Dental Practice Profitability Calculator

Most disagreement about overhead is really disagreement about categories. Lab bills are frequently posted to supplies. Practice software and phones land in occupancy as easily as in technology. Workers’ compensation is sometimes filed with business insurance even though it is part of what the team costs.

None of that changes total operating expenses, so your overhead percentage is unaffected. It does change the breakdown, which is the part you use to decide what to look at next. Pick a convention and keep it the same every month.

Merchant and credit-card processing fees belong in professional and administrative expenses here. Recurring equipment leases, software subscriptions, service agreements and maintenance belong in equipment and technology; equipment bought outright does not.

Two identical practices can report very different profit simply because one owner pays themselves a modest salary and takes distributions while the other runs a large payroll figure through the practice. Neither is wrong, but including it makes overhead impossible to compare.

This calculator leaves owner and partner compensation and owner distributions out of operating expenses entirely, and shows them separately if you enter them. The operating remainder is therefore a figure before the owner is paid.

Associate and specialist compensation is different: those providers are paid to deliver care the practice bills for, so their pay is an operating expense here. It is still provider compensation, never Team Labor Cost.

Debt principal and interest are both excluded from operating expenses in this calculator, and equipment purchased outright is excluded as a capital item along with depreciation and amortization. What is left is a clean view of the cost of operating the practice this month.

Because of that, this result will not match a tax return or a year-end financial statement, where interest is an expense and depreciation appears. Enter monthly debt service in the optional field to see what remained after those payments, shown below the operating result rather than inside it.

One caution: a lease that is really a financed purchase can appear in either place. Whichever you choose, do not enter it twice.

This page is a public estimate of a single month. It is deliberately separate from the CORAL Team Bonus System, which performs its own monthly calculation from the practice’s own numbers and applies its own profitability requirement before any bonus pool is treated as distributable. Nothing calculated here feeds that system.

If a bonus pool is what you are working on, the dental bonus calculator estimates that instead, and the guide to dental practice bonus systems compares the common models.

For the definitions behind these figures — which expenses belong in dental practice overhead, and what is deliberately excluded — read the overhead guide.

For a wider view of the systems behind the numbers, the free Reef Health diagnostic covers scheduling, collections, team and patient flow.

Overhead and Operating Remainder are two of the numbers a practice watches each month. Collection rate, production per day and team labor share answer different questions and require their own inputs.

This calculator works from money received. What has been earned but not yet paid sits on your aging report instead, and our dental accounts receivable guide explains how to read it.

Marketing is one of the expense lines above. What that spend produced per new patient, and what those patients returned, is calculated by our dental new patient value and acquisition cost calculator.

Earlier in the sequence, the share of presented treatment patients agree to is a separate figure again: our dental case acceptance calculator works it out by dollar value and by case count.