The Dental Business Guide
The Dental Business Guide
From Spreadsheets To Xero: Building A Modern Dental Finance Stack
We share a practical finance playbook for dental clinics, from moving to cloud accounting to adopting accruals, daily bookkeeping, and metrics that drive better decisions. We also preview an AI-driven dashboard that unites PMS, accounting, and marketing data.
• choosing Xero as the bookkeeping core and retiring spreadsheets
• using HubDoc or similar for receipt capture and digital invoice flow
• configuring bank feeds and batch payments to save hours
• selecting a cloud PMS and reducing data silos
• adopting accruals instead of cash accounting for clarity
• tracking hourly rate, new patients, cancellations and NHS run rates
• forecasting tax and cash flow each month
• setting roles for manager, bookkeeper, accountant and fractional CFO
• keeping separate Xero files per practice for group operators
• migrating data cleanly and establishing approvals at scale
If anyone's interested, just please fill in this form, and then one of the team or myself will reach out to you in coming weeks and days to discuss. Drop me an email: urin at samera.co.uk
Welcome and good evening, everybody. Um, my name's Arun, and today I'm gonna be talking things about accounting and finance and the technology. Um now, for those of you who haven't attended any of these webinars before, uh, I'll talk for about 30 minutes. Um, but I'm gonna change up today. Um I'm gonna encourage people to actually ask questions um about this. I do have some um content to talk to you about, and um, and really it's all about questions that people have asked me over the years. Um, but I've been an accountant for dentists, dental practices, dental groups, not just me but my whole team for over 23 years. So so we know what works, we know what doesn't work, we know what practices need to do. Um, and we also have our own dental clinics, my wife's clinics, the Neem Tree Dental Practices. So everything we've done has always been tried and tested in those clinics. So it's so important to um ally yourself with someone who knows what they're doing and understands the dental business if you're looking for an accountant. But so, what I want to do today is I'll be talking um accounting stuff, questions that people have asked me. But please feel free to do ask to ask me questions as we go along. Um just bear with me a second, let me see if it's all right. Um there, okay. So if anyone has questions, please do ask. But I will start off with some of the questions I've had over the years. So, first question is what software do I actually need to get started and what can weigh it? So, if you're running a practice, it could be a single practice, it could be a multi-site group, it could be anything. The first thing in the accounting sense of the word is you need to have a bookkeeping package in place. Now, many years ago, people might have used Excel to do their accounts for their practices. Honestly, you need to have moved away from that a long time ago. And if you haven't, that needs to be done first first things. And before we even do that, if if you don't aren't doing your accounts on a week by week, date by day, month-by-month basis, you need to get this sorted out. So, what packages are we looking at? So, on the accounting side of things, you really want to go cloud, okay? You can only really go cloud now, okay? And the two big names you may have heard of are Zero, which is X ERO, and QuickBooks. Um, there's other software like Zoho, there's other ones like Free Agent, various things. But honestly, um, if I was gonna recommend, and the only one we really truly recommend is Xero to our clients. Um, it's a platform that's scalable, it's very good, it's efficient, it's secure. Um, and I would strongly suggest that. So that's gonna be your bookkeeping system. So that's what every month the information needs to go into there, or every day everything information needs to go into there, such as your invoices you receive, uh the income that you've made, all the invoices relating to labs or materials or electrics or whatever, it's all going in there. Now, you might be thinking, well, and I'll come on to how you do that and what you do with that in a moment, okay, and who would do that, but that's the software, okay, for accounting. Now, you will also in your clinics have some type of practice management system. Um, now historically, there's always been things like software of excellence, and that's been around, I believe, under for 36 years. Can you believe it? So a long time, but that's not cloud-based. So if you're looking to go to cloud-based, the obvious ones are things like um dentally, which is still owned by Henry Schein. Um, and again, being cloud-based is hugely, hugely um valuable and useful. But going back to the accounting side, you have zero, but then you also want to think about how do I capture that information in. So in a month to month or day in a month, you might get a hundred invoices, you might get loads of invoices from various sources. Um, you might get them an email, you might get them on paper, you might get them in the post, um, or you might get them through some other format. But you really want what you really want to do is get them into one format, and that format will be your digital format. And why? Because that will save you time. So that digital format, such as a PDF or an image of that um invoice, wants to be going into some type of um kind of receipt capture kind of software. So you may have heard of software called Dex. Um, there's auto entry. The one that Xero uses is HubDoc, because that's part of the Xero package, um Xero ecosystem. Um, so what would happen? Let's say I have a bill coming in from dental directory. That cut in, and so I look at from my own clinics point of view, that bill comes electronically via email into HubDoc directly. Okay, in HubDoc, that information is extracted from HubDoc, and from HubDoc, that information extracted and goes into zero into the relevant fields. Now, someone is doing this, someone's mock make someone's making sure that the data being transferred is correct, but that's what happens. So it's so important that you set up the right systems to do this. Now, um at the end of the month, then so remember the data is the invoice to data's come into zero. Someone's entered that information into the zero system, and that would be a bookkeeper. Now, um, I would strongly suggest you have a bookkeeper do that, not um your nurse or manager or someone, someone who knows how to use the software. So often we've dealt with practices where it's just been badly put into, and if it's garbage in, it's garbage out. So have the right person to do that. If you need a help with finding bookkeepers or someone to do it, we can do that. Um, but more importantly, once that data's gone into zero, at the end of the month, you might need to pay your bills. Now, historically, people might have written checks, checks aren't really there anymore. Um, but you can now make um payments in one back pay one batch payments. So again, you might have an integration with zero, and you might just tick all the boxes. You might you can see so remember you can in zero, you can actually see the actual invoice that is scanned in. You can see a copy of it check. Oh, that's fine. That person that um bill's correct. I'm gonna tick it, I'm gonna pay, I'm gonna tick this, I'm gonna pay, I'm gonna tick this, I'm gonna pay. Well, I'm not gonna pay that one yet. So then you can do one payment, one batch payment in one go, and it just clears your clear comes out in one go. It logs straight into your bank account, makes the payment, and it's gone. Now, how much time does that save? Honestly, it saves absolutely hours. Okay, absolutely hours. So the the key things are having the uh the zero in place, the key things is having something like HubDoc in place, and then the key thing is having some type of payment processor in place. Now, we use something called Cresco C C R E Z C O, which links into zero, and um that really helps. Now, in a in uh in addition, we have um other kind of software which is um on the kind of accounts. If you wanted to have an accounts payable approval source software, so if you're running a group, you're gonna have lots of invoices coming from various places. You might run multiple zeros, so you want to then think about how do I approve the invoices. There must be a process of approval. So, again, and this an AP system can be put into place. There's something called like approval max, there's light cheer, there's various options that can go into place. Um, so that's kind of very basics of the bookkeeping side of things. Then, of course, there's uh payroll. Um, again, many different types of payroll out there, systems out there. Um, zero is an option, Bright Pay is the one that we always use for our clients, and then of course, um there's lots of reporting that you can do, reporting tools you can do. You can use SIFT Analytics, Fathom, Spotlight, you name it, there's so many things that can be used. So I won't go into that much detail now. So that's my first question. Okay, answered. Um, the next question I've always had is okay, uh I'll come back to that in a minute. How do I make my PMS talk to my accounting system? So, so PMS package management system talks. Well, the trouble is at the moment, people most a lot of clinics in the UK are mainly using software of excellence. So that is a kind of standalone product, and it does it's not very helpful to be able to extract data out of it. Something cloud-based, such as dently, makes things much easier because you can extract data out. But what we've found in the dental market is that data just sits in different silos. Okay, you've got something sitting in the practice management system, you've got something, some data sitting in zero, and then then never the two will meet. So, what we are building actually is a kind of a tool where all this data gets pulled together, and then you can start seeing that data and having a proper data dashboard to interpret your business performance. We're in the process of building that that will be AI driven as well. And I'll I'll send I'll share some details towards the end of this um webinar on that. Now, right, uh now one of the things I didn't mention, and which I should mention, is when you're using something like zero, your bank information is coming, is talking to it all the time. As long as you set it up correctly, the information coming from your banks is going into zero all the time. So the the the the debits and the credits from the bank statements are going in there. So that's really helpful because that speeds up the process. You don't have to write type it in, you don't have to get a PDF, you don't have to get a CSV file to upload, it's just coming in automatically through. And again, it's all done in through through a secure route. Um now, one of the things that I've always picked up over the years is how many practices, and this is down to poor bookkeeping, to be honest with you, are doing um cash accounting as opposed to accruals-based accounting. Now you might be thinking, well, what does that mean? What's cash accounting? What they're doing is that you have all the information that's going on in that's in the bank statement, that's just being recorded as a cost against materials or a cost against um labs or cost against electricity, and the income coming in is saying, Oh, that's the income for the month of October, for instance, and you add them all up. Now, that's really not the ideal way to do accounting. If you're trying to understand the business, you really need to be doing based on accruals-based accounting. So, what does that mean? It's based on the invoices you receive. So, when you receive an invoice from um, let's say an electric electricity invoice from, say, National Power, you process that invoice. You don't process the payment, you process the invoice at each month. And at the end of the month, we reconcile the bank to the payment that's been made. That's kind of how you should be doing proper accounting. Now, I've seen practices that have done cash accounting, a large group's even doing cash accounting, and really it gives meaningless data. And with that meaningless data, you have no idea how your business is doing because you're not really accounting with the invoices. You want to get proper invoice information in. And then similarly, on the top line with the revenue, again, take the information from your uh practice management system, the the income generated or the from the payment allocation report, typically from Dentley or um Software of Excellence. These are this matters because when you want to then analyze this data and start making better decisions, that's what you need to do. So if you are doing cash accounting, taking information from the bank statements and doing the accounting that way, as opposed to taking it from the invoice, change it. Okay, honestly, change it. That's so so so important. Right, what else have I got to I've been asked? Um laptop's playing. Okay, sorry. Here we go. Okay. So what are the numbers? So let's assuming you're doing this on a month-to-month basis. You're getting the bookkeeping done with accruals-based accounting done every month. You'll get so that the end of the month, you can start seeing how your performance is. Um, you can see the revenues, you can see all the costs, and you can see if you're making money or if you're losing money. But what are the things you should be actually looking at on a month-by-by-month basis, basically? Well, key some of the key metrics I would look at. Um, I'll come back to that question in a minute. Um the the one of the some of the key things you should be looking at is um your hourly rate. Let's say you're running an associate led practice, you can determine the hours that they're working, the the revenue they're generating, and you can start tracking and comparing which associate is making more money or which associate is making less money. And then you start thinking, if you're the business owner, do I push more work to a particular associate because they're generating a higher income? Potentially, okay. Another metric you want to be looking from your practice management system is to see how many new patients have I got this month, um, and does that correlate with the money you're spending on marketing? Okay, again, so if you had all this data in one dashboard, you can then see, okay, how does that work? How does it not work? Um, cash in bank, I think, is important. I think another key point what we have in our practices is that we don't let people not pay us, we get people to pay us as the work's been done. We even get payment in advance. So our debtors are very, very low. On the odd occasion, some of mine walked out from the practice and forgot to pay, but really it's very, very low. So, um, so we don't offer any payment terms, we don't give them invoices in the post, we don't do anything like that. We expect people to pay us there and then or once the treatment's been done. So, and if I do have any debtors, I we may need to make sure we're chasing them up and figuring out what the problem is. Um what else is there? So, let me just go back to this. Please could you explain why invoice before paying should be the right way? So, I'm not sure what that means, but I'm I'm assuming you're um you're talking about the accruals-based accounting. So, accruals is a concept of a of accounting, it's one of the kind of four important um points under accounting. There's uh and that means you're match, you're matching the activity to the to the to the to the invoice that's come through. So, quite often or not, you might have see in your bank account, if you're doing cash accounting, you might make a cash payment to a supplier, but that may have been related to something three months ago. Okay, so you're not matching the the and that's another content, the matching content, you're not matching the income to the activity of on the expenses side. So it's so important to have an accruals-based um approach to doing the bookkeeping, to doing the accounting. So if you look at any other large organization or any or most large organizations, all large organizations out there will only do bookkeeping and accounting on an accruals basis. It's smaller businesses when they start doing cash accounting, but that's not very helpful and it's not very kind of useful to view to analyze or see how your business is doing. I think hopefully that maybe you've answered your question. Now, you might be thinking, right, Aaron, you're talking about all this stuff and you're not that techie. Um, how hard is this to do? Um, it's not rocket science. If you've got a techie brain and a financial brain, um you could do it, but it'll take time, okay, it'll take effort. Um, certainly from our side, we can certainly help you. We're accountants. This is all we do, pretty much. Well, one of the more one thing. My team, I have a whole team of accountants that do this, okay, for dental practices. So um it'll take a few weeks to get into it implemented and stabilize it. Um, but um, I think it's important that um you kind of have a practice manager that will review what's going on. You'll have an external team such as ourselves who'll do the bookkeeping, management accounts, payroll, that type of stuff. And then obviously the practice owner can do the sign-off when they're need needed, okay. But in terms of from a cadence point of view, you're getting those invoices coming through every day, and you want to get those books updated every day. You don't want to let them lie up for one month or two months. You want everything done on a day-to-day basis. So at the end of the month, you know how you're doing, how much money you've made, how much money you've lost. Um, and so then at the end of the month, you close the books, you may have heard that term, and and then you say at the end of the month, we've got, let's say, four or five days after the month end, you know how you've done, you've made what your performance is, and you've actually can see, okay, I've done quite well or not so well, and this is what we need to change the following month. So, what are the things that you what so you might be thinking, oh god, this is so much stuff you're throwing at me, and I probably am, okay. So sorry, but um I'll come back to that. There's another question from Jocelyn here, so I'll come back to that in a minute. But the quickest um some quick wins you might get in the next 30 days, if you are using zero but you're not using bank fees, make sure you turn the bank fees on, that will save you so much time. Implement a receipt capture system such as HubDoc, such as DEX, such as auto entry, one of those. Um, and that's the first thing. And then I suppose the other thing is to set up something like a payment system where you can make all the payments directly from Xero. Okay, you just tick the boxes, okay. Um, you don't even have to go to your log into your bank account. Through Zero, you can log into your bank account and you make all the payments, and it just goes out in one go. Honestly, when before we had that, it would take me hours to make payments, and we've got two clinics, it'll take a long time. I can get all the payments done within five minutes, okay, at max. So these things can change and and really speed up your um turnaround time and save you valuable time so you can focus on growing the business. Um, what else are they? The other questions that we've got. Can't we say come back? So, yeah, some people are saying, Well, I've got a different system, I'm not using Xero. How can you switch off or switch over? It's all very doable. Um, we have a data migration process in place where we actually look at what software you're using, and then there's a process of transferring the data at a certain cutoff date, um, and then we'll implement Xero and then we'll start doing uh uh making sure the data's clean and potentially run it parallel in one for one month with your existing software with Xero. Um, all very logical, very doable, um all very easy to do. Um let me go back to some other questions I've had as well over the years. Um okay, yeah. So in terms of the um you might someone's asked, well, does this I'm talking? Am I talking about one practice or am I talking about multiple practices? So now you might say I've got a group of four or five practices. This needs to be done for each practice. So that doesn't mean you have one zero file for all practices. No, that's absolute rubbish. You need to have a zero file, zero software subscription for each practice, and you might be thinking, well, that's gonna cost me more money. Yeah, it will cost you more money, but it'll be way more expensive if you grouped everything into one zero. Um, and then you're trying to sell one practice down the line. No one's gonna buy your practice, I can guarantee it because they can't see where the data, where the which practice is making the money, which one isn't making the money. So you need to have a separate financial accounting system for each practice in place. It will set you up so much better for the long term, and then you say in the future, I've got three practices, I want to sell one, you can just sell it very easily because the data is self-contained within one um within one kind of um bookkeeping package. Um, in addition, um what else is that we should do? Um what else is the other question? Other KPIs to measure that I've said so. KPIs that we will I mentioned the alley rate, I mentioned the the new patients we get. Um, if you're an NHS practice, look at the UDA UAA UOA run rate, looking at patient number of count cancellations per month is also a good one to track. Um that's kind of typically what we put in a monthly reporting pack, um, and I think that's what people want to see. In addition, we also always track our taxes, how much tax have we paid, um, what is our anticipated tax payment that's gonna be in the next January. Uh, so we've always got a rough idea of what the tax will be and what the cash flow situation will be. So, all of this all leads to us. If we're doing all these numbers and we're keeping track of it, we can then also then monitor our cash flow and predict, okay, what is our cash position going to be at the end of the month? So, when it comes to accounting, there's three main uh accounting um statements one is the profit and last, one's the balance sheet, one is the cash flow, and you want to be able to track your cash flow to predict what your cash flow situation is going to be in a few months down the line. Quite often or not, many people don't do that, and that's when a problem arises. So, get that factored into this whole mix of what we're talking about here. Um, who should own which processes? Okay, yeah. So, as I said, the practice manager should be in charge and getting the information to the accountants. The accountants should be taking care of the bookkeeping, the annual accounts, the monthly accounts, management accounts, the payroll. If you're a group, you might want to start thinking about um having a fractional CFO. We do offer that service where you might say you want two or three hours of one of our team per month who's a CF who can provide the CFO services. Sometimes I do it, sometimes one of my other colleagues does it. Um, but again, it's giving you insight into the practice, into the financials. Okay. Um, yeah, I think those are kind of the main points. Then I'm gonna answer there's another question that's just come down here. Is there a way to get around fraud from customer not present at payments? Let me think that through. So to get around fraud, yeah, good question. Um, if the customer's not like there, depending who the person is, um, this is more of a payment processing issue. I'm no expert in this, Jocelyne. I think we'd have to talk to your credit card provider. How do they suggest you do this? Um, one way maybe is that you provide like a strike link for people to pay um on. Um, but again, it's a verification of is the card being stolen. I'm I'm not sure exactly in that context what that means. Okay, um the other kind of questions that are there. Let me see, just bear with me a second. Okay, so yeah, if we switch so yeah, so we've talked about switching so okay, in terms of costs and pricing for this, um it'll vary. Okay, I can't give you a definitive answer, but the way we always assess clients uh for this type of service is if you've got an existing zero file, we will always in kind of investigate that and ask you to give us access to zero. We will then do our number crunching and analyze it and look at the data historically say, okay, this is what we think is good, this isn't not so good, this needs to be tied up, and then we'll come up with a price from that. So we've helped us to understand your zero file. That's what we want, that's our process. Um, in turn in terms of um where does it go? I think then also um if you've got multiple sites, there'll be multiple costs associated with this. Um, so there are many, many accountants in the in the in the UK, and some are good, some are not so good, and there are many in the dental sector. Um, some are good, some are not so good. I think things you need to be looking out for, and there are many people in the accounting sector who promote themselves as accountants who aren't accountants, who aren't even qualified accountants, so be very careful. You need to be looking for I the ideal institute is the institute of chartered accountants in England and Wales, which is um what I'm uh my firm is, I'm a fellow of that. And um there are lots of not like dentistry where you can't act as a dentist if you're not a dentist. People in accounting, lots of people call themselves accountants when they're not. So be very careful in that respect. Get the right people and the right team to support you. Um I think in terms of pricing, you'll have to look at the cost of the subscription of the software, the payroll individual individual people, the the bookkeeping cost, the monthly cost, the management accounts cost. So it does um there's lots of things that need to be done, okay? But if you're serious that now, all these points I'm right raising today is it's if you're serious about growing and developing a business, you need visibility of your numbers. If you don't have visibility of your numbers, it's meaningless. It's absolutely meaningless, okay? So you can work your system and the way we run it in our clinics. Again, my partner, my wife's meter, she's a dentist, but she doesn't work clinically anymore. She's been running associate-run clinics for the last what 10-15 years. Um, but we have access to these numbers. We see these numbers on a week-by-week basis, month-by-month basis. So we know what's working, what's not working, we can make decisions and adjust accordingly. And that's why it's so important to have this type of information um at hand and having this type of system in place to do it. Um, because if you're too busy in the dentistry, you won't have these systems, and therefore, if you're a practice owner, I'd urge you to put these systems in. And even if you haven't, yeah, and if you enjoy the dentistry, great, but still put these systems in because you at some point may want to step back to see how your performance is and um make better decisions to actually say, I'm gonna grow this, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna add another surgery, I'm gonna buy another clinic. It could be any of these things. Um, so really, really, really important in this respect. Um, then one of the other things that I alluded to, and I'll just we'll share a screenshot somewhere if I'm gonna do this again. Um I'm gonna share the screen. So I'm just trying to find the right thing. So hopefully you can see this. Okay. Um now this is our Samara.ai. Now we are um, as I said earlier, we're building um basically an AI-driven CFO service, and what you can see here is still in the process of being built by my AI development team. Um, but what we're trying to do is bring in um multiple sources of data um for this. So you could get data from Google, you can get data from your practices, from your practice management system, such as Xero, such as Dently, all of that data is coming into one pot. Um, and you want to you want to be able to then see see all that data in one place and then make decisions on it. So you could then see the data from Xero, the data from um kind of dently, the data from Google, and then from that, that dashboard will tell you, okay, this is what we're doing, this is what we're working well, this is where what's not working well, but you want it to be custom, you want it to be driven, data driven, okay. Not you don't want to have to put hand type things in or do anything like that, you want it all coming. So that's why it's so important the data going into Dently, the data going to zero, the data going to Google, the data is actually accurate and correct, it's been done properly the first time. That's why, as I said earlier, you want accruals-based accounting to be doing this. Now, if you don't have if you're not doing accruals-based accounting, that data is going to be meaningless. So it's so important to be getting that right as well. Now, if that's kind of floats your boat and you're interested in this type of thing, um, I appreciate it's not for everybody, but honestly, this is where I see it all going across accounting. Um, you can have a read of this in your own time. Um, you can definitely um find out more, you can register your interest. We are looking for a few practices to test this out on, okay. Um, and we'll certainly be in touch very soon. We can if you and the key kind of clients we want, we're looking for people who are using Xero or who want to use Xero, who are using Dentally, okay, those are the two main drivers at the moment, because again, we're getting the API integrations into that software, and then from that, we can then test it out and build it. We're doing it in our own clinics, we're testing it out, but it's always good to get other clinics to do that as well. So, if anyone's interested, just please fill in this form, um, and then one of the team or myself will reach out to you in coming weeks and days um to discuss. Okay. Um, so let's go back to this. So, on that note, um, I don't really have any much more to say. Half an hour is up. Has anyone got any further questions? I know it's uh short and sharp, 30 minutes. I try and keep it tight. I know everyone's got other responsibilities of dinner and children. And parents and dogs and all that type of thing. Um, if anyone's not got any questions, I will not I will go. Let me see. Is there any other questions? I'm not sure if there is. So thank you so much. Um, I will leave you there. But if you need me, need to discuss anything, or you're interested in some help, um, drop me an email. Uh, my email address is urin at samera.co.uk, and we can go from there. Thanks very much. Have a nice evening. Bye bye.