BudgetEase Blog - Making YOU Profitable™

I recall my first experience as a bookkeeper in a dental practice. I met the dentist and of course the hygienist. It wasn’t until I began working at various dental practices that I realized how much non-dental related work the hygienist does.

For example, I have seen the hygienist responsible for receiving payments, preparing and sending past due invoices, dealing with insurance-related matters, scheduling patients, and managing accounts payable. This work is in addition to the dental work which he or she is trained to do.

Cash flow management and reducing accounts receivable aging are important factors to small business owners. Sending an invoice isn’t always enough to get paid. Sometimes your client needs a nudge in the form of a late fee to pay your invoice.

Providing a retirement program for your employees is an important benefit to attract and retain employees. We have found that simple 401(k) plans initiated by small organizations are easily funded and compound annually to provide valued employees a nest egg at retirement. What feels like small contributions each year result in meaningful retirement benefits over time.

Most dentists use proprietary software to manage their practice. As you might imagine, there are countless dental-specific programs, the most popular being Dentrix, Ace, and Dovetail. The primary focus of these programs is to manage patient care and set appointments with very minimal, if any, focus on accounting. To keep track of transactions and provide financial information, dental practices really benefit from using an accounting program like QuickBooks.

Many small business owners start out doing their own bookkeeping. As business grows, there is often little time to manage the books and the search for an internal bookkeeper begins. While QuickBooks is user-friendly, it’s important to hire a candidate that knows their way around the software.

Before the Conversion

Clean up Vendors: Take time to weed through your vendors for duplicates and update contact information. Merge like vendors and make vendors not used in several years inactive. This process is much simpler with QBD.

As unpleasant as it is, you probably have debt that you are never going to collect. This is a good time to write off bad debt and clean up your A/R Aging report. The proper way to account for bad debts is with the Allowance Method. However, many small businesses use the Direct Write-Off Method when dealing with bad debts. This method expenses bad debts at the time it is deemed uncollectible.