How to Reduce Dental Office Overhead in Your Practice
The first step to reducing dental office overhead is to recognize you may have an overhead problem. There is a multitude of ways you can reduce this overhead, from managing your time and inventory to adjusting employees and patients as needed. Regardless of the direction you want to take your practice in, getting a solid grasp of your finances and maintaining that grasp can help you make realistic business decisions that could make your practice a success. You want to be able to control your income as much as possible, which means knowing where every dollar goes at your practice. Find out how you can best control and maintain your dental practice’s overhead with our Unified Smiles representatives, helping you meet your goals.
Start Taking New Patients
If you’re not taking new patients at your practice, one way to provide a little financial wiggle room is to start accepting new patients. These new patients don’t necessarily need larger procedures to maximize your overhead efficiently, specifying the procedures you’re accepting new clients for is a simple move that helps you move your bottom line. Booking procedures that aren’t as time-consuming or intricate can also help you with the next method to reduce your office overhead.
Control Your Open Time
The open appointments at your dental practice, regardless of if they’re no-show customers or simply empty slots, are costing your practice money. If you have regular clients that don’t show you may feel the need to double book their appointments with easy-to-handle procedures to ensure that you have the time slot occupied. Give someone at your front office the appointment book as their task and instruct them to keep it as full as possible. Life in the office is never perfect, some days you’ll be overbooked and others you’ll be under-booked but by maximizing your time you’ll minimize profit loss reducing your dental office overhead.
Staffing and Raises
Staffing is one of your biggest expenses so knowing when to hire, fire, and give raises appropriately. Firstly, ensuring your dental practice’s overhead is increasing is essential. A stagnant or declining practice should not encourage raises. However, if your practice is doing well a raise may be in order. Secondarily keeping an eye on your employees is essential and firing any employees that aren’t keeping up with their duties is necessary to ensure your dental office overhead is under control.
Negotiate the Price of all Equipment
In your practice you never want to settle for a price as offered, you want to be negotiating the prices you pay for every piece of equipment overall. It doesn’t stop at equipment either, you can negotiate prices for tech support, marketing, and supplies as well. Getting discounts on needed supplies is going to help your practice in the long run, so negotiate with every single provider you can to try to get the best possible deal for your practice. By working with Unified Smiles, you can avoid this negotiating headache as we offer pre-negotiated prices and benefits for 100+ vendors in a variety of industries.
Go Paperless
Going green with apps, emails, and other digital communication can decrease or even eliminate the cost of sending out promotional materials, appointment reminders, bills, and more. This helps the bottom line of your business by freeing up those finances to be used elsewhere. With more tech-savvy individuals seeking dental care, it’s easier now than ever to implement a paperless method of communication between your practice and your customers.
Check Your Numbers
If you want to stay on top of your dental office finances, you’re going to need to be honest with yourself about money. Where do you spend too much, not enough, and what do you need to make your practice a success? Crunch your numbers, take into account supplies and crunch your statistical percentages. Are you maintaining a quarterly collection percentage in the high 90’s? What do your patient recall percentages look like? Take a long hard look at new patient numbers as well to make sure the practice is sitting where you want it to sit.
Maximize Efficiency
From a clinical standpoint, efficiency can easily be maximized by either hiring or properly training dental assistants and chairside assistants. This ensures that you can focus on the procedure at hand, as many of the preparation tasks would be handled in advance. This maximizes your time by minimizing the time in between patients. Passing off smaller preparation duties makes you, as the practitioner, more efficient from procedure to procedure, increasing the number of procedures you can complete in your schedule.
To learn more about dental office overhead, fill out the form below or call us at 844.US.UNITE Our team can help you maintain a healthy practice one smile at a time!