Reporting is vital for dental practices to track how they’re performing financially. The data will help you monitor and assess financial trends in your practice. You can only fix a problem if it is detected. Your dental reports will provide you with the information to understand and take action to proactively manage your practice’s future.
Dental Production Report To Calculate Your Expected Revenue
To collect, you need to produce. Any procedure performed on a patient with a dollar value is considered production. Production reports forecast your reimbursement. Additionally, you’ll be able to see your gross production and net production, which is your gross production minus adjustments and insurance write-offs. Any production management software can run this report by day, month, or year. Your software will also provide you with a breakdown of the production for each provider that treats patients in your office. By running this report, you can catch any downward trends and find answers to what is happening with a little bit of research.
Write-off Report To Calculate Your Net Income
Your write-off report is crucial as it shows you how much money you will subtract from your production. A write-off is a credit applied to a patient’s bill. Insurance write-offs and professional courtesy write-offs are the most common. An insurance write-off is caused when you are in-network with an insurance company and accept their negotiated fee. You take the insurance check as full payment and write off the remaining balance so the patient does not receive a bill. A professional courtesy write-off is given to a friend, family member, or patient who paid cash. Typically, a 10% discount is applied to the account. You can calculate the net production from your write-off report, which is your gross production minus all adjustments and write-offs.
Collection Report To Track Your Actual Collections
You can track the revenue that comes into your practice with this report. Collections from your dental office come from two different sources: the insurance companies and your patients. You can generate a this report by day, month, or year. The report should be run every day for end-of-day reconciliation. A production report tells you how much money your office is producing, and a collection report displays how much you’ve collected and whether your billing team is doing their job correctly. You will find your collection percentage in this report, which is your collected funds divided by your net production. The collection percentage of a successful dental practice will be in the range of 95%.
Accounts Receivable Reports (Patient and Insurance A/R) To Track How Much Revenue Is Still Outstanding
An accounts receivable report will show all amounts owed to you by patients and insurance companies. You can run these reports for patients and insurance separately or together with your dental software. This report will enable you to see if more money is due from patients or the insurance companies. Your report will let you know which aging report needs more work. If insurance companies owe you more money than your patients, work aggressively on your insurance aging report. If these numbers are reversed, focus on the patient aging report. Moreover, aging reports categorize outstanding balances according to the length of time they are overdue. Review the categories listed below to know which accounts you need to address more urgently:
- Current – due immediately
- 1-30 days – due within the next 30 days
- 31-60 days – a month overdue
- 61-90 days – two months overdue
- 91 days and over – more than two months overdue
Daily Deposit Reports
You should run your daily deposit report as one of your essential daily activities at the end of each day. The daily deposit report shows the totals for each type of payment, such as cash, check, and credit card payments from patients and electronic funds transfers and check payments from insurance companies. What you deposit in your bank account needs to match your daily deposit report to the penny. Not reconciling the two is a recipe for disaster. Your daily deposit report can also help you detect fraud and improprieties.
Use Reporting To Proactively Ensure Your Practice’s Financial Health
Keeping track of your practice’s performance by way of rigorous and daily financial reporting is essential to ensure its ongoing financial health. Five key reports to focus on are your production, write offs, actual collections, accounts receivable, and daily deposit reports. Monitoring and acting on insights you see in these reports will enable you to proactively direct your practice’s current and future success.
Could your dental practice benefit from support in patient financial verification to ensure services are covered? Schedule a demo of our dental revenue solution here.
