Dr. Allen Nazeri (DDS, MBA) presents a YouTube MBA-series lesson listing the "Top 20 Must-Have Practice Reports for Every Dentist." He argues that measurement (via readily available dental software and a dashboard) is essential to manage and grow a dental practice. Dr. Nazeri enumerates daily, weekly and monthly reports (production & collections, deposits, diagnosis vs accepted-treatment ratio, 7-day schedule, referral source and inquiries→appointments, production by procedure/provider, outstanding treatment, recalls, A/R & A/P, P&L/balance sheet, chair utilization, average transaction, bank reconciliation, production adjustments, inventory, website traffic/SEO, insurance utilization, etc.), explains why each matters, and recommends review cadences and uses (e.g., spotting billing errors, calculating marketing ROI, optimizing chair utilization, training staff).
Chapters
This is Dr. Alan Naziri and welcome to another MBA series video lesson. Today is about the top 20 must have practice reports for every dentist. Now, I am just astonished as the number of dentists who have no clue on how to measure various activities in their business. And I'm talking about both small and even some large group den dental practices. And this is really surprising because most dentists and dental practices, they have access to dental softwares that they can buy or they can store it in the cloud and so forth. And there are many, many good dental softwares out there. And I hope the dentists who want to create these reports, they just go out, look at different softwares, buy a software and customize it to their practice rather than trying to invest and use their own capital resources to try to create their own software, which would never be as good as the one that someone is doing it for a living to make software. So remember, if you cannot measure it, you won't be able to manage it. And this is what I'm talking about, having the reports, because those reports will allow you to make proper strategic decisions about your practice, about your new patient, about your marketing, whether or not you should add a dental chair, whether or not you should go to a bigger office, hire a new staff member, and so forth. So what are the minimum number of reports that you need and why? Well, I'm going to share with you how many reports that I typically require my clients to have and how often they should be looking at them. As a matter of fact, you need to create a dashboard on your computer so you have all of these reports available to you at your fingertips. Now, there are some daily reports, so let me go through those. First. Report number one is a very important report and that is your daily production and collection report. This report basically summarizes your total production and your total collection of that day. Now, some of the practices, this is also broken down into the total practice versus each provider, which is even better. Now, this report must be checked on a daily basis, especially if you have insurance companies that you are filing a claim for, because if there is a mistake on the production report that can easily be corrected before the end of the day, rather than submitting it to the insurance company and causing delay or even if the insurance company pays the claim and then later on you become audited. Remember, as a licensed dentist, you are responsible for all your activities in your dental office. So you cannot say, oh, it was just a clerical error done by Suzanne working my practice, you are still responsible. So it's absolutely important that you review this. If you have different providers in your practice, each provider should review it and sign it off so it's accurate information. Remember, you are responsible as the practice owner for all the information that you submit, especially to the insurance companies. Report number two is the deposit summary. And I am talking about the total cash, check, credit cards and possibly wire transfers that come in. This is a one page report that tells you exactly how much money came in, was deposited. As a matter of fact, you can take this with you to the bank to deposit right in the bank and it should match exactly what you're depositing. The third report which you look at on daily basis is your diagnosis versus accepted treatment ratio. So basically I want to know how to how many crowns, how many root canals, how many extractions, how many implants were diagnosed and how many of those were actually accepted by the patient. Because that ratio tells me what the problem is, whether or not I need to freshen up on my skills of case presentation, or whether Susie is doing a good job at the front desk twice talking to the patients about this, or whether or not maybe my offers are not good, my fees are too high. So tracking of this is very, very important. Now report number four would be your seven day patient schedule summary. And the way I use this report is that at the end of every day, I like to look at the schedule summary for one week from today because I want to know if I have an implant patient, if I have a prosthodontic patient, if there is something that I need to order, if there is something that I need to anticipate. You know, it's just a very proactive way of managing your schedule and your inventory and communicating with your staff what's coming up the following week. So if today is a Monday, we look at the schedule for the following Monday and we decide if there's something that we need for that schedule.
Now the next report that I like to look at is the new patient referral source report. And basically this report shows where did every new patient come from. And many times this report can be linked to your production. So basically it tells you exactly how much was produced from the Google Ad, from the Facebook, from magazine, from coupons, flyers and so forth. And this is how you can actually calculate your ROI return on investment for your marketing. The next report that I like is the new patient inquiries to appointment ratio. And this report will tell me exactly from all the external activities, marketing activities that we do, how many inquiries are coming in and how many of them are actually being booked by my Front office people. If I don't have very good numbers, that means we really need to do some training for our front office people to get them on board so they can schedule the patients better. Again, the total number of inquiries can include the telephone, the social media messages, text or anything that that report can track. Okay, now report number seven is the production report broken down by procedure and provider. This is a very important report because I can see how much each provider, my hygienist, my dentist in my practice and myself are producing by procedure. So I want to know am I doing lots of crowns or is my strength more like root canals or extractions? And depending on where, let's say an associate is, I may want to train them more in certain area because apparently they do not have enough training if they're not doing much of those procedures. Typically dentists who do not have training in a particular area, they tend to lean over to the areas that they basically have more training. And that really shows up on the production report. Now, report number eight. Is the treatment outstanding report? This is the report generated. And these are the patients that have had a treatment plan, but they have not scheduled their treatment plan one way or the other. Again, I want to know how much of this treatment is sitting out there. And on the days maybe that the office could be less busier, we can make outbound calls to patients, remind them of these outstanding treatment and, and this is one way to basically generate revenue for the practice and also keep our staff busy and motivated on the days that less calls may be coming in and so forth. And so this treatment outstanding report is an absolute necessary because at all times you understand how much business is actually sitting on the shelf. Report number nine would be the patients who are due for recall. And these are patients who may.
Have a recall coming up for hygiene or they may have missed a recall. And this report generally tells me how good our hygienist is doing a good job in convincing patients to come back for the regular hygiene and care as well as it allows the hygienist to, to use this report to call patients to bring them in for the cleaning and maintenance. Report number 10 is account receivable and payable. Summary. This report will give you information as how much money is owed to you by your patients. That's the account receivable and how much money you have to pay in bills to others. That's the payable, payable summary. I like to look at that on a weekly basis so we know where we're at, especially if your practice is insurance Based if your numbers are going up, your account receivable, then you need to go back and talk to your insurance administrator, understand why these claims are taking time and so forth. Report number 11 is income statement, the P and L and the balance sheet. And by huge surprise, most dentists, they don't even track this. The profit and loss statement and the balance sheet is one of the two reports of the income statement. There is another report called cash flow statement. But the P and L and balance sheet shows how much money came in, how much money is gone, expensed out and how much money is left at the end of the month. The balance sheet basically shows the assets and the liabilities and I will cover those in the future. Video lessons for you. Report number 12 is your dental chair utilization and production per hour. So I like to know how well our dental chairs are being utilized and what is the production of per hour per chair or production per hour per chair per provider. Because these reports can tell us are we maximizing, are we optimizing the use of our dental chairs or our dental chairs going empty for a long time? If the utilization rate is low, then there are certain marketing activities that I recommend that we do with our clients that that can help them maximize the use of the dental chairs. If the patients are not in a dental chair and the mouths are not open, basically production stops. And this is something that is used by most industries, including the airlines. And so it's very important that you know the utilization rate of that. Report number 13 is the average patient transaction by dollar volume. So I want to know how is our office doing with the average patient transaction. This is especially important if you're training our doctors associates to do more comprehensive dentistry as well as if we have over the counter supplies and products. So we like to keep track of what is the average patient transaction that is being spent. And again, this number can also be used in calculating our lifetime value, which was a different video lesson that if you have not watched that, please go back and watch it. Report number 15 is our bank reconciliation summary which basically shows what payments were deposited, what payments were withdrawal through a check, cash or whatever on the bank statement. So we want to make sure that everything has been balanced. Report number 16 is the production adjustment summary. This, this is especially necessary when we have insurance companies and sometimes they do not pay claims. We have to write things off or we have to write our fees off because someone is asking for a discount. So I like to know what that amount is. It also allows you, the dentist to keep an eye on any adjustments that are unauthorized in your practice. So you can, you can be aware of anything funny that may be going on in the practice as well. Report number 18 is the inventory management. One of the biggest problems in dental offices is the fact that they do not have control over their inventory. So many times I see and this has happened even in my own practices before where a dental assistant would come in and say, doc, can I order a GC key tack? Say sure, we can order that for you. And then two weeks later we find a bottle that is expiring that has never been used. So having a good inventory management on a monthly basis where you have all the expiration dates and everything on it is very important in terms of how much money is going to go out in ordering supplies. Your report number 19 has to do with your website traffic analysis and the new content activities. Those of those who are my clients, they know that I push them to put more contents on their websites and this should come on a regular basis. So maybe you schedule five contents a week and then you measure the traffic analysis as well and your SEO position of your website. So again, this report is an executive report among the 20 that I like to take a look at so we can make decisions based on that. Finally, report number 20 is the insurance utilization. If you use insurance in your practice and this report will allow you to see how much insurance was used, which insurance companies paid the most amount of money to you, and then you can evaluate this whether or not you should keep an insurance or drop it from your practice. This is Dr. Alan Nazeri. I help doctors develop, scale and exit from their businesses successfully. If you have found value in this information and you like to learn more about how I can help you grow your practice, please feel free to contact me either via email or WhatsApp. And please like and share this video and don't forget to subscribe. Thank you very much. We'll see you next time on the next video lesson.
