We haven't always been "dental accountants." In fact, we worked for over 5 years in dental practices, growing from 1 to 10 practices to gain the experience (often the hard way!) necessary to know how to manage practices, which numbers and metrics were important, and how to streamline those metrics.

In fact, we went through all of the big "Dental CPA" firms, paying lots of money for financial statements that we didn't see for 6 weeks after the month ended, which almost made them useless. The statements were often incorrect and completed by a bookkeeper (and not an accountant) without the exact dental accounting knowledge we needed. Their bill pay systems were not fully integrated with our cash flow forecasts and threw off our numbers. The charts of accounts were not industry standard and the classifications were off. For example, dental equipment was lumped in with supply costs, throwing off the metric used by our Lead Dental Assistant. Finally, not having our numbers in real time really limited our decision-making ability.

So... we added dental accounting to our services, bringing a team of full-time dental accountants into our dental practice management company. Then we made sure our charts of accounts were standardized across all dental practices and accessible from any device. We then integrated QuickBooks Online into our proprietary dental dashboard so that we knew whether we were in line with our goals. This allowed us to quickly make adjustments if we were off track - we were no longer flying blindly! While it didn't make us perfect, it meant we would know how to improve and immediately find out when we were off track.

We allowed our dental team members to have limited access to their metrics as a percentage of collections and this really motivated team members to perform well. Time that was spent manually entering numbers disappeared - our accounting efforts paid off. For example, our Office Managers knew whether payroll was too high, too low, or just right, and in real time. We can now look at our quarterly payroll metric as a percentage of collections (our goal is 25%) and would find out visually if the metric was increasing our overhead, and, crucially, how to get it in line.

After attending multiple dental conferences where dentists were asked what their overhead was and had no idea, we decided this trend needed to end. We now want to bring dentists the transparency needed to successfully run a dental practice. Our numbers are now accurate, timely, cloud-based, and integrated with a dental dashboard that visually shows how the practice is performing.