In most service industries there are two aspects of running a business.
One, Industry expertise; In the medical field it is the license providers such as MD, NP and particularly in the field of dentistry it is the DDS, RDH and Two is the business acumen to run a business. Juggling these two is overwhelming for any private practice dentist / owner.
Business side of dentistry not only includes the things such as running payroll, handling month end bookkeeping, marketing but also includes industry specific tasks such as handling HIPAA, paying associates based on production or collection, categorizing staff as employees vs. contractors, dealing with dental labs and ordering and managing dental supplies.
For example, let’s look at running a payroll. We have seen over and over again how private practice owners manually calculate federal and state taxes for each and every employee on a sheet of paper (no, I did not say excel), cut a paper check to their employees and pay taxes every end of the month to the agencies. This entire process, assuming you are running a weekly payroll is going to take around 12 hours per month, which could be spent on more important things such as spending time with grandchildren. And we have not even talked about running a payroll for an associate. A typical compensation for an associate is based on a % of production or collection. Most practices do not have systems in place or technology to support paying an associate a seamless and a transparent process. The ideal way of following this is to keep track of each and every patient seen on the day an associate has worked, the production the associate produced per patient and the collection (partial or full) received over time for the procedures and then compensating an associate and making respective entries for your accounts receivable and payable. Following this process is not only time consuming but is required to maintain a healthy relationship with an associate.
We at Umbrella Dental Partners are private practice dentist / owners first and over the years have developed systems and processes to support our business operations. We now help other private practice dentist / owners on the business side of dentistry with our managed service offering. To know more about our offerings and a complimentary 30 min consultation, please get in touch with us.