RosterSafe vs the spreadsheet you use now

This is the real comparison. Almost every firm this size tracks credentialing in Excel or Google Sheets, and no competitor will write this page honestly because the spreadsheet is not their competitor. It is mine.

What the spreadsheet gets right

It is the incumbent for good reasons, and pretending otherwise would insult the person who built it.

  • It is free, and it is already paid for.
  • It is infinitely flexible. A new column takes three seconds and no feature request.
  • Everyone can already use it. There is nothing to learn and nobody to train.
  • It is yours. No vendor can change it, price it up, or shut down.

If you track four providers with a couple of dates each, stop reading. The spreadsheet is the right tool and you should keep it.

Where it quietly fails

A spreadsheet has no alarm

This is the whole thing. A spreadsheet is a record of what you already know. It does not tell you anything; you have to go and look. Which means the system's reliability is really the reliability of one person's memory to open a file on a busy week.

Conditional formatting is not an alarm either. A cell turning red still requires someone to be looking at that cell. RosterSafe sends the alert to you, by email and in the app, on a schedule you set, and keeps sending it after the date passes until somebody actually resolves it.

Only its author can really read it

Every credentialing spreadsheet encodes rules that live in one person's head: what the highlight means, why that row is bold, which tab is current. It works perfectly right up until that person is on holiday, off sick, or has left, which is one of the most common moments a firm starts shopping for software.

The deadlines are not evenly spaced, and there are more than you think

Each provider carries a state license renewing every one to two years, a DEA registration every three, malpractice cover annually, a CAQH re-attestation every 120 days, and roughly 25 payer enrollments each re-credentialing on a two to three year cycle. That is not one date per provider. At 20 providers it is several hundred staggered deadlines, which is why something is expiring nearly every week rather than in a tidy annual batch you could plan around.

One tab per client does not roll up

A billing firm serves many client practices. In a spreadsheet that becomes a tab each, and the question "what is at risk across everything this month" has no answer short of reading all of them. RosterSafe makes the cross-client rollup the default view and lets you filter down to one practice, rather than the other way round.

Nothing checks the exclusion lists

A spreadsheet cannot tell you a provider has appeared on the OIG exclusion list. Billing a claim for an excluded provider is False Claims Act exposure, and it is the most expensive version of non-billable there is. RosterSafe screens the roster against OIG-LEIE and SAM.gov on a schedule.

There is no record of who changed what

When a date is wrong, a spreadsheet cannot tell you who typed it or when. RosterSafe keeps an activity trail, and every reveal of an encrypted field such as an SSN writes an audit event naming who looked.

The actual math

The spreadsheet's price is zero. Its cost is a probability multiplied by a consequence.

At 20 providers RosterSafe is $500 per month, or $6,000 per year.

When a provider goes non-billable, their claims deny until the enrollment is restored, and restoration is not fast: commonly 90 to 120 days. Worse, most commercial payers will not backdate, so the claims from that window are usually gone rather than delayed.

I am not going to put a fabricated dollar figure on your lapse. It depends on the provider's volume and which payer lapsed, and you know both better than I do. The cost-of-lapse calculator does the arithmetic on your numbers instead of mine, and it will tell you when the answer does not justify paying me.

Moving off the spreadsheet

Can I import my existing spreadsheet?
Yes, that is the intended way to start. Upload a CSV and map your columns to RosterSafe fields; the mapping step exists because nobody two firms name their columns the same way. You can also pull provider details from the free NPPES registry by NPI, which fills in names, taxonomy and specialty without re-keying.
What if my spreadsheet is a mess?
Most are, and that is not a reason to delay. Import what you have. Missing dates show as missing rather than being guessed, so you get an honest picture of what you do not know, which is usually the most useful thing the first import produces.
Is a spreadsheet ever the right answer?
Yes. If you track a handful of providers with a couple of deadlines each, a spreadsheet and a calendar reminder is genuinely fine and you should not pay for software. The math changes when deadlines outgrow the number of times per week anyone remembers to open the file, which for most firms is somewhere around four or five providers.
What does it cost compared to free?
The free plan is a test drive rather than a smaller product: one provider, forever, so you can put a single row of your spreadsheet in and see what the alerts do with it. Running the actual book is the paid plan, at $25 per active provider per month with a $100 monthly minimum, which is $500 per month at 20 providers. Set that against what a single lapse costs you in denied claims while the payer re-enrollment runs its 90 to 120 days. There is a calculator on the site for that, which uses your numbers rather than mine.

Import it and see

The free test drive takes one provider, forever, no card. Put your most complicated provider in and see whether RosterSafe tells you something the spreadsheet was not.

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