How to start a dental bookkeeping checklist to follow in your practice today

You’re making important decisions in your dental practice with incorrect information if your dental bookkeeping isn’t done correctly. Any successful entrepreneur will tell you to concentrate on the core business and leave the supporting function to the professionals. With secured cloud-based accounting solutions; we will enable you to have access to analytics on cash flow, profit margins, dental bookkeeping expenses and much more from anywhere in the world at any time. Once your accounts are reconciled and your practice’s bookkeeping is up to date, you are able to generate financial reports and clarify precisely how well your dental practice is doing. Reconciliations are important because they can help your dental practice identify overdraft transactions and fraudulent financial activity.

Nav uses the Vantage 3.0 credit score to determine which credit offers are recommended which may differ from the credit score used by lenders and service providers. However, credit score alone does not guarantee or imply approval for any credit card, financing, or service offer. You may also want to consider how the software solution you’re considering will impact the patient experience. Billing errors or slow billing will negatively impact how your customers view your practice.

Accountant’s Review

So, what if you’re in a position where you can’t do your true job well and manage dental practice financials accurately? It may be a good idea to talk with your dentist about outsourcing those duties to someone else. Monthly conference to review financial statements that include the Balance Sheet, Income Statement (P&L), and the Statement of Cash Flow. Personal FICO credit scores and other credit scores are used to represent the creditworthiness of a person and may be one indicator to the credit or financing type you are eligible for.

There is a lot to consider when keeping your dental practice bookkeeping correctly up-to-date. This checklist breaks it down with important steps you can you follow and build on as you work through your own bookkeeping each month and year. We have a different checklist for the end of the year when closing the books for the CPA to take over.

+ Make Better Business Decisions

Drilldown Solution, we provide dental practices with accurate and effective bookkeeping services to help you make real-time decisions that accelerate growth. QuickBooks accounting software is affordable and fast, the perfect combination for a dental practice. Another step that is often missed by inexperienced dental bookkeepers would be to reconcile payroll.

This can include help with creating a budget, setting financial goals, and identifying areas where the dental practice can improve its financial performance. This type of guidance can be invaluable for dentists who want to grow and succeed in their field. Working with a dental specialized CPA and accounting firm can also help dentists save time and hassle. These firms can handle all of the financial tasks for the dental practice, freeing up the dentist to focus on providing dental care to their patients. This can be especially helpful for dentists who are not trained in accounting and finance, or who simply do not have the time or inclination to handle these tasks on their own.

Learn how to calculate and benchmark your dental practice overhead.

Record the whole loan payment to the balance sheet loan account, then make a journal entry moving the interest portion of the payment to your interest expense account. Besides that, you can include other accounts such as dentist compensation, interest expense, depreciation expense, and owner perks. Let’s know how you can customize QuickBooks charts of accounts for dentists. It will also include the details of requirements in an expanded profit and loss statement to examine the practice well. A newer option for QuickBooks is the ability to download the transactions right from the bank or credit-card company. Once the transaction has been coded it will be memorized for future transaction download.

Bookkeeping for dental practices typically involves recording transactions in a system of accounts, such as a general ledger or accounting software . This is a separate system from the office’s patient management system . While the patient management system records production and collections, the QuickBooks Online accounting system is synced with bank, credit card and loan accounts.

BRING YOUR OWN CPA

Whether it is tax, invoices, bank account management, or anything else, QuickBooks will help you to track all the financial movements with a single software. While discussing the QuickBooks chart of accounts for dentists, the recommended expense accounts are lab fees, dental supplies, payroll , marketing /advertising, rent, and general expenses. We specialize in providing tax preparation, financial planning, and practice-management services to dental practices throughout California and other states. As part of our QuickBooks accounting services we review your bookkeeping on a regular interval to ensure your accounts are accurate. Anytime you call with a question or need advice for an important business decision, which you are always welcome to do, we can review your QuickBooks file to make more informed decisions. The cost of our dental accounting and bookkeeping service varies by business, but it starts at $299 per month and goes up to $399 per month.

• Whether you manually enter transactions or import them from the bank account, you will need to enter/accept transactions in QuickBooks to officially record them.
• Your practice consultant is your business coach and helps you identify and implement business improvement initiatives.
• We compile and categorize all of your accounting journal entires (deposits and payments/debits and credits).
• Therefore, at the top of our checklist, we list items that we need to remember before we start anything.
• I called almost in desperation one January 1st and spoke to Sona, explained my problem and soon I signed reluctantly because I had not been able to get my problem solved for many years.

To do this, hover over the diamond to the left of the account name and click to drag the account to its desired location. As mentioned earlier, make sure you look at what software integrates with other software, including your practice management system, and how it will impact or automate your workflow. Every bookkeeper on our team is required to have a 4 year accounting degree, and minimum of 3 years CPA firm experience. They do my bookkeeping for all locations and I have never been more at ease with how they handle everything. One of my favorite parts is the how they show my overhead averages compared to the national averages for all dentists, and the real life averages of the other dentists working with Percentology. I have been in practice since 1998 and have never found a person I can trust with my books until I found Sona and her team.