Dental practice numbers explained
A dental practice can have a full appointment book and still struggle to pay the owner. The answer is rarely in one report. It sits in a handful of numbers: what you produce, what you actually collect, what it costs to keep the doors open, what an hour in the chair earns and what a new patient costs to win. This guide explains each of them in plain terms, using only your own figures, and links the calculator that does the arithmetic. The overhead, production, chair and new-patient sections apply equally to physiotherapy, veterinary, chiropractic and optometry clinics.
1. Production is not collections
Production is the value of the work done, at your fee schedule, on the day it is done. Collections is the money actually received, from patients, insurers and payment plans. The two are never the same. Insurance write-offs, discounts, family courtesies, refunds and unpaid balances all sit in the gap between them. Your practice management software reports both: look for the production summary and the collections or payments report for the same period, and pull the adjustments report alongside them. Track all three every month. When the gap widens, it is usually a contract fee change, a billing backlog or an account that has gone quiet, and each has a different fix. Enter gross production and adjustments into the production per hour calculator to see net production, the figure that is closer to what you will collect.
2. Measure overhead against collections, with owner pay kept out
Overhead is everything it costs to run the practice: staff wages and payroll taxes, rent, lab fees, dental supplies, equipment leases, software, insurance, marketing and the rest. Take the lines from your accountant's profit and loss statement and divide the total by collections, not production, because collections is the money that pays the bills. Keep the owner dentist's pay out of overhead. If it is mixed in, you cannot tell whether the practice is efficient or simply paying its owner well. The practice overhead percentage calculator takes collections and each overhead line, shows owner pay separately, and gives total overhead, overhead as a share of collections, and profit both before and after the owner is paid. To check the margin over a longer period, run the same figures through the net profit margin calculator.
3. Know what an hour in the chair produces and costs
Production per hour turns a monthly total into something you can act on in the appointment book. Take net production for each provider and divide it by the hours that provider actually saw patients, from the schedule rather than the rota. Then work out what it costs to open the practice for an hour: total overhead divided by the hours you are open. The difference is profit per hour. The production per hour calculator takes gross production, adjustments, clinical hours, days worked and overhead per hour, and shows net production per hour, per day and profit per hour. If the figure differs sharply between days, look at how those days are booked, not just how busy they felt.
4. Run hygiene as its own department
Hygiene is often treated as a loss leader that feeds the dentist's schedule, but nobody checks whether that is true. Treat it as a department with its own income and costs. From the software, take production booked to the hygienists. From payroll, take their wages plus employer payroll tax and benefits; the employee cost calculator helps you build the full cost of each hygienist. Add hygiene supplies and a fair share of rent and other overhead. The hygiene department profit calculator gives department profit, margin, and production and cost per hygiene hour. If hygiene loses money on its own, you can then decide knowingly whether the treatment it generates for the dentist covers the loss.
5. Chairs and hours set the ceiling
Every practice has a hard limit: the number of chairs, multiplied by the hours they are available, multiplied by the days you open. Utilization is the share of those hours actually booked with patients. Count chairs and opening hours, then take scheduled hours from the appointment book. The chair utilization calculator shows available chair hours, utilization, idle hours, production at full use and the production left unrealised at your own production per hour. Idle chairs mean extra marketing or longer hours can help; a near-full book means growth needs more chairs, more providers or better use of the time you have. For a single provider's daily slots, the appointment capacity calculator gives the same picture, and the no-show cost calculator puts a figure on the booked time that patients fail to turn up for.
6. What a new patient costs and what one is worth
Marketing only makes sense when you compare its cost with what the patients it brings are worth to your practice. Add up the period's marketing spend from the profit and loss: advertising, website, directory listings, referral rewards. Count new patients from the software's new patient report for the same period. Estimate first-year value from the production of last year's new patients, and retention from how many of them came back. The cost per new patient calculator gives cost per new patient, lifetime value over the years you choose, the value-to-cost ratio and the number of new patients needed to cover the spend. Use your own retention, not a hopeful one; it decides the result more than any other input.
7. Review monthly and act on the number that moved
None of these figures is useful once. Pick a day each month, after the accountant closes the books, and update production, collections, adjustments, overhead lines, hours and new patients. Run the practice overhead percentage calculator first, then check whichever number changed most since last month. A falling collection rate points to billing. Rising overhead points to a specific line. Lower production per hour points to the schedule. Fix one thing, then look again next month. If you want the whole review in one place, the Dental Practice Numbers Workbook on the kits page keeps these figures together so the monthly check takes less than an hour. To see what each team member brings in, the revenue per employee calculator and the labor cost percentage calculator use the same payroll figures, and the break-even calculator shows the collections you need before the practice makes a profit.
The mistakes that cost the most
- Treating production as income. The fee schedule is not the bank balance. Plan wages and spending from collections.
- Hiding owner pay inside overhead. It makes a well-run practice look expensive and a weak one look fine. Keep it on its own line.
- Assuming hygiene pays for itself. Without its own wages, supplies and share of overhead, you are guessing. Work out the department profit.
- Judging marketing by enquiries. Phone calls are not patients. Compare the cost per new patient with what those patients are actually worth to you.