231: How Top Dentists Cut Financial Management Time in Half

As a doctor, you're not spending hours and hours writing checks, tracking things down. You're spending the time growing the practice, working with more patients, onboarding new hygienists. Right. Any of the other things that are going to be actual drivers to growth for your organization.

Hi, I'm Emmett Scott, and just like you, I've had my ups and downs in the dental industry, but times are changing. The DEO has built a map of how to succeed in one of the most challenging industries to navigate. On this show, we talk to dental industry leaders, solve problems, and get you the answers you need to these challenging times and thrive. Welcome to DEO's Growth Secrets podcast for dental organizations. Now let's get started.

Welcome to DEO's Growth Secrets podcast with me Today. I have a company that we actually have worked with inside the DEO for a long time. We're big fans and, and this company is working with a lot of our DEO members to help create automation and efficiency inside the back office. So I've got Ashley here with Bill.com Bill.com is a large name, not just in dentistry, but really across the country and world, really. And it's very amazing to see start to make your way into dentistry and really start to establish, you know, yourselves as a resource to create a much more efficient office. So Ashley, do you want to say hello and give the folks here a little introduction?

Yeah. Thanks, Jake, and thanks for having me. My name is Ashley Valdivia. I'm an account executive at Bill. You know, basically last year working exclusively in the, in the dental space, the DSO groups, helping them essentially understand what's out there, how to be more efficient with their time, really build systems that give them more visibility, control and time back as they're looking to scale.

Amazing. So let's just talk a little bit about build.com. i think a lot of people have heard of you all. I know you work with a lot of our DEO members, but those that aren't members probably would, would really benefit from an overview. So a little bit about bill.com and kind of on a high level, how you work with dental offices.

Yeah, it's a great question. So at a high level, Bill is designed to help leaders spend more time on high impact strategic initiatives, not on, you know, keeping the lights on. How do we automate the most time consuming part of the accounts payable process, expense management, so that the groups can scale and do it with confidence, control and clarity and making sure that they're managing things on a holistic level right Allowing for that strategy to start from the top and then come down to all the different practices that they have.

So, so what, how does it work specifically? So if somebody kind of was. Was to sign up and work with you, give us kind of a roadmap as far as how you would install things and what would happen in the office.

Yeah. So essentially. Right. It all starts with the initial conversation with somebody like myself from Bill to understand, hey, what is the actual use case here? What's going on with the organization and figuring out now, are there bottlenecks? And if so, we create a Bill account. That Bill account can be either one to one, or we can make one for each of the different practices. Having like a localized centralized inbox, digitizing, kind of the approval workflow, and integrating with your accounting system so that the actual, like, setup time is typically multiple locations between a week to two weeks max. And the team's already set up to, to get ready and going. We connect directly to your bank and so you can initiate payments directly from Bill and know that they're going to get there however it is that your vendors want to get paid.

So. Or so you would start sending payments from a bill.com kind of backend interface. All of the transactions from the bank are kind of funneling up into Bill.com, right? All of them or some of them.

Yeah. So it's, it's totally up to each practice. Right. So one of the things that we see a lot are, for example, patient refunds. Right. Those are typically checks. They take a lot of time. And what we can do with Bill, we can import them or use that sync to then just basically push out a batch of checks so you can drive all of the payments through Bill. So you're doing things with the click of a button or if you wanted on the flip side, to do it through your current system, you can always update the records within the Bill site.

And what are people typically doing if they're not doing this? Because I know, like getting people access to the bank account, getting these transactions. Yeah. What are you. What are they typically doing?

You mean before, like.

Yeah, like what's. What are most people doing right now who aren't using sometimes, though checks.

I hear checks a lot. A lot of it is pushing paper around. Right. We have a lot of entrepreneur doctors that got multiple practices and they're having to go from one location to the next, or people are having to go and meet them to give them a stack of papers to review, to sign off on that stack of papers then becomes Stack of checks which then signed, reviewed. A lot of it is tracking is happening through spreadsheets or email chains and things just get lost in the shuffle of everything that goes on.

So this is the payment, the outgoing payments of checks and then also the receiving of checks.

Right.

You got. Your interface will allow people to start to manage all of that through like a central database, essentially.

Yeah. So we have a receivables module as well, so you can invoice your clients and receive payments from there. You know, typically in those cases where maybe the insurance didn't cover everything. Right. And we still have an outstanding balance, we can drive that through bill. And using the EPHI fields help maintain HIPAA compliance.

Okay, what else? This is like such a huge monster that it's really surprising how many people are still using paper. Obviously it's okay. You know, it's. It's doing fine. But if you're using any paper at all for financial management, this seems like this would be a good use. Any other kind of that come to mind? Use cases, modules.

Yeah. So there's also the credit card and expense module. Right. So anytime we have multiple locations, you know, it doesn't always make sense to have a formalized approval process for these invoices. We want to give each of our practices the flexibility to do business. And the easiest way to do that is issuing credit cards. Now, what happens with credit cards? Is there. Anybody can tell? Everybody knows. End of the month, what are we doing? We're scrambling to get receipts. We're scrambling to go through a spreadsheet, you know, reconciling with our credit card statement, figuring out what's going on, begging people to give us an explanation as to why they made certain charges. And so we're able to give a. Essentially a free smart card with all these different automation tools in place to make sure that we're capturing that information when it happens. We can route it, we can set up enforceable budgets and targeted spend so that knowing what's going on with the organization and kind of thinking ahead and not just reactive, I mean, each one

of these things would be a game changer. So, so even setting budgets.

Right.

For different.

What.

What are some of the examples or use cases of. Of budgets where, you know, compared to what people are doing now, probably no budget at all.

Yeah, yeah. So right now what we hear a lot is, hey, we've got one card per office. Maybe sometimes it's even less than that. And they have a limit of $5,000 or $10,000 a month, and they're Supposed to know what to spend it on. What we can do with the budgets inside is say, hey, we've got location A, They've got a budget specifically for lab supplies. Then they can have a budget for office materials, and then from there, they can even have a budget for employee morale. Right. You want to go pizza party? Let's make sure that we're targeting and forecasting for that and have it so that each month we've got that budget available, or each quarter, really, whatever that cycle is, and then using that to drive those transactions from the kind of the base level into the accounting system.

Okay. And also that obviously leads to cost management, better cost management. A lot of this stuff is a pretty direct roi.

Right.

So if you have budgets, you can manage costs better. You're not going to go over if you're managing kind of your payments through a central spot, Maybe less late fees, less overpayments. What are some of the other kind of benefits on top of just being more organized, more visibility.

Yeah. So there's. There's a few. Right. So you. You covered a couple, which is late payments. Right. But also duplicate payments. I can't tell you how many times I've had clients that are telling me I just paid this bill out three times because our vendor didn't realize we'd issued a check and the check was in the mail. They get sent into our practice manager, who doesn't know that the core team had already issued it. They issue it on their own because the vendor's their friend and want to make sure they get paid. So that's one side of it. But also it reduces wasteful spending. If we're tracking every dollar that goes out. And I can see, I can say, ask Jake, you know, you charged some Lululemon pants on your car here, but you booked it as an office expense. Can you explain what's going on? And so it helps reduce spending like that fraud risk in general. Right. Giving you a gap between your sensitive company financials and what your vendors are receiving, so that no one's ever really going to have a chance to capture that information. And on the flip side, from like, an impact perspective, this all means, as a doctor, you're not spending hours and hours writing checks, tracking things down. You're spending the time growing the practice, working with more patients, onboarding new hygienists. Right. Any of the other things that are going to be actual drivers to growth

for your organization, I mean, imagine sending duplicate payment. So the worst, you know, best, worst case, you just pay twice, which is, you know, awful. And best case, you have to just communicate and just get that money back or do a stop check and just a complete waste of time, you know, and so. Yeah, go ahead.

Yeah, no, I was going to mention that the other side of that coin is, of course a vendor's going to want to get paid twice because, hey, I'll get you a credit. But when we think about it, what happens when the vendor doesn't get paid? What happens when we don't know if the vendor got paid because we don't have a way to track it? I've had clients that, you know, their process was sending a stack of invoices to a location like a state away, getting that stack back, hand signed and then sending back checks. They almost lost one of their key vendors because payments were getting out late and they didn't even know it until it's almost too late.

Dentists, are you ready to boost your practice's profits and simplify payments? Imagine zero credit card processing fees for your practice. With NADA Payments, the leader in dental payment solutions, you pay nothing for credit card transactions, keeping more money in your pocket. Patients love it too. They can avoid extra charges by using debit cards processed completely fee free, ensuring their satisfaction. Switching is effortless. NADA Payments integrates seamlessly with popular dental software so you're up and running without disruption. Streamlining your operations with cutting edge features like text to pay and payment links, making it easy for patients to pay from anywhere. Need flexibility? Offer recurring billing for subscriptions or customized payment plans to improve cash flow and patient retention. Plus, NADA Payments provides patient financing options, helping patients afford larger treatments while you get paid up front. Dental practices switching to NADA payments typically save 75% on process, freeing up thousands for growth. Reinvest those savings in advanced equipment, digital marketing, or hiring top talent to scale your practice faster. And with no termination fees, you're never locked in. NADA Payments gives you the freedom to focus on what matters your patients. Join the countless dental entrepreneurs who trust NADA Payments to optimize payments and fuel their success. Ready to transform your practice's financial future? Visit nadapayments.com to discover how easy it is to save big and grow smarter.

Yeah, you know, it's, it's when you hear these things, it's just like, man, there's such a solution to this stuff. When you start to get into financial management technology is to a place where a lot of these problems should be going away. And I can tell you a lot of our deal members who are investing in working with folks like you and really like getting on the forefront, they're saving just massive amounts of time. It's. Yeah, it's a. It's wild to be dealing with so much paper still. So and so you're. Then you kind of are eliminating manual entry, you're speeding up approvals. Right. Any. I mean, there's just. There's so many benefits to digitizing this and creating an organization around it.

Yeah. And, you know, it's easy to think about all of these as kind of separate parts of a process, but when we take a look holistically. Right. What do all these little parts mean? It means that we're having better structures. Right. Better processes and more control. There's no reason that the core team that's helping with all the practices isn't going to be able. The financial insights to make decisions. Right. They should be able to control and dictate how all the practices work. And by having something like Bill, where it's all digitized, we can digitize and automate those kinds of roles, processes and responsibilities.

Yeah. One of the biggest kind of mindset traps that we find, dentist entrepreneurs fall in, which is, you know, you want your team to make the right decisions, and it's a little bit frustrating when they don't. Right. You're like, oh, my gosh, that was so simple. Why did they make that decision? Why did they do that? But then if you really dig into it, they didn't have the same information that the owner had. Right. So the owner has a more of a holistic view. Maybe they have access to the bank accounts, they can see where the money's going. And so if you have a team member that doesn't have that information, of course they're gonna make a different decision. They don't have the same. They don't have the same variables and things to look at. So it actually helps with decision making too, when people have access to democratized information.

Yeah, exactly. And I think that a big part of that is, especially as an entrepreneur. Right. All of your members are. They're focused on growth. They want to take an active role in their businesses. Only thing that happens as a detriment, you can't spread yourself too thin and expect the same results to come through. Right. And so having that way to delegate in a way that allows everyone to make these decisions in a conscientious way. Right. Thinking strategically. So that way the people that are running the show have a little bit more bandwidth to then focus on other initiatives.

So what are some of the Questions that people have coming in. And then even on top of that, some of the hesitations like this sounds great, but it's not the right time. I need to wait. What are some of the questions and hesitations you hear?

Yeah, I would say the big one is practices thinking that they're too small. Right. That they're not going to benefit from them because maybe they're just one or two practices and they've been doing it for a while and they don't see necessarily the benefit there. Right. Or they're looking at this from a comparison of like, hey, my current process is $0. This process has a cost. Why would I incur a cost for this? And what I typically encourage them to do is take a step back and think, you know, it's not just the cost of the solution, but it's also the cost, the soft costs. How much time is it taking you to do this? How much error is happening? Right. What is this as a result to, you know, for the company?

Yeah, yeah. I think smaller offices have an opportunity to create like this well oiled machine. If you do, it doesn't have to be crazy, but just if you do take advantage of some of these technologies because you don't have a lot of the complication, you can create this as fine tuned, um, you know, efficient practice which ultimately leads to either more profit or more streamlined, which is less headaches.

Right.

So those offices are the ones I think that should be really looking at this stuff because you just don't have complication, it's easier to implement.

Yeah. And, and I think a big hesitation that comes up now that we're. Now I'm thinking about it again. It's status quo. Right. We've been doing this for a while, it's been working. And on the flip side, a lot of the owners don't know that something like Bill is out there. And when they think about digitizing a system, they're thinking about losing the control and visibility they have from actually signing a check. Right. Because when they sign a check, they know no money is going out until I sign that check. It's more of thinking about it like how can we improve the visibility so it's not happening just at the check signing before it even gets to that point.

Totally. Yes. This makes tons of sense. Okay, so, so what does, what does a well oiled machine look like? What is a growth? Almost like growth Ready apprentice look like in your estimation?

Yeah. So think centralized yet distributed. Right. There's one system, but there's the ability for local Teams to initiate, approve and operate independently. We have a cloud based organization with automation and controls for the accounting, for the payments, all of that where it's rolling up to that core team so that everybody's got the audit trails, there's control and dashboards that allow you to kind of make decisions as they're happening, all while cutting the AP process by at least half, if not more.

Yeah, it probably sounds like a dream to some people, but it is very doable. I mean, it's very, very doable. Like I said, this is a software that we use inside of, inside of our own internal company. It's crucial. So any real world examples, I think you all worked with a larger group that you, you know, this, this would just cut so much time. So maybe give us an example of someone you worked with.

Yeah, yeah. So one of really good examples, there's two that come to mind is a Lightwave Dental and Guardian Dentistry partners. Now Lightwave Dental, they believe they started with Bill when they had only eight practices and they're now at around 90. Okay. And the reason they went to Bill is they were realizing, you know, they got investments, they're going to be growing and they couldn't keep adding accountants every time they onboarded one or two practices. Right. You don't get to 90 by scaling your headcount at the same time you're scaling the practices. So what they did instead they switched to Bill to automate the accounts payable workflow. And now I believe they're, each accountant does 10 to 15 practices. That's all they do. They're responsible for that. And they've kept that same scale of adding headcount, you know, 1 to 10, 1:15 ratio, that 1 to 4, 1 to 5. Yeah.

So improves your ratio, which is, which is, that's what, that's how you scale. I mean you just need those better like team members to amount of work they take on. I think you mentioned another one with Guardian as well.

Yeah. So Guardian's very similar. Right. And both were essentially looking for the cookie cutter approach. How do we get a process to standardize? So when we onboard new practices, it's plug and play. Guardian was a little bit different actually. So bit of background on Bill. We've been in the AP space for 20 years. We're publicly traded and in that time we've developed a lot of strong partnerships. And I bring this up because Guardian Dentistry, I believe their CEO or their CFO was one of our accounting firm partners. Right. Meaning they used Bill through an accounting firm when they switched to this industry. They realized, hey, I already know what to do. I already know how to have a distributed system for multiple locations. It's Bill. And so they came to Bill from their very first one and they're now also at around like 90, if not around 100 practices.

Amazing. Okay, so that kind of leads us to some trends. But what trends are you seeing out there in finance? It's called finance automation.

Yeah. So when you say trends, are you saying like, what are. What's the technology doing? Or are you saying kind of what are we looking for?

What do you, what do you. What's kind of in the technology world? I mean, maybe, I'm assuming AI. There's probably some broad stuff.

Yeah. Okay.

What are the kind of trends in this area of business?

So I would say that the, the big trends here are being proactive instead of reactive. Right. Using AI to trigger improved forecasting, insights into cash flow, to find fraud. Like you mentioned before, it happens to see all of these exchanges, the anomalies, before they become issues. Also improving the way that we deal with vendors being able to track costs, track how they're being paid, you know, in seeing how do we convert. Hey, I've got 10 practices. Each has their own relationship with this vendor. I just saw how much we spent for the past year. Maybe reach out and then have them give us a better rate or better terms using. Right. That, that buying power of having multiple different locations. And then lastly is everything is more connected these days. Integrations with your erp, with the banks, all of that working together to streamline that time is kind of what is the most exciting part, you know, nowadays.

Yeah. So I mean, let's say you open up time probably if you're a little larger, you know, I guess this opens up the ability to become more strategic, to think more long term. Right. If you're not spending time clicking buttons and managing just whether checks are paid or not, or multiple checks or doing all that admin work, it really improves financial, financial kind of visibility. So you start looking into the future rather than going backwards. Anything else you'd add about what this makes possible when you're not spending all your time doing the minutia?

Yeah. So I think that a big thing to think about here is Right. How much of your time is being spent just keeping the lights on. And what we're able to do with finance automation is have that sure knowledge that we are getting to these projections. Right. If you're going to be onboarding a practice or maybe you're planning on selling one of your practices. What's going to happen? They're going to audit and review your financial documents. You better have those lined up. Having something like Bill allows for that, but also giving the team that is in charge of making decisions, of growing the company, giving them as much information as possible so that they're doing the right things for the organization, mitigating the total fraud risk. The concerns that we have around vendor management, like I mentioned previously, all kind of baked in together so that as let's say, example, a cfo, they're not sitting here thinking about what happened last month, they're here planning for the next six months.

Yeah, I think that's the big idea is, is and it's strategically as far as any business and dental office or practice, the more you can automate the fulfillment of the patient, you have the patient that goes in and gets the actual dentistry. Everything besides that is, is tech fulfillment. It's, it's administration work, you know, anything that's not talking directly patient. The more you automate that and that, the more opens the team up to plan future growth and solve future problems. So I think that's one of the huge benefits that you're mentioning.

Yeah, I had a client that initially when we were talking, you know, they, they saw the value, but they didn't really see the roi. And so I was asking them like, hey, you're still practicing, right? And said, yeah, well, how much time are you spending on this each week? They rough estimate, three hours, four hours. And when I got them to think about this, well, how many patients could you have helped or met with in that time? That was the big driver there.

Yeah, exactly. The less time doing this, the more time with the patients. Well, Ashley, thank you a ton. I think that's a great overview and answers a lot of the questions people might have. When it comes down to it, we want to have an ROI mindset. We teach this to a lot of our members. It's not about this like kind of cost coming in. It's once you have that cost, what does it open up? What's the ROI on that cost? And I think something like this is kind of a no brainer. So I appreciate you guys being on here.

Thank you for listening to deo's growth Secrets podcast for dental organizations. Continue the conversation on our Facebook group and meet other dental leaders. Get questions answered and the strategies you need to succeed. Plus, we have some free resources for you right there on the Facebook page. Remember, you're not alone. Let's do this together. Join DEO's Growth Secrets Group on Facebook book and until next time, keep smiling.