I’m not the most organized person in the world. I’ve never balanced my checkbook. But there is one thing I’ve learned to do every single day I’m in the office. I take less than five minutes to look at a couple of reports that we can refer to as “day sheets.”
I can’t stress enough how important this step is. It gives you the pulse of your practice on that day and gives you a chance to correct minor boo-boos before they become major headaches. I use Dentrix (Henry Schein), so I’m going to use names of their reports. Certainly the other major practice management software players have similar reports.
Before we look at the reports, let’s think about what information we want to know about our practice after a day of business:
(1) How much money did we make (a.k.a. collection)? (2) How much dentistry was billed (a.k.a. production)? (3) What providers did what?
With that in mind, here are the two reports that give me this information:
Receipts Day Sheet This tells me the what the office collected in total, how much was collected on behalf of each provider, and what forms of payment were used (e.g. insurance check, cash, credit, etc).
Day Sheet (Chronological) This tells me what the office produced in total and what each provider produced. In addition, there’s complete detail about every coded procedure that was done, who did it, how much it produced for the practice, and whether or not a patient paid anything towards it. We’ll also see payments that finally came in for procedures that were done in the past.
That’s it. Two reports and we get the pulse of our practice. Have your receptionist/office manager print this for you each day as they hand you the checks, cash, and credit card receipts. It should be like clockwork.
Here’s an example of the kind of thing I’m looking for. Just yesterday, I saw on the Day Sheet (Chronological) that a hygienist, who wasn’t even working that day, had a large production number. I quickly scanned the rest of the sheet and saw that a crown I had done was incorrectly attributed to her. Not a big deal since my office will get paid just the same, but I wouldn’t have been able to include this when I look to pay myself later on.
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