Working from home can be freeing in a lot of ways, but it also requires an incredible mind for detail. Mercifully, tools like Microsoft Excel can ease a lot of that burden. Medical transcription is a very popular at-home job; let’s see how Excel can make a transcriptionists’ life easier.
Job Tracking
Medical transcriptionists get a lot of work, especially if they’re polylingual. Keeping track of who is paying you how much to do what by when would be a part-time job all by itself if Excel couldn’t track those details easily for you.
Paid Out
Medical transcription requires specialized equipment (a foot-pedal operated tape player, sound-dampening headphones, and a high-quality ergonomic keyboard.) By using Excel to track your costs for such items, you will always be able to find the payment details when you need them later.
Invoices
Excel templates can create high-quality, professional looking invoices that you can send to your various job sources and immediately save to your computer as an easy way to track paid vs. unpaid invoices.
Time Stamping
Most transcription jobs pay by the word, but there are some that pay by the hour. For tracking your working time, breaks, and efficiency (words per hour), there are few more flexible and powerful tools than Excel.
Projecting Deadlines
By keeping an accurate tally of your previous word-per-hour counts, and the average words-per-minute of the medical tapes, Excel can handily assess roughly how long it will take you to transcribe any given job — very useful in managing your time to get as much done as possible each week.
Marketing
As in-demand as medical transcriptionists are, you still have to get your name out there in order to get jobs. Excel can keep a tally of how profitable each of your marketing efforts are so that you know where to most effectively spend money in the future.
Recontacting
Much like marketing, only better — keeping track of your previous clients in an Excel database so that you can call them up and ask for more work once you have proven yourself is an excellent way to make sure you’re never without something to do.
At-home medical transcription isn’t a glorious job — but it’s one that’s vital to the health care system. Boot up your computer, get trained in the details of Excel’s capabilities, and you’ll find that the back-end bookkeeping of the job is inconspicuous and easy to deal with, letting you get on with the important stuff.
