing fee in full. That’s why you hear of horror stories of people getting sued by creditors while they are signed up with certain debt settlement companies.

Be advised, VERY FEW if any of these companies will make any payment to creditors until their initial administrative start up fees are paid in full. That means, although you are making payments to the debt settlement company, NONE of those payments are going to ANY of your creditors. It also means you are getting further behind and additional penalties and fees are being tacked on.

#2) Debt Consultants of America Charges a $299.00 Cancellation Fee – BE ADVISED: after you sign up as a client and later decide this was a bad mistake, you MUST pay them $299.00 to cancel your contract. Once you become a client, you have to pay your way out of the contract. Even if the company doesn’t deliver as promised and even if you are not satisfied with their service, you are still going to pay that FEE.

Although the cancellation fee information is evidently placed somewhere on their contract, past clients are saying they weren’t aware of the fee until they decided they wanted out. If you don’t have money to burn, don’t sign that contract. If can’t afford to lose three hundred dollars, don’t sign that contract. If the thought of paying $300.00 to cancel a service you decided you were displeased with ruffles your feathers, don’t sign that contract.

#3) If You Have OK or Good Credit Then You May Want To Find Another Option! – If you have OK or good credit, it’s probably best to find another option other than Debt Consultants of America. Some consumers are great financial planners and when they see trouble on the horizon, they take preemptive measures to insure that their financial outlook won’t be terribly impacted by such things as a downsizing or a layoff. They might move to consolidate their debts or push their creditors for debt settlement.

This way they don’t have to go through the pain of facing late payments or watch their credit score drop dramatically. Some choose the (DIY) Do It Yourself Debt Management, while others choose to have a third party debt settlement company to handle their issue. If they end up becoming clients with companies like Debt Consultants of America, there is a huge problem.

The problem being this; their debt settlement systems are set up to negotiate with creditors only after a person is behind on their payments. So why would these companies sign contracts with clients who have good credit and who are not behind on their payments knowing their system is for people who are behind on their payments? Especially since the client would have to pay a cancellation fee?

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that one out. Remember the initial question, Should You Become a Client of Debt Consultants of America?” To help you make an informed decision, we’ve provided you with the basics on what to expect. Ultimately, the decision is yours, but at least you won’t go into this type of contract not knowing the reality of what you are signing for.

For every project management, a nonpayment, a value-added application, and an attendance and time tracking tool is essential in your business. For extremely large companies, it is really important for these companies to be managed efficiently. By efficient management, we mean a management with minimal errors in the processes and an accurate approach of your consultants to the transactions at hand. Moreover, one way to ensure this is by using a consultant time tracking tool. You should, however, not limit it to consultants if you can. Instead, make this time tracking tool available to all the workers you have in your company.

In the business world, the definition of the word tracking is close to the word defined as a means of making sure jobs and tasks are completed in a desired frame of time and to be able to archive important data for future use and scrutiny. Tracking is a cost-effective tool that serves to lessen human work. The human work we are talking about here include dispatch jobs, inventory checks, and employee performance analysis. Specialized electronic clocks are available for the implementation of time tracking of your employees.

If a company wants a report on the workers and how they are utilizing their time while at work in the office, attendance and time tracking is necessary. There are elaborate time-keeping tools that can serve as time trackers that can actually compute and separate inclusive times when your workers are going out to lunch and those 15-minute or 30-minute breaks from the time they are really working. After the collection of data, it would be then very easy to calculate the efficiency of your employees by directly applying the time consumed by your employees while at work (minus the time while they are out at lunch, break, and the like) against the quality of the job they are doing.

For office functions, such as timesheet reporting, expense reporting, resource allocation, management and budgeting of projects, and invoicing, a time tracker also comes in very useful. The reporting of time and expense more accurately is a direct benefit a company gets with the use of time trackers for their employees. If your company is still in the phase where part of your workforce relies on outsourced skills or strategists, you can make use of them by getting insight as to how they view and make use of time trackers.

You may be expecting answers from these questions to be already a public knowledge in your office. What you are after, anyway, are the possible answers your company as a whole does not know yet. Root for these answers and be quick to develop your own new uses and functionalities of the time trackers. And so, you are able to make good use of your outsourced consultants by directly engaging them and subjecting them to your newly-developed time tracker. In the end, you will be using a tool you have developed through your consultants. This means more effective consultant time tracking that comes straight from them – the consultants themselves.

If you own a small business or are thinking about starting one, then whether you know it or not, you probably can make use of business consulting services. Business consulting will help you sort through the unknown, manage risk, get more efficient and profitable, sidestep legal trouble, and much more. Take a look at some of the benefits of business consultation to see if it would be a good match for you.

As mentioned above, there are many different and specific benefits to these kinds of services. There are so many different factors that you have to manage when you own a business. You have your core product or service itself, whatever it is you are offering or trying to sell. You have the logistics behind that, whether it’s a storefront, a door-to-door service, an eCommerce site, or anything else. You have marketing costs, and you have employees which come with their own costs, and also need to be managed effectively.

There are administrative and financial sides to the business, legal considerations and concerns, and much more. That only scratches the surface and already it’s a lot to deal with. Business consulting services will help you to sort through all of that noise, steer clear of trouble, and make yourself more efficient and successful.

Of course, don’t forget that simply having a sounding board can be very valuable to a business. Talking things over will help to eliminate potential trouble spots before they pop up down the road, and will help you to separate good ideas from bad ideas right from the start. A logical voice offering you advice or asking you questions is more than often for most business owners to make the right decisions.

For example, let’s say you live in Miami, and you’re looking to start a small business in Florida. A checklist of the legal steps and requirements which you need to follow, and a guide to the dos and don’ts of the process will be crucial in your success. It’s the only way to ensure that you get things done the right way, and don’t end up having to go back, or find yourself in trouble, at a later point in time.

That’s what working with a provider of business consulting services is all about. You will be working with an experienced professional who knows all of the ins and outs of what you’re trying to do, and will be able to soundly advise you on the best way to proceed. You’ll save yourself frustration and time, and give yourself peace of mind knowing you did the best thing for yourself and your business.

Whether you want to start a new business, make your business more efficient, deploy a new business model, or anything else, turn to someone who provides business consulting services to help guide you on your journey.

It seems these days as if practices are doing more and more patient consultations over the phone. A lot of this may be due to the current economic conditions and the fact that patients are trying to avoid having to come in and be seen and be charged a co-pay.

What ever the reason physicians are spending more time on the phone these days and are asking whether or not they can bill CPT codes for telephone consultations and get reimbursed.

Unfortunately, Medicare will not pay for patient consultations performed over the phone. In terms of other payers, you will have to check with them on a case by case basis.

If this issue has become a big problem for your practice and is absorbing a lot of your time, you may want to consider billing your patients for this service.

Telephone services are typically billed using two sets of codes added to the CPT index in 2008: codes 99441 – 99443 are for phone services by physicians, while 98966 – 98968 are for services by “qualified non-physician healthcare professionals.” Again, none of these codes are covered by Medicare but more and more private payers are starting to reimburse for this code so it is certainly worth checking with them to see if they will pay.

If you do decide to bill patients for these codes, here are five things you must know about these codes:

• They may be billed only for “medical discussion” that IS NOT related to an E&M service that was provided within the last seven days and DOES NOT lead to an in-office visit within the next 24 hours or earliest possible date.
• The phone conversation must be documented by the provider that took the call.
• Though Medicare does not pay for these codes, both sets of codes have relative value units (RVU’s) assigned to them that you can use to help determine what fee you will charge your patients for these codes.
• The patient must initiate the call in order for you to bill the service.
• The codes are valid for established patients ONLY, according to the CPT guidelines.
• If your practice is performing a significant amount of phone consultations, that revenue can add up over the course of a year and make a difference in your practice’s earnings.
• If you are considering billing for phone consultations, here are some tips that should help you get paid:
• Negotiate with private payers – The key is to document every instance over the course of a year that you provided a telephone consultation. The amount of consultations could be significant and show your physicians and other providers provided the service 120 times over a year. When you renegotiate your managed care contract, you can show the provider relations department of that payer the documentation supporting your 120 phone consultations and explain to them this is what you did. You can then ask the provider relations for an allowance from the payer for these consultations. If one payer agrees to pay for the phone consultations, take an EOB showing payment and show that to another payer and ask them if they would be willing to match it.
• Discourage patients from lengthy phone calls and ask them to come in for an office visit – Most of your patients aren’t going to like the idea of you billing them for phone calls in general, much less ones that only take five minutes. If it appears that a phone call is going to be a long one, go ahead and encourage the patient to come in for an office visit and explain to them that way your insurance will pay for it instead of you having to bill them for the lengthy phone consultation.
• Get paid for a growing practice expense – The CPT codes for telephone E&M services were established for a reason. If the codes are in the CPT book, you have every right to code them and bill for them. The key is to decide at what point you will bill for the phone consultation (i.e. 15 minutes, etc.) and to see how your patients react as you don’t want to run patients off but they have to understand your time is valuable.

This is a billable service that is definitely worth your practice looking into. You’d be surprised at how many of your private payers may reimburse you for these codes. In addition, if patients know they have to pay for lengthy phone consultations, they may just decide to come in and have a face to face visit.