Case study / Published P&L comparison
Same collections. Different take-home.
Two general practices can produce similar collections and arrive at very different margins. DSO CFO's published comparison looks past the top line to the ordinary expense and collection lines that explain the difference.
Illustrative published comparison. Not a client result, forecast, or promise of savings.
The figures describe the educational comparison only. They are not a verified client outcome.
The challenge
Collections are a useful starting point, but they do not explain how much a practice keeps. The published comparison asks what ordinary expense and collection lines can reveal about the distance between similar top lines.
The comparison / Five connected lines
A category-by-category view makes useful questions visible without treating any one percentage as a verdict.
Start with what the practice keeps
The published example compares two practices collecting around $2 million each. Their owner take-home differs by $320,000. The point is not that every practice can recover that amount; it is that collections alone cannot explain profitability.
When an owner looks only at production, a quiet change in overhead can go unnoticed. Reading the same categories every month makes that change visible while there is still time to investigate it.
Five lines worth reading together
The comparison focuses on dental supplies, hygiene payroll, front-office payroll, rent and facility costs, and the collection rate. A higher supply percentage might reflect purchasing or inventory practices, or a legitimate change in clinical mix. Hygiene payroll needs to be read alongside schedule utilization and production. A collection-rate gap can make revenue already produced disappear from the bank account.
No single benchmark settles the question. Each line needs a consistent definition, a comparison appropriate to the practice, and an explanation from the people who run it.
Make the monthly review useful
Pull a trailing twelve-month view, express each relevant line as a percentage of collections, and look at the dollar difference when a category moves. Ask why before deciding what to change. The useful habit is not cutting every expense; it is noticing where the economics drift and making a deliberate decision.
- Read collections and owner take-home separately.
- Compare overhead categories using the same definitions each month.
- Investigate a gap before treating it as waste.