Having the guidance and support of a dental accountant can be critical to the success of a practice, but what happens when you don’t get timely responses to your questions, doubts or concerns?
While dental practice accounting is essential for dentists and practice owners, a lack of timely communication can have devastating consequences for a business:
Cashflow decisions
Rising and falling every week, cashflow varies hugely for dentists and practice owners. From insurance deposit delays, and upfront dental supply purchases, to payroll every month, it’s essential that your accountant keeps you updated with what money is available today, not last quarter.
A swift and regular response to cashflow concerns also helps to highlight errors, confirm payments, and generally keep daily operations operating in a smoother manner.
Payroll, tax planning and dental supplies
Having daily guidance from your accountant in relation to payroll can reduce errors, prevent rushed fees and corrections, and ultimately, keep payroll running accurately and predictably.
Without a clear and prompt response to tax planning queries, you start to lose control of tax outcomes, and could end up incurring penalties.
When you need a question answered about bulk discounts or vendor credits for instance, a slow response could cause you to miss out on opportunities to save money, and make unwise purchasing decisions.
The difference between acknowledgement and resolution
While a dental accountant might acknowledge an email or telephone message from you promptly, if the issue remains unresolved, you’re not able to make informed decisions and protect your cashflow. Acknowledgement is vital, not least because it confirms that your message has been received, but even more important is resolution. What you need from your accountant, is acknowledgement, closely followed by resolution.
When should you expect your accountant to respond?
A response on the same day is necessary for questions or issues surrounding vendor payments, payroll or daily deposits. Questions that require a more detailed analysis should ideally be acknowledged within a 24-hour window, with a date included for a final resolution.
Simple tips for enhancing communication with your dental accountant:
By making just a few small changes to the way in which you communicate with your accountant, you can achieve clearer collaboration for you and your entire team:
- Ensure every question has context
Be specific about date range, patient initials, or vendor as applicable, along with the deadline you desire.
- Attach supporting documents
Whether it be screenshots, relevant reports, or bank activity, attach whatever your accountant might need to give you the answers you’re looking for.
- Request a timeline
A polite but clear request for both an acknowledgement and an anticipated date of resolution, helps to keep both parties in alignment.
- For time-sensitive items, use one channel
For attachments and audit trails, the client portal or email generally works best. Texts can be used to urgently alert your accountant or dentist bookkeeper to a problem that needs to be resolved, or question that needs answering, but should always be followed up with an email summarising the request.
- Schedule brief but regular check-ins
All it takes is one short call of 15 minutes or less once a month (or as often as agreed between the two parties), to help prevent small issues becoming bigger ones.
Communicating with your specialist dental accountant should never feel like an uphill battle, and if their response time isn’t in sync with your expectations, discussing this openly with them is the best solution for a healthy, more profitable practice.