Category: Dental Advisor

Starting your new dental career can be one of the most exciting (and nerve-wracking) times of your life. Whether you are starting your own practice from scratch or joining one that is already established, there are several important aspects to keep in mind.

Our dental accounting team in 70808 has compiled a quick guide that will help you manage your priorities as a new dentist with confidence and ease.

1.  Protect Your Work-Life Balance– While you might be used to a heavy schedule during your years in school, don’t let yourself burn out. You deserve a healthy work-life balance. By setting boundaries and following them, you can enjoy your time with friends, family, or hobbies without feeling overwhelmed by your work schedule.
2. Know Your Strengths – Your practice should center on two things: what you are compassionate about, and what you are incredible at. Don’t pursue a specialty just to appeal to your community if it isn’t something you are excited about. Focusing on your strengths will bring you more satisfaction in your work as well as higher quality to your service.\
3. Manage Your Debt– Dental school graduates usually have a significant trail of student debt following them. Whether you refinance, make extra payments, or choose an alternate repayment plan, focus on reducing your balance instead of simply paying off the interest. Don’t forget to contribute early to your retirement fund, either. The best time to start saving was yesterday.
4. Successful Practice Management– A dental practice is a business, and a business needs a strong leader. Dental schools don’t typically prepare you for the financial and leadership elements of your career, so don’t be afraid to seek coaches or consultants. With the right mentor, both you and your practice can succeed.
5. Continue Your Education– The last advice you want to hear as a new dentist is ‘more schooling,’ but it’s true. Once you have settled in, you should look for new opportunities to hone your skills. There exists a world of workshops, lectures, and courses that can further your passion in dentistry, bring you confidence in your work, and improve the value of your practice.

With the right mindset and plan, you can build yourself up as a new dentist, achieving your leadership and financial goals. If you are considering starting your own practice, our team will be the resource you need to secure your future in success. Contact our dental accounting firm in Baton Rouge today to schedule a consultation.

It’s no secret that, as a dental practice owner, you take on a great deal of responsibility and overwhelming  financial stress. Here in our office, one of our main goals is to help you achieve financial freedom so that you can completely focus on leadership and business growth. The following tips from our dental accounting team in Baton Rouge will help you create a more solid foundation for your dental practice and help you along in your financial journey.

Organization is key. It is important to make sure that you always have systems in place. This will ensure that no details are missed and that everyone has a protocol to follow. Disorganization can quickly lead to unhappy customers, and ultimately, the downfall of a business. Efficient organization can also help bring opportunities for improvement to your attention.

Dream big.  Your dental practice will only be as successful as you envision it to be. Set clear goals with deadlines to use as a ruler for your success. Goals will help with financial decisions that present themselves. By setting goals with clear expectations, you will be able to assess how small decisions can have a true impact on your practice in the future. It will help you define a clear path toward your financial freedom.

Always have a plan. Without both short-term and long-term financial plans in place, you will be setting yourself up to fail. How will new earnings be allocated; how much will go toward savings? Are you budgeting for new purchases? Where will money come from if business gets slow?  If you don’t already have the answers to these questions, this is a great place to start. Planning for the unexpected helps to ensure that your dental practice will survive surprise expenses.

Make wise financial decisions. When starting a dental practice, it is inevitable that you will acquire some strategic debt. The key to success in the business will be an analysis of your return on investment. Don’t make big purchases without a thorough analysis of the value that it will bring to your practice.

If you need help creating a plan or making a financial decision, our office is available to help. Our goal is to put you on the path toward financial freedom. We want to help take some of the financial stress away so that you can focus on your community, patients, and business growth. Contact our dental accounting firm in Baton Rouge, LA today for a business consultation.

Marketing is at the heart of most business growth, but it is only the beginning. Even the best outreach efforts won’t advance your dental practice unless you can convert new leads into active patients. 

There are many reasons outside of your control that might stop someone from scheduling an appointment; however, make sure you are taking all possible measures to ensure they book with you and follow through.

Here are four ways recommended by our dental accounting team in Baton Rouge to help your team more effectively sell the value of your service to potential new patients:

Be available and responsive: As a dental professional, you know what it’s like to be busy. Your patients have busy lives of their own, so it’s important that your team is available to take calls as they come in and that you strive to offer flexible appointment times to accommodate the workweek.

Offer a friendly and welcoming environment: As you well know, some people suffer from dental anxiety. Work to overcome this discomfort quickly by communicating in a warm, affirming and caring attitude with your marketing, over the phone, and in person.

Make sure your team greets patients by their name and gets to know them. Ask patients during each step of a procedure how they are feeling. Offer sedation dentistry if you do not already. 

Don’t hard-sell a service: While you are expected to tout the benefits of the treatments you offer, patients are often turned off by pushy approaches, especially for elective procedures. Take the time to get to know each patient’s needs, treatment goals, and budget. Make them feel valued and understood, and you will increase the likelihood of treatment plan acceptance.

Master the art of the follow-up: Repetition is one of the easiest techniques for cementing something into memory. If a potential new patient reaches out to your office, be sure to follow up if you don’t hear from them again. You never know the reason they didn’t call back; taking that extra step can offer a second chance to make a connection and help your practice stand out in their mind.Many dentists struggle to think about their practice as a business. It is likely that you chose dentistry because of a desire to serve and heal and did not think about sales and bookkeeping. Our dental CPA firm in 70808 understands this so we offer ideas on tax savings, practice growth, and how to boost new patient numbers.

Contact our dental accounting firm in Baton Rouge and see what kind of difference we can make for you!

Healthcare is a serious business fraught with stress and experts are now touting the value of levity in breaking the tension found in the workplace. Books and courses about injecting humor into business are springing up, including a Stanford Business School course for executives called, “Humor: Serious Business.”  

Scientific studies have shown that joking and laughter relieve tension, boost the immune system, and relax the muscles. Laughing can increase memory, energy and creativity, as well as elevate mood. It can knit teams together and create a psychological safe haven.

While the addition of humor to the workplace does not remove deadlines or reduce performance expectations, it can help create a more enjoyable work life. Additionally, laughing can increase memory, energy, creativity, and elevate the mood.

Any office can benefit from these effects, so why not consider adding some lighthearted moments to your team’s day?

Here are a few suggestions from our dental accounting team in 70808 to help inject humor into your workdays. 

• Try sharing a tasteful, work-appropriate joke with your team to start the morning huddle and invite them to bring their own. 
• Post a board in a shared space and challenge everyone to bring a funny quote, image, or comic strip to hang. 
• Put on a silly shirt day once a month, decorate the office for a holiday, and allow holiday dress-ups during Halloween or holidays like Valentine’s Day. 
• Take funny photos or videos of you and your team and share them on social media. 

Keep your humor on-brand and non-offensive to all. 

If using outright humor doesn’t feel right to you, think about its cousin, levity. This is simply an elevation of mood that feels calming and light. Finding moments to share a laugh can invigorate the culture of your office.

There will always be pressure to attract new patients, increase productivity, and handle emergencies as they arise. Consider adding fun into your daily routing when the time is right. It should put everyone at ease and make the serious work of dentistry more enjoyable for both your team members and patients alike.

Far from making your practice look frivolous, experts say humor inspires confidence and loyalty. If you can make your patients smile, they will remember how you made them feel and will be more likely to stay with you.

A happy team leads to a successful practice. Let our accounting team help you along the way with guidance, insight, and our custom-tailored financial services. Contact our dental accounting firm in Baton Rouge, LA today to see what we can do for you!

Dental CPA Baton Rouge

Whether you manage your practice’s human resources or oversee a practice manager, you are responsible as a business owner for ensuring your policies are appropriate, legal, and fair. Few practice owners are trained in HR, but some level of knowledge is important for the viability of your practice.

Here are a few commonly asked questions regarding aspects of human resources for dental practice owners.

What questions should I avoid during interviews?

There are a few basic, even common questions that are never appropriate for an interview setting. Some of these include:

• What is your marital status?
• Do you have children?
• What is the origin of your (unusual) name? 

While such questions seem like natural ice-breakers, they are illegal. They can lead to the sharing of information about protected class status such as disability, family status, ethnic or religious heritage, sexual orientation, and others.

Even if their answers would have no bearing on your decision, these questions can leave you open to a complaint if the position is not offered. You should always keep questions business-related.

What should I do if an employee refuses to sign a disciplinary action form?

If this happens, bring a witness into the room, and note the refusal to sign. Have the witness sign confirmation that the disciplinary action form was provided to the employee. Remind the employee that refusal to sign does not negate the disciplinary action and further infractions will lead to more serious consequences.

We use software to track employee hours and the program has a function to automatically deduct meal times so employees do not need to manually clock in and out. Should we use this function?

Before you decide to use an automatic system of this type, consider the time saved by not manually entering hours. Then compare it to the time lost by entering corrections if a team member misses lunch, returns early, or runs late.

If your office rarely deviates from schedule, this might be beneficial. However, if you find that you are making corrections more than once or twice a week, this function could cost more time than it saves.

Understanding the nuances of human resources is an important part of building a strong practice. As bookkeepers, tax preparers, and valuable advisors to dental practices, we can also help you create a profitable operation. Contact our dental accounting firm in Baton Rouge, LA today for a free initial consultation. 

Baton Rouge LA Dental Accountant

Have you defined goals for your practice? Planning and achieving milestones provides a sense of personal satisfaction, inspiration to others, and often, greater profitability. Whether you want to double your patient flow, open a second office, or become a key opinion leader (KOL), your goals can be attainable if you create a strategy and work towards them systematically.

Here are seven strategies for goal-setting:

Define your objectives: If you only have a big-picture idea of what your goal looks like and a fuzzy vision of how to achieve it, stop and reassess. Start with the “why,” and progress to the “how.”

Sketch or write it out, measure it, and break it down into steps. Ambitious plans are only successful if you create a detailed map to reach them.

Take it one step at a time: It can be easy to focus on all the effort required to reach a goal and quickly become overwhelmed. Break it down into milestones that are weekly, quarterly, and even yearly. Creating these incremental steps allows you to celebrate minor achievements and pivot quickly if a plan is not working.

Create visual reminders: Set up a vision board or a private Pinterest page for visual inspiration. A Kanban-type board or thermometer poster can help you measure progress.

Choose what works best for you and your type of goal. The more tangible you make your vision, the more inspired you will be to turn it into reality.

Talk about it: Talk to your personal advisors, friends, loved ones and, if appropriate, your team about your goals. It will keep you accountable and allow others to share your inspiration.

Map out benchmarks: Define the steps needed to achieve your dream, such as creating a new marketing plan, adding an additional team member, or a setting out on a real estate hunt. Work your plan by breaking the large steps into smaller ones. 

Don’t let setbacks defeat you: Remember the old saying, “Quitters never win and winners never quit?” The road to reaching dreams can be bumpy; expect setbacks and roll with them. Don’t allow yourself to feel discouraged or defeated. 

Show yourself kindness: Don’t work to the point of burnout. Take breaks and be as gracious to yourself as you would to a friend who is on a mission to achieve a goal.  

Through gradual and measurable goal-setting, you will likely gain the clarity needed to reach your objective. Our dental accounting team can help you create a roadmap based on our many years of experience and put the financial pieces into perspective.


Contact our dental accounting firm in Baton Rouge, LA today to make an appointment for a free consultation and set your goals in motion!

Dental hygiene appointments are a major revenue driver for most dental practices. They are responsible for about one-third of total production numbers for most practices. Making the most of these appointments can help to improve profitability.

A recent study shows that there is room for improvement. Just 17 percent of dentists say most of their active patients keep hygiene appointments every six months, and at least one in ten appointments are no-shows.

The department can train to increase case acceptance and promote elective services. In fact, hygiene numbers could increase as much as five times among current, active patients with some diligent planning.

How Much Does a Hygiene Department Contribute to a Dental Practice? 

Numbers vary, but one industry benchmark suggests that each hygienist should produce around three times their wages, or about 33 to 35 percent of the practice total. If you want to improve your margin, your department could benefit from systemization.

Start with a hard look at the numbers. Each month, analyze the hygiene department’s finances. Look at the collection to production ratio, no-shows, and the time spent with each patient. Studying these numbers will help to identify ways to maximize the department’s productivity. 

It can be a challenge to keep prophylaxis appointments moving while giving each patient maximum attention. The average time spent on scaling – 20 to 30 minutes – can present an optimal time to educate patients on oral health, focus on case acceptance, and discuss elective procedures.

Make sure your team educates patients on the importance of dental hygiene exams and the consequences of skipping them. Some patients view these appointments as mere teeth cleanings; they likely don’t have a grasp on all of the benefits of cleanings and examinations. 

Emphasize the need for regular oral cancer screenings as well: how one person dies every hour of an oral cancer and how simple, painless exams can detect a problem early enough to treat it successfully.  

Improve Case Acceptance and No-Shows

After analyzing your hygiene department, scrutinize and revamp your appointment confirmation system. Some practices set up their hygienists to schedule next appointments chairside or escort patients to the front desk.

Another way to decrease no-shows is by sending multiple reminders through a variety of mediums such as phone calls, texts, emails, and physical postcards. Some practices call or text a day or two before the appointment. 

While some of your patients might balk at multiple messages, they are less likely to ignore them. Make sure patients understand that a missed appointment robs another patient of an opportunity to receive care and treatment.  

When you boost hygiene production, you are likely to improve your bottom line. If you’d like to gain greater financial insight into your practice’s profitability, contact our dental CPA firm in Baton Rouge, LA today.

The days seem to fly by in a dental practice, barely leaving time for you to check in with your team. Do you really know how they are feeling about work? Dental practices, like any healthcare organization, can be stressful and busy environments, but as a leader, you need to ensure patients receive positive, professional care. 

Team morale is vital to patient satisfaction and retention – and it makes good financial sense to invest in. According to a recent Gallup poll, there are roughly 22 million actively disengaged employees costing the economy up to $350 billion dollars a year in lost productivity. Key factors cited in the report included illness, absenteeism, and attitude. 

When you are working inside a person’s mouth – a most intimate act – you can imagine how quickly they will pick up on a poor attitude.

Servant Leadership

Morale can be improved through a concept known as servant leadership. It is centered around getting to know each team member on a personal level, recognizing their contributions, and thus creating a feeling of pride within the team. A harmonious work environment flows from the top and engenders trust in the organization.

In 1970, the late pundit Robert K. Greenleaf coined the phrase servant leadership saying, “the great leader is seen as servant first, and that simple fact is the key to his greatness.”

Get to Know Your Team

Learn what motivates each team member and plan rewards accordingly. Some might enjoy a photo and thank-you post on social media, others a private, hand-written note, and almost everyone would enjoy a paid day off. Think about what makes sense for your team and budget. Your efforts, no matter how small, will serve to energize your employees and make them feel good about serving patients.  

Recognize Contributions

Group recognition is also important. Plan a catered employee luncheon or hand out gift certificates. Create an employee recognition week and include it in your patient newsletter. 

Practice self-awareness

Check in with your own state of mind each day and be mindful of spreading sour vibes. Hold yourself accountable for following through on promises; handle conflicts quickly; adopt an open-door policy that makes your team feel comfortable. 

Meet

Holding morning huddles and team meetings keeps everyone on the same page and fosters easy communication. It also makes you aware of potential job satisfaction roadblocks, such as an overwhelming caseload or uneven work distribution.   

Pitch in

Finally, employees always appreciate a leader who rolls up their sleeves and helps when the going gets tough. 

The trust, appreciation, and support you give your team can make a tremendous difference in office harmony, patient experience, and your bottom line. To ensure a thriving practice, make morale a priority.

If you’d like to learn more about creating a harmonious work environment, get in touch with our dental accounting team in Baton Rouge, LA today! 

The prospect of an IRS audit can be a daunting experience, especially now that the government is expecting greater levels of accountability. An effective way to beat the stress associated with that dreaded envelope in the mail is to be proactive. While a dental accountant can help to buffer you against an audit, there are a few steps you can take to be proactive.

Document Everything

Get in the habit of keeping up with your tax records year-round to be better prepared if you are targeted. Staying organized is critical. Use whatever personal filing system works for you so you always know where your files and documents are located. Be sure to make both a digital and paper trail for redundancy.

Learn How Audits Work

If you are unaware of what an audit entails, take time to learn about the process. Knowing what questions an IRS examiner might ask or what documents they will want to see goes a long way toward being prepared. A dental accountant can also explain the process and arm you with the knowledge you’ll need to feel confident.

Gather All Necessary Information

Before the audit takes place, ensure you have gathered all documentation that you will need to make available to the auditor. If you believe something is missing, be proactive and contact they vendor for the missing records. When you have all your documents in one place, lay out the information and label it for the auditor. This will help to make the process more efficient.

Beware of Red Flags

If you are a practice owner, you will need to be scrupulous in reporting income down to the penny. Be aware of red flags such as travel, entertainment, and vehicle expenses. Ensure you are substantiating all deductions so that they align with your reported income. 

Hire a Dental Accountant

While the tax laws are always changing, our dental accounting firm keeps up with the latest updates. We understand the nuances of deductions in your field and can answer questions in a way that DIY tax software can’t. 

Get a Pre-audit Compliance Report

If you have let your bookkeeping become disorganized, or you’re feeling overwhelmed, get on track with a thorough examination of your financial data. Our experienced dental CPA team will help you establish a system and provide the documentation if you are ever faced with an IRS audit.

For more information on audits, or additional accounting advice, contact our dental accounting office today.