Bookkeeping for Dental Practices
Your practice management software says you produced $180K this month. Your bank account disagrees, loudly. The gap is insurance write-offs, adjustments, and collections that haven't landed — and if your bookkeeping doesn't reconcile the two, you're running a practice on a number that isn't real. We tie production to actual money.
Production is a wish; collections pay the rent
Dentrix or Open Dental tells you what you produced. It does not tell you what you kept after insurance write-offs, contractual adjustments, and the claims still working their way through a carrier. Bookkeeping that doesn't bridge production to collected cash leaves you managing the practice on a headline number that overstates reality by a comfortable margin.
Insurance A/R is the quiet stressor. Claims age, get denied, get resubmitted, and some never come. Books that track it properly tell you how much of that outstanding production is real money versus optimistic paperwork.
What clean dental books actually tell you
Reconciled properly, the numbers get useful: real collections versus production, overhead as a percentage of collections — the number every practice-management consultant asks for and few owners can produce — and whether your supply and lab costs are drifting the way they quietly do.
If you run associates or multiple ops, clean books let you see profitability by provider and by chair, instead of one blended figure that hides who and what is actually carrying the schedule.
How Kaizen runs it
We run QuickBooks Online, Ramp for cards, and Gusto for payroll — associate and hygienist comp included — set up so the data flows in instead of getting typed at month-end. Then a documented close lands on the same date every month with the same reports, no matter who's on PTO.
We're named after kaizen, continuous improvement, which for a practice means the lab bill coded to the wrong month gets caught in the reconciliation, and overhead creep gets spotted while you can still do something about it. Quietly, every month.
What's included
- Transaction categorization tuned to labs, supplies, and dental-specific vendors
- Bank & credit-card reconciliations — every account, every month
- Production-to-collections reconciliation so the P&L reflects real money
- Insurance A/R tracking so aging claims don't masquerade as cash
- Overhead-as-a-percent-of-collections reporting, the metric consultants ask for
- Provider- and op-level profitability if you run associates
- Membership-plan revenue recognized across the plan, not on signup
- Monthly data-quality scan — uncategorized, unreconciled, imbalanced items flagged early
Pricing
Straight answers
Do you connect to my practice management software?
We reconcile production and collections from Dentrix, Open Dental, or Eaglesoft against the bank and the books, so your financials reflect real money — not just what the schedule produced.
My books are behind. How fast can you catch up?
Month 1 of the Reset is the backlog: categorization, reconciliations, and a first real close with production tied to collections. Most catch-ups land inside 30–45 days.
Can you report overhead as a percent of collections?
Yes — it's a standard part of the monthly package, along with supply and lab cost trends and provider-level profitability if you run associates.
Do I need this, or just a bookkeeper?
If you're a single-doc practice with clean books and a good CPA, a bookkeeper may be plenty — we'll tell you. If insurance A/R and overhead creep are a black box, that's exactly what we clear up.
Related
Free 20-minute books assessment
We'll show you the five things we'd fix first in your books — useful whether you hire us, hire someone, or do neither.
Talk to SalesOr call us directly: +1 786 789 0969