ABA Clearinghouse Checklist: 10 Electronic Transactions and Safeguards Your Billing Needs

Claims don't go straight to payers; they travel through a clearinghouse as standard X12 transactions. TargetFlo includes that connection. Here is everything it handles, and the safeguards worth asking any vendor about.

The 6 transactions

1. 270/271 eligibility — real-time coverage checks during intake, with payer ID mapping.
2. 837P professional claims — built from signed sessions, checked by the scrubber, and sent only after a person approves.
3. 277CA acknowledgments — accepted or rejected, with the payer's claim number captured on acceptance.
4. 276/277 claim status — a daily follow-up on claims accepted more than 30 days ago with no payment.
5. 835 ERA — payments and adjustments posted to claim lines; see how ERA posting works.
6. ERA enrollment — tracked per payer, so manual payment entry warns when ERAs are already active.

The 4 safeguards

7. Test vs production — claims go out in test mode until production is switched on; demo organizations never send at all.
8. Safe retries — every submission carries an idempotency key; temporary errors retry, and after five attempts a person decides.
9. Notifications plus a daily backstop — responses are delivered by a secured notification, and a daily check picks up anything missed.
10. Exact matching — acknowledgments and remittances post only when they match exactly one sent claim; otherwise a person picks.

What you provide

Each payer's electronic payer ID, ERA enrollment where required, and your billing identity and payer rules. Corrections (frequency 7) and voids (frequency 8) are linked to the original claim automatically.

Related: Real-time insurance eligibility for ABA · Billing & Claims · Insurance & Eligibility