Do you struggle to manage the financial aspects of your dental practice? Do you work long hours with a lot of patients yet still have trouble making payroll? Do you know which procedures are most profitable for your practice and which are not? Are you attracting the right patients to maximize your revenue? If you don’t, you are not alone; most practice owners focus more on the clinical aspects of their practice, looking at financials only when problems arise.
Is there a better way?
The answer is a definite yes – if you run your practice with the help of the right management software, you can streamline your operations and improve your practice’s financial health without spending numerous hours and thousands of dollars getting a finance degree. Let’s explore the 7 best ways the right management software platform, such as Visual Practice, can help enhance your practice’s finances without a lot of work on your part:
1. Monitor Cash Flow:
Cash flow is the lifeblood of any small and medium-sized business, including single and multi-office dental practices. The right practice management platforms will quickly and easily generate comprehensive cash flow reports that give you a clear picture of the money coming into your practice each week, month, or quarter so you can prevent unplanned cash crunches. Moreover, your software should allow you to easily export your financials for importing into your accounting software of choice, such as QuickBooks, to get a more complete picture of your cash flow situation relative to your expense commitments. You should also be able to export the details in a format compatible with Microsoft Excel if you or your accountant want to perform more advanced what-if analyses.
Visual Practice gives you a crystal-clear view of your cash flow so you can identify trends, forecast future cash flows, and optimize your financial strategies to maintain a healthy bottom line.
2. Maximize Production:
Understanding your practice’s production performance relative to your practice’s throughput capacity is essential for identifying areas of under-utilization, waste, and opportunities for improvement. Tools like comprehensive production analysis reports allow you to track how many new case starts you have, monitor staff productivity, and measure case profitability.
With Visual Practice, you can generate comprehensive production reports that provide insights into the volume and types of treatments for each period. These reports enable you to identify areas of future resource underutilization and help you drive decisions on whether to increase your marketing efforts to attract more patients to keep your chairs full or dial them down if your production rate is over capacity. By understanding and maximizing your production efficiency, you will enhance your practice’s profitability.
3. Identify Backlog:
Look at your backlog of treatment plans as an early indicator of potential cash flow issues in the future (if the trend is down) or as a signal that you need to hire more staff if the trend is up.
Like with cash flow, Visual Practice’s live backlog reports allow you to start with a summary view and then drill into individual treatment plans in progress within the selected accounting period. These findings can be exported in a format that allows for further analysis, if needed. With Visual Practice’s backlog reports, you can prioritize appointments, allocate resources effectively, and minimize revenue loss due to missed opportunities. Reducing your backlog can also help manage your growth and ensure a steady cash flow.
4. Watch Receivables:
Timely collection of payments is crucial for maintaining a steady cash flow. Dental software simplifies accounts receivable management by automating payment reminders, tracking outstanding balances, and generating detailed receivables reports.
Visual Practice enables you to meticulously track and oversee outstanding balances, aging receivables, and issue automated reminders to prompt timely payments from patients. Gone are the days of navigating through the labyrinth of accounts or chasing after tardy payers. You can now identify overdue accounts, follow up with patients, and streamline the payment collection process to improve your practice’s receivables and overall financial health.
5. Procedure Profitability:
Understanding your procedure profitability for each type of treatment is essential in determining if you have the right mix of services to maximize your profitability.
With Visual Practice, you can easily look at procedure profitability from a few different angles, per provider, per office, per treatment type, relative to insurance reimbursement, etc. These reports enable you to identify opportunities, and perhaps change your service mix to maximize your revenue potential. For instance, stop offering extractions if they are not as profitable as dental implants.
6. Patient Activity:
Knowing which patients have not been active for a period of time allows you to take action to get them re-engaged (via special offers, coupons, etc.), which is a much less costly option to keep your chairs full vs. attracting new patients through traditional marketing initiatives.
Visual Practice allows you to quickly generate lists of patients that have not been active for a selectable period of time. You can then use to re-engage them through various contact options, by mail, by e-mail, by phone, etc., and prevent future erosion of cash flow as these patients are prone to being attracted by your competitors.
7. Balanced Scorecard:
Dental practice management software can provide valuable data and analytics to guide your financial decision-making. In today’s competitive dental landscape, strategic financial planning is essential for long-term success. The right dental software platform empowers you to make data-driven financial decisions based on real-time insights and accurate forecasts.
Visual Practice’s Balanced Scorecard dashboard allows you to see, at a glance, your practice’s financial performance and then drill into its various constituents to further analyze detailed financial metrics. By leveraging these data, you can gain insights into past performance, identify trends, and make informed decisions to drive growth and profitability in the future.
A good dental software platform can be your strategic ally by empowering you to exercise precise control over your practice’s financial health. From monitoring cash flow and managing backlogs to maximizing production and procedure profitability, dental software empowers forward-thinking practice owners like yourself to make data-driven decisions and optimize practice finances. By harnessing these cutting-edge tools, you can ensure a seamless financial flow within your practice without a lot of effort or specialized knowledge on your part.
