No matter how much you trust your team as a dental practitioner, if you don’t have any formal financial oversight, your practice’s revenue could easily be diminishing without your knowledge, due to billing errors, insurance fraud, unidentified discrepancies, mismanaged expenses, or even fraud.
Protecting your business against fraud and maintaining financial transparency are valid reasons for hiring bookkeeping services for dentists, but the advantages don’t stop there.
Here are 6 clear benefits of professional bookkeeping for dentists and dental practice owners:
- Financial recordkeeping that’s compliant with HIPAA
While patient health records are of course worth protecting, billing statements, payment data, insurance claims and other financial records, are equally as sensitive. If not handled correctly, they can expose Protected Health Information (PHI), leading to HIPAA violations for your practice, along with legal penalties, and above all else, a loss of trust from your patients.
A bookkeeper would use accounting software that’s HIPAA-compliant to protect sensitive records, set up a series of controls to limit who has access to PHI, and track and document all financial transactions with detailed audits for compliance purposes.
- Patient payments and insurance reimbursements that are streamlined
If you don’t have a system in place to track and follow claims and patient balances, your practice can start to leak revenue, making it difficult for you to manage financially.
A bookkeeper would make sure that all insurance claims are accurately submitted to reduce the risk of delays and denials, monitor reimbursements that are outstanding, and keep detailed records of deductibles, unpaid balances and co-pays.
- Cost-sharing arrangements that are smooth and tax-friendly
In the dental industry, cost-sharing arrangements aren’t uncommon, with several dentists sharing an office and expenses, while running businesses that are entirely separate. While these can work well, if not structured appropriately, they can create unintentional compliance and tax issues.
A bookkeeper with tax experience can help you avoid any unnecessary tax implications, and stay compliant with the IRS with structured agreements.
- Maximized tax deductions
With access to tax deductions that businesses in other industries don’t have, like CE courses, high-tech equipment and professional memberships among others, dentists should be maximizing these, and yet all too often, they miss out due to the wrong classification, or improper tracking of expenses in real time.
A dental bookkeeper will track all deductible expenses in real time, make sure that all costs are correctly categorized, and maintain records that are always audit-ready.
- Clarity over finances that enables scaling and growth
When financial data isn’t clear, planning an expansion, deciding when to make technology or equipment investments, or secure financing, becomes difficult. Without accurate financial insights, many of the big financial decisions that need to be made, are made in the dark instead of strategically.
With a specialist dental bookkeeper, you’ll get regular financial reports that are structured, helping you see exactly where your business stands financially.
- More time to focus on other duties
Financial management can be a burden for most busy dental practitioners, and as a result, important tasks often get overlooked that can result in hefty losses for the business as a whole.
Without recordkeeping and book-balancing to worry about, dentists and practitioners can claw back hours at a time to devote to patient care, and the growth of their practice, thanks to professional dental bookkeeping.
With all the challenges of managing a dental practice, professional bookkeeping can help dentists and office managers improve efficiency, and ultimately, help them shift their focus away from recordkeeping responsibilities, and back onto the patients and their care.