Taking the stress out of the hourly rate

Many of you will have had an eventful summer in practice; many families, many exam appointments and many closed books. It’s always a tough month or two for many dental businesses and dentists.

Owners and associates are left feeling the stress as they know what they should be invoicing an hour and if they don’t know exactly they always have a rough idea at least!

So how do you take the stress out of the hourly rate?

For me it is about turning the hourly rate into a daily target. Therefore if you are working 7 clinical hours you need to invoice £2100 a day on a £300 an hour rate.

This is also a much better way for the front desk team to be looking at the diary when booking appointments. They will see that there is no way you can achieve that target if they then book a family of 5 in a space, before or after a large number of existing exams that are already booked.

Nurses always become annoyed with dentists who start a filling during an exam appointment. I will defend the dentists where I can (do not get me wrong I can’t stand unplanned treatment but there are always two sides!). When the team understand that the dentist has not met their hourly rate once that day and they have to do the filling at 4pm for financial reasons the team often see the other side.

You can really take the stress out of the hourly rate by taking control of your diaries! By doing so you will be able to hit your daily target as the diary is not seen as a free for all.

It is not acceptable to have a day booked full of exams just because the hygienist is in; leaving the business and clinician out of pocket.

The same applies as mentioned for school holidays. If you want to learn more about diary zoning check out this article here. This will show you how you can then achieve 70-80% of your daily target by lunchtime! Even better.

By looking at a daily target you will feel much less stressed about what you are invoicing per hour and instead feel more relaxed and therefore be more productive each day.

A little tip – we always wrote the amount due to be invoiced on the top of the dentists’ day list – it was a pleasure for them to see as soon as they arrived and that it was definitely worth getting out of bed that morning!

Laura