Bookkeeping and financials for a dental practice
Most practices know collections and payroll and very little else. That holds until you try to answer whether marketing is paying, at which point nobody can separate ad spend from software subscriptions from the little league sponsorship.
The point of clean books is one number: production per marketing dollar, by channel. Getting it takes a chart of accounts where marketing is its own set of lines, ad spend is split from management, and merchant fees, lab bills and supplies are not living in one bucket.
The other figure owners misjudge is overhead. Supplies should sit near 5% to 7% of collections, lab 8% to 12% in a restorative practice, staff 25% to 30%. A practice running lab at 18% has a fee schedule problem that no amount of marketing will fix.
Two weeks in, working means a clean profit and loss statement for last month with marketing broken out well enough to argue about.