Feb 18 2025 13 mins 1
Kiera walks listeners through easy but critical accounts receivable systems to implement in your practice so you never have to face a financial crisis again.
Episode resources:
Sign up for Dental A-Team’s Virtual Summit 2025!
Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast
Schedule a Practice Assessment
Transcript
Kiera Dent (00:00.932)
Hello, Dental A Team listeners. This is Kiera and today I just wanted to ask, are you struggling with cashflow because of overdue payments or you don't know how to do your AR or billing just fills out of hand? Well, great news. Healthy AR is an incredible way for you to keep your practice profitable and successful. And today we're going to dive into it and give you some really incredible systems to help you actually keep this on top so that way you don't ever feel like you're in a financial crisis again. So hooray, hooray. I'm so excited.
I hope you're ready for it. I hope you're just having an incredible day today. I know talking AR is not always super fun, but honestly having a well-managed AR system, being able to track to follow up to figure out where the gaps are really can give you confidence. So I wanna give you guys three quick actionable tips to be able to take this and have a healthy AR. You guys know the Dental A Team's all about practical tactical, making your life easier, making you super successful and happy.
doing it with ease, having a fun time with doctors and team members. So we are able to possibly impact the world of dentistry in the greatest way possible. So let's kick it off you guys, because honestly, AR is one of the most overlooked areas. It feels taboo. feels like we don't really know. So what are we even going to do? So like, let's just dive into this and really get it there. So number one is to set up clear payment policies and make sure that we're upfront with our patient. And if you don't have this, adding it onto your treatment plans, adding it into your practice,
Don't worry, everyone has this. So it doesn't need to feel scary or daunting or my gosh, like we're changing everything on our patients. You're not, we're just being very clear upfront. And what this does is it actually makes it easier for your front office to be confident with their treatment planning, to be confident with their scheduling, because now we all know the rules of the game. We know what we're doing and we don't have to be rude about it. We don't have to be mean about it. We just need to be crystal clear so people know the rules of the game of our practice. So a couple of quick tips are.
we do require payment at the time of service. I know back in time we used to not, but this is something that we do for routine procedures. And yes, we estimate and we go in, we try to maximize everything that we have within our practice by getting insurance estimates. But the reality is sometimes we aren't gonna be able to get that correct. Insurances aren't even accurate until we bill out. And so we don't crutch on that and bill out and then collect money. We collect, we estimate the best that we can. We collect at the time of service.
Kiera Dent (02:18.604)
and then we're able to let them know if they have a balance or if they have a credit. Hopefully we're getting close. I'd prefer credits more than I'd prefer balances. I don't like to chase money, but you choose how you want to do that. And then making sure we have really good payment options like Cherry or Sunbit or some of those other ones are really great ones. We actually have some offices that have a really beautiful spreadsheet where we have all the different payment options that we can offer. I only like offering one, two or three max of payment options.
but for your practice to know all the different carriers, like I said, Cherry and Sumbit, Cherry tends to be really high right now of a great financial one, Care Credit always is the top one, but having some of those options so that way we as the practice aren't carrying the bulk of this debt, but we're able to have options for our patient can help you get that better case acceptance and also keep us out of that financial pickle. So, and then also helping our patients have a clear financial policy and I actually have a practice that worked on this and
They were saying like a couple of things like they had six steps on it. And I really loved this of one is like no future scheduling until the payment, their balance is paid. And I think that really helps because then we're not just adding to the debt and we help our patients know like we've got to get this taken care of before we're able to schedule you for more treatment. Then we expect full payment on the first day or we're able to go like two payments half and half. So sometimes for crowns we'll do 50 % today, 50 % upon crown seat.
Those are some great things. I don't go beyond two payments within the practice. Otherwise they go into third party financing. You also, if you are struggling with this for larger payments or treatment plans, so you can decide is it 2000, is it 4000, is it 10,000, you choose. But I usually do a deposit and some people will have higher deposits, but let's say it's a 2000, you can do 10 % of that. So that would be $200. I like a 10%. I think it's easy. I think it also
for a patient who wasn't expecting to do treatment, it's not as daunting for them. So giving that 10 % down payment could also help out. And then really making sure that we are staying on top of our AR, which is going to lead into the next point, making sure that our accounts aren't going past hopefully 60 days in general. I know we might have higher AR right now where they're into that 90 days, meaning we've done treatment and 90 days have passed since we've made payment. And then making sure that we have a good collection policy as well.
Kiera Dent (04:39.266)
really making sure all those pieces are there is going to help. And we communicate this to our patients. And if we'll communicate it to our patients, then they know the rules of the game. So for that, when offices start to do this, they start to have patients understand that we make payments, that we only do two payments in-house, that we are collecting at the time of service, that we are making sure that they have these financial policies written. We're not allowing more treatment to stack up on delinquent accounts. What happens is that practice actually starts to
become profitable and they start to get more cashflow. Patients start to pay their balances and it's crazy because just asking for the financial money really actually helps a ton. And it's weird because you just think, all I did was ask for the money. Well, yeah, I have a practice that I was able to add over $20,000 per month to their schedule. And they said, Kiera how are you able to do that? One, it's through some tactics, but two, it was just stopping at the front desk and collecting the money before the patient left. Like it sounds so simple, but really,
just collecting and a lot of offices are even putting credit cards on file, which can really help. So number two, so that's like step one is like, let's collect the money before it goes back. Let's make sure we're checking upon check-in to collect the balances. Let's make sure we're collecting on checkout so we're not following up with all this money. And then number two for this healthy AR is we've got to have a strong follow-up system for outstanding balances. So what I like to do is I like to run the AR report at the beginning of the month. I like to put it into a Google Sheets file.
And then I like to actually have it color coordinated of what area is this account at? Are we on statement one, statement two, statement three? Before I ever send out statements, we always, always, always call. Hey, Kiera great news, your insurance paid. The balance is left, remaining is this amount. I can do Visa or MasterCard over the phone, which do you prefer? This way I'm collecting balances instead of just sending statements. I know a lot of offices love to send statements. It feels really great. We love to.
send it out, send it through the mail, make it feel like we're really moving the needle forward. But if we would just pick up the phone and call, I even tell some offices like we're going green, we're trying to save on paper and stamps, so we're collecting this. There's also a lot of companies like Mula, I really love Mula, and you can actually text the statement to your patient, which can help. But please, let's not lose the power of calling them, because calling and collecting payment can really, really help a lot. So making sure we have this where it's automated.
Kiera Dent (06:58.168)
Patients can pay online if we don't have that, that's going to be something that they really need to do. Like I said, Mula is coming in as one of my top companies for processing right now based on their fees and also the availability to send electronic statements to have it link into the patient ledger. I think they're doing a really great job. And then making sure we're actually tracking that entire scorecard of the AR on our Google Sheets or whatever you wanna do. But I like it color coordinated and then I like the doctor and the billing representative.
To meet together at the end of every month, we see how many first statements, how many collections we made, how many 60 day, how many 90 day, and then are there any that need to go to collections or do we need to figure out what to do with that account? I am not here for an advocate of whatever is right or wrong. You get to decide what's best for your practice, but we've got to have a way to follow up on this. And insurances should be receiving statements 15 to 30 days. Following up on them more consistently can actually help us get payments quicker. So making sure we're also sending clean claims.
So everything's attached, everything's put together. So we're not getting things back because we didn't do our part, making sure everything's being submitted on the first run, I really think can help it out. And so when offices do this, what's interesting is we've been able to actually pay for all of our consulting in very quickly because we've taught the office how to go and collect the money that is already in the accounts. And so, and it's crazy because I'm like, you already did the work, let's just collect the money. And so sometimes it is on sending statements, sometimes it's calling the patients, but it's crazy how just even.
connecting in with your patients really can help them realize that like we just have this money that's outstanding, let's get it paid. So right now I would figure out, can you get with Mula, can you have an automated system to be able to send out statements and then have someone who oversees AR and they follow up on it every single week. That's something we're really gonna need to make sure it's taken care of. I like Tuesdays and Thursdays for billing days, you do it whatever you need to do. Not the full day, usually a four hour chunk is probably pretty good for.
Most practices, every practice is different, but that would be a good one. And then step three, pretty simple, is we've got to review our AR metrics and take actions. So this is what I was talking about, the doctor and the billing representative meeting together, and we've got to monitor our 30, 60, 90, and over 90 days where we're at. So the zero to 30, 60 to 90, over 90, we've got to make sure, and what I like is of all of those accounts, we're never over one month's worth of collections. And so I try really hard to get that down.
Kiera Dent (09:16.868)
Over 90 should be less than 10 % of total AR. I even like it to be chipped down to like 5 % of that. So if you know the metrics that we need to do, we've got to be collecting. And if our team knows our goal is to collect in 30 days always, we get better at insurance verification, we get better at collecting, we get better at watching our AR, we get better at all these different things, then we truly have a system that works. And then making sure that it's in there so the doctor can take a look at it so you can see how many first statements, second statements, third statements, you can even make a
little dummy codes that you attach to each patient's ledger. So at the end of the month, you can actually run a report to see how many statements really went out of first, second, third. I don't go past three. I do not want it going past three. And if you call on the first one, usually we're not getting to a second one. We're setting up options. We have payment options if necessary that are external, not internal, that really, really can help you. for me, I would, if I was a dentist, I would have my billing meeting set up. I would expect my team to get through that entire AR list within a month.
I don't care how many accounts are on there. We might have some cleanup to do, but getting through that, and I have an office where we were able to take them from about a 65 % collection ratio. It was really drastic, all the way up to 98%, but we had to go back three years to clean it up. And there's a lot of them that we weren't able to collect them because we'd waited too long, but it was a process. I think we had about 10,000 accounts we had to go through, but this team was diligent. They were dedicated. It was hard, but we were able to actually make progress.
And it was so fun for them to actually build the system and for the doctors to understand and the team to understand and they'll never get into that position again. And so really going through these three steps, like I mentioned, of clear financial policies with our patients and collecting before they go back and also when we do time of service, we have a full follow-up system of how do we have it? How do we submit our statements? Do we call for it? How do we have this? And then we review it every single month with our doctor and billing.
a team member meeting, it's really gonna help you guys stay on track and be able to get this healthy AR. So the reality is we've got to enforce this. We've got to make sure that we're following up on it, that we're expecting to be at 98 % collection and that we actually go through with this because right now is the time like you've done the work, let's collect the money. And so if this is something that you are like, gosh, like Carrie, you're just speaking my language, reach out, DM us, I'm happy to show you some AR tactics that we've done for other practices, give you some resources and tips.
Kiera Dent (11:36.32)
or head on over to our website, TheDentalATeam.com and just book a call. And I'm happy to go through it with you and give you some, some complimentary value and practice assessment to see where you're at, the great things you're doing in areas that we can help out. This is what we're obsessed with doing. And Dental A Team does this. This is what we do for our practices. This is why we have the systems. This is why we have the systems for success for you. And I'd love to help you. So when, when you're ready and if you're ready to boost and master your AR and cashflow reach out, we're ready for you. And I'd love to help you, but truly commit to
being a master of AR and having that healthy cashflow, you're doing the work, get paid for the work you do. You deserve it. You're worth it. And as always, thanks for listening. I'll catch you next time on the Dental A Team Podcast.
