As a dentist, your primary focus should be on keeping your patient healthy and their smiles glowing. You shouldn't have to spend your valuable time tracking invoices and keeping your books up to date. Not only is bookkeeping a time-consuming task, but it takes you away from the essential duties that you spend years in school training for.
A simple way to make sure that your books get the attention they need is to outsource this task to a professional bookkeeping firm. This ensures that your financial data is being dealt with professionally by experts who have the experience in this area that you or others at your clinic may be lacking.
Some of the most important reasons that you should consider outsourcing your bookkeeping include:
1. Gaining back precious time
Bookkeeping is a time-consuming activity, and it can take up a lot of your time if you don't have a dedicated resource working on it.
By outsourcing your bookkeeping, you won't have to spend your time managing your books. You will be able to focus more of your energy on your practice and be able to make better decisions for your clinic.
2. Lowering your clinic’s costs
When you outsource your bookkeeping, you can save a significant amount of money for your dental practice. You won't have to hire an in-house bookkeeper and, therefore, won't have to pay additional costs for payroll deductions, CPP, EI, vacation time, and more.
There are a multitude of financial benefits that go along with outsourcing your clinic's bookkeeping, such as having someone personally take care of your finances without having to pay for training, vacation time, and other benefits.
3. Keeping your books current
When you outsource your bookkeeping, your outsourced bookkeepers will ensure that your books are kept up to date throughout the year effectively and accurately. Outsourced bookkeeping firms handle tasks such as:
- Entering invoices and expenses
- Daily cash sales reconciliation
- Paying vendors
- Bank and credit card reconciliations
- Generating financial statements
- Assisting you with setting up your chart of accounts
- Accounts receivable collections
- Payroll and other accounting tasks
An outsourced bookkeeping firm can also take care of revenue recognition and ensure your revenue is recorded accurately. Plus, when tax season rolls around, your books will be up to date, making it easy for your accountant to identify tax deductions for your business.
4. Visibility on cash flow
Outsourcing to an experienced bookkeeping team will provide you with visibility on your cash flow and your clinic's profitability. They will be able to create monthly financial reports which include your balance sheets, cash flow statements, profit and loss statements, as well as AR aging reports to help you manage your collections.
Cash flow visibility is important if your clinic requires capital to purchase new equipment or if you need to reduce your costs in anticipation of a period of restricted cash flow. They can also help you keep track of your expenses to know where your cash is going and identify areas where you may be overspending.
An outsourced bookkeeping firm will help you keep track of insurance billing, keep your AR up to date, and allow you to see just how much is owed to you by insurance companies.
They can help you create custom reports that will track the profitability of each new and recurring patient and measure the overall growth of your practice. And, if you have more than one practice location, an outsourced bookkeeping firm can help track the performance of each individual practice, allowing you to compare their performance.
5. Scaling alongside your growing business
As your dental practice grows and you begin to expand your patient base, you will have to deal with an increase of invoices and insurance balances that will need to be followed upon.
While these tasks are highly time-consuming, they may not require the help of a full-time employee. When you choose to outsource, you get the advantage of working with a team of professionals that can handle your extra workload. They can grow with you as your business grows and even take on the bookkeeping work of new locations as you open them.
6. It will allow you to leverage on technology efficiency
Most outsourced bookkeeping firms utilize cloud-based accounting software and other cloud-based tools like QuickBooks Online, Dext Prepare, and Plooto These can help you streamline your bookkeeping processes and keep your source documents stored safely in the cloud. An outsourced bookkeeping team will be able to stay on top of the latest advancements in technology, allowing your business to be as efficient as possible.
There is a lot that goes into managing a dental practice. You need to focus on acquiring new patients, delivering excellent service, and managing insurance billing to name just a few crucial tasks. You are good at what you do, and so are outsourced bookkeeping firms. They specialize in bookkeeping and other back-office accounting services.
If you are looking to save time and money on your bookkeeping, outsourcing may be the solution you are looking for. Enkel has a staff of trained bookkeeping professionals that can help you manage your dental practice’s financial data and keep your books current. Contact us today to find out exactly how we can help you grow.
How We Select and Evaluate Our Recommended Software
We thoroughly research and test the apps we include in our regular workflow for Client bookkeeping services. After deciding on criteria for evaluating the software and then researching the app itself, we tested the app, noting its strengths and weaknesses. We then work with the app for at least a few weeks before deciding whether to recommend it to our readers. We use the software as it was designed for its intended tasks. For a detailed walk-through of how we select and evaluate software, please see the details of our process.
