While you likely receive profit and loss statements from your accountant or bookkeeper, I find that a lot of dentists don’t have as much control over their overhead and profitability as they would like.

Practice owners often tell me they’re not 100% sure about their expenses, or that they seem higher than they should be, or there never seems to be enough left over to meet their personal income needs.

Financial reports are good for looking at what’s happened in the past – how much has been made and what’s been spent previously.

But increasing profitability involves predicting and managing future expenses too. Significant financial commitments should only be made with a precise view of how they will impact the bottom line.

My Profit Calculation Spreadsheet is designed and tailored specifically for a private dental practice to do this. It shows you how much you should be able to take home per month in real time, based on current production, collections, and expenses.

It can also be used to better predict the financial future. By entering possible or predicted changes in production, collections and/or overhead, up or down, it will show you exactly how each change can affect what you’ll make from your practice. This has helped prevent many of my clients from inadvertently making costly mistakes that could have diminished or even crippled their income!

It’s also valuable in setting goals for the practice in terms of provider production for you and any hygienists or associates, whether or not you’ve already hired them, and observing the potential financial outcome for any selected scenario.

Finally, how much personal income do you need or want to make from your practice monthly or annually?

With my Spreadsheet you can plan out exactly what needs to happen to accomplish this and, like many of my clients have, you may discover you are much closer to reaching your practice financial goals than you thought!

I could tell a lot of interesting stories about this. An extreme example was Dr. X., who had never taken home more than $65,000 per year from his practice and had even declared bankruptcy at one point. Using my Spreadsheet, he was able to go from wondering where all the money was going to completely controlling every dollar in and out. Along with other improvements I’d helped him make, his annual take home increased rapidly to $250,000 and continued to grow from there!