Revamping your financials is as easy as … Kiera shows off her savvy financial skills by sharing what it takes to know what's being spent in your practice. Her spreadsheet tips will answer such questions as: What can be cut? How can you make sure your overhead is in check? What do you need to produce? And much more.

Want a sample spreadsheet to get started? Email [email protected].

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Transcript:

Kiera Dent (00:00)

Hello, Dental A Team listeners, this is Kiera and I hope you're just having an amazing day. Like a great, great, great, incredible day. ⁓ just, today's topic is one that makes me excited and it's so dry and boring, ⁓ but I love it. And I'm like, that's probably a buzzkill for the podcast, but you know me, one of my core values is fun. And Dana, shout out to Dana, DanyDane over there.

⁓ She gave me one of the best compliments. We do a thing on Wednesdays called core value shout out in our company. And I will tell you if you do not have this in your company, I would strongly advise you do this. What we do is every single Wednesday, our company goes and our whole team says that this is our favorite. You guys, we have gone from a very small team to a much larger team and we still do this. So just know small teams, big teams, it is doable and it is very

relevant and very essential. And I think it just goes so well. I am okay to take a little bit longer on this morning huddle because of how good it is. so core value shout out is where we just randomly will pick somebody and then it's popcorn after that. So they'll choose the next person. So for example, we would start and I would say, okay, Shelbi starting today and everybody chooses somebody on the team and they highlight them for a core value and it has to be a core value. It has to be something specific. And so Dana gave me one of the greatest compliments.

She said, Kiera, she said she wanted to give me the core value of fun, because fun is really one of our core values. And she said, I want to give it to you for fun, because she said a lot of times topics that are so hard ⁓ or things that people wouldn't necessarily find fun. She said, you just know how to sprinkle the fun and the confetti and the glitter and make things that are hard or something that teens wouldn't want to do or doctors wouldn't want to do.

you make them really fun. And honestly, that has stuck with me. It is a few days later since she gave me that compliment and I'm still remembering it. So not only is core value shout out day amazing, it also helps you just enjoy and to have like, to be happier. ⁓ It also infuses core values into your company. And I'm excited and grateful that I'm able to bring fun things to the podcast, a dry topic. I hope I've teed this up enough to where you're excited about it.

But this is, think, the discipline side of business of owning a dental practice that you need to do. And this is really, think, for office managers or billers and doctors. And this is something that I think will give you so much confidence. it came actually from our doctor mastermind. We have ⁓ a private doctor only mastermind that we run every single month. It's a virtual one. And then we do an in-person one ⁓ that's more for doctor and leadership teams. But our monthly one, call it Think Tank, and it's on the first Tuesday of every month. And a doctor was saying, she's like,

I just don't know where to cut. I said, send me your PNL and tips like, and she's going to want your credit card statement and she's going to want all your stuff. And while yes, I am obsessive on this. have helped family members. I've helped offices. I've helped myself. something that I will like toot my own horn on it. I actually think I'm very talented with money, with saving, with figuring out solutions and helping people understand where you can cut. This podcast also came about because this morning on my, ⁓ Shelbi Britt and I were meeting and we were literally going through.

our finances to see where could we maybe squeeze the tube of toothpaste a little bit more, where could we maybe change a few things. And I think that that's just so relevant and so helpful. And so this is something I do in my day in day out life. It's something that I think for you to go from chaos and lack of financial clarity to confidence is something that I really want to just bring to the table today on the podcast. If you're new to Dental A team, welcome. We are obsessed about helping you have your best life and ⁓ doing it in a fun, easy way through dentistry. And so

helping you with our yes model. So you as a person getting your life, your vision, all of that in place, then moving into earnings. So ⁓ financially, that's the piece today. And then using those financial pieces. So your analytics, your PNL, your overhead to also help us figure out what systems and team development need to go into place to make sure you have this thriving practice. Because honestly, I believe that being successful, being a successful dental practice does not have to be hard and it can actually be easy. So that's what we're here for today. ⁓ With that.

So today it's going to be like, how do you actually like figure out your costs? So I did this a long time ago and then I like met a lot of really smart financial people. I'm not a financial advisor. I will throw that out there. So just make sure you talk to them and you have your, ⁓ like you chat with them of what's best for your state, but I will teach you how I do it. This is annoying. It's a little cumbersome, but people love to hear like, how do you actually do this? I'm always like, how do people get like jacked? Like how do they work out? Like.

me like what time do you work out like what do you do for your nutrition and just so I understand the full landscape and then I'm going to pick and choose of what's going to work well for me that I'll actually implement so hopefully that will be effective for you today as well.

So this is what we do. I have a spreadsheet that I have for monthly costs. We do this with all of our clients too. So if you're like, this feels too hard, don't worry, join the Dental A Team. We'll help you get it put together. So we have a monthly cost. And what I do is on the monthly costs, and this is probably my most visited spreadsheet of my entire company. And I'm super excited because we're bringing in another team member who does financial.

Forecasting and has a whole background in finance. So my method might get revamped to 2.0 and there's always another layer. But what I have is I have on our monthly costs, I have all the salaries and all of the pay. Now for offices, I do include doctor pay. Again, I'm not a CPA and I do believe that doctors should be paid. So I put in either your W-2 salary and or your doctor compensation of 30%. Now I do lose numbers. So our consultants are paid very similar to how doctors are paid.

⁓ And so you can get a general idea. So mine are general ideas. It's not my highest month. It's not my lowest month. It's the average is what I've selected to do for these costs. So again, this spreadsheet will not be absolutely perfect, but I think it's a really great tool to figure out what can I cut? How can I make sure my overheads in check? What do I need to produce? How do I basically figure out my BAM, my bare ACE minimum in a company? And so that's what we're gonna be looking at. So with that, I first list all the salaries and...

I want everything in there. And then what I have is a current. So I'm gonna have a current and then I'm also going to have like a future. So for example, if you're planning to hire somebody, but they're not hired yet, that's something that you're going to wanna know, what is my cost now? And what is going to be the future cost? Because those two things are actually different numbers. And so for me, it's really helpful so that I can look at you guys honestly.

When I started this, had like three team members and now we have tons of team members on there and outsource people and virtual assistants. And ⁓ the list just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. I can go back and I can look at things that we've done before. And so mine's on Google Sheets. And again, we've built one of these and I'm even happy to share, reach out, [email protected]. But this is something, so I go through all the salaries. And then for me, ⁓ if you do health insurance or you do a health stipend or whatever it is, you add that in.

as well, but then what I do, and again, talk to your CPA, see what your payroll tax are. For me, I just estimate 10%. I always like to air higher. So you will notice in all of my projections and everything I do, I'm going to always air higher than it actually is rather than lower. And so just looking at that, just so you know, that's how I do. So my CPA told me 10%, we have business in four different states. I think we're actually up to five now.

So I estimate high, no matter what state they're in, I just do a 10%. So I'll do my total salaries of the month, an estimated 10 % payroll. And then I've got that in there, my total payroll. Then we have our health stipends or health insurance, our 401k costs in there, how much it costs me per user, what the 4 % is. I actually go grab people's salaries and their bonuses, put it in there. So I have a pretty good idea. Then what I do is I check every single month to see based what I have here, is that close?

to what I'm actually paying or is it not? I know some of you might be like, well, here, I just get it from my CPA, I get a P &L. I agree, but this is a good checks and balance between my CPA and myself. And also when I'm trying to project and forecast, can I add people in? How much is this gonna have? Where can I cut? If I can see it all line itemed out, it's actually for me at least much easier for me to see what are all my costs and where can I squeeze the tube of toothpaste to get a little bit more ⁓ toothpaste out of that tube or a little more juice out of the lemon.

So that's what I have. And then what I have down below is like outsource. So if you've got VAs or you've got ⁓ different people that are contractors or things like that, I have that in there and that one EBS and flows mostly that hangs in my marketing department. That's where I have a lot of those. And then also VAs and EAs that'll be in there that are virtual assistants that are through other companies. So they're not running on my payroll, but they are down there. Like I have some consultants on there. I've got some coaches on there that will be in that section for me. But those again are not up in that payroll section because I'm not paying that.

payroll tax on them and I'm also not 401k on them, but that helps me see how much am I paying in outsourced resources to see should I cut that, should I keep that, how much do I have on the top, is my payroll heavy. You also can break this down by department. So you can see how much am I paying in my hygiene department, are they offsetting, how much am I paying my doctor department, my front office department, all those different departments. If you want to get even more granular, you can. And then below that, I have all of the office expenses and this is something really great.

This year Britt she ⁓ 2.0'd us and she put in their end of year expenses because there's a lot of things that I just pay at the end of the year that are annual subscriptions that will save money on but the reality is I should probably be saving that money throughout the year, right? Because every single month there would be an expense allocated if I didn't pay it annually. So we should be adding that in so we're saving for that. We're preparing for that for the end of the year. We have different things in there. So like all of our subscriptions that we have you might have Netflix, you might have Audible, you might have

Canva for marketing, ⁓ ChatGPT if you're paying for those subscriptions, anything. And I'm constantly updating this like as you hear ChatGPT and how many do we have for that? ⁓ We use our project management software is on there. I also know that every single month I have a budget allotted for employee gifts and anniversaries. And so we have an allotment of how much we spend. I do double check this, but I try to break it down. Also I have in there my merchant fees and how much my merchant fees are on average.

⁓ And I literally list everything out. So whether it's personal, because like Audible and my phone, I do have those on there. Those are personal things for me that do run through the business, but there's still business expenses that will need to be on there. ⁓ And then we've got our bookkeeping and our accounting or CPA, our lawyers, all of that in there. If you have vehicles that your CPA said is okay for you to run through, all of that, your rent, your mortgage, your supplies, your internet, all of that in there.

to where at the bottom of this list, you can get a complete grand total for the month. And what's really awesome about that, you can actually break it apart so you can have doctors where they're not in there. This then tells you basically your BAM, your bear ace minimum. And then what we can do from there is we can figure out what you need to produce to be able to hit. So hopefully all that was like not too much. just rattle, I'm like literally looking at my spreadsheet as I'm telling you this, all of that. Then below that, we're gonna wanna also add in debt services because debt services are also going to hit your cashflow side of it.

So when you have these two tools together, then you can figure out what's bam, my bare ace minimum, what's my overhead and then what can I cut and then what do I need to produce? Then we can figure out what we need to produce with block schedules. There's like a whole other zone, but back to the client's question. She said, I don't even know what to cut. So today me and our leadership team, we were going through this and we literally looked to see, okay, what's on our office expenses? And I know this sounds so dumb and so like trite.

but I think it's the discipline of knowing how to do this because you better believe when I'm looking at my monthly expenses, which are outlandish and they're very high. When I look at this, saving 40 bucks a month is not like, it's truly a literal spit in the bucket. But when I think about it, it's $40 here, it's $20 there. It's just like your credit card statement at the end of the month. I'm always shocked at how much is on there and it's $20 on Amazon here, $30 over here.

$20 there and all those $20, $30 purchases add up to multiple thousands of dollars every single month. So when we look at this, I look at every single office expense and I'm like, okay, is Adobe something that we need? And this was actually a catch that we had. I was like, we're paying $65 a month for Adobe. Do we still need the entire suite? The answer is no, we don't. We only need it for a small thing. And then we started thinking like, softwares are evolving. So we're like, does G Suite ⁓ actually cover that? Or...

does another one of our subscriptions cover it? Because so many times our subscriptions that we're paying are like duplicates of something else. G Suite has expanded and I'm like, do we still need to use boomerang? I use boomerang all the time. I love boomerang so much, but I'm like, has G Suite evolved to where they have something comparable to it that we could cut the boomerang is 120 bucks a month for us. And Shelbi was like, wait, not all of our team members, like our marketing team does not use boomerang. They're not doing client facing emails. They rarely are in their inbox. They're in Slack all the time.

she's like, what if we reduce the number of people on boomerang that would actually cut our costs down. So again, it's this like fine tuning revolving through it looking, do we need this? Could we reduce this? Do we need to, are all the people that were still on there, do we still need to pay for all those people? Could we change it to this? Are we still gonna be here for that? And you go through and you literally ask, is this a want, a need, or is there a better way that we could spend our money on this? And again, I know it sounds so dumb. Like this, this is not fun.

This is not something that I'm excited to share with you on a podcast, but I'm so excited because the discipline of doing this, the doctor, the reason it came up is because she wants to sign up for AI, ⁓ Pearl or Overjet. Back and forth, we talked about it at length of which one's better. This is why I love our Dr. Mastermind. And it's about $130 a month. And she just like, I'm so sick of these subscriptions. And I'm like, well, go get rid of Netflix or go get rid of one of these things or don't have all the beverages in the

in the refrigerator, maybe just choose one of them. Like there's so many things like, but this is where you look at your list because you have your entire list in front of you. And my office expenses right now, and this is where I look at my credit card. I look at every single thing on there. Right now we have 39 different things that we pay for of monthly subscriptions or annual subscriptions, different things. It's got our insurance policies on there. And then what I can do is I can come in and assess and say, okay, of all these high expenses, like if I need to cut expenses very quickly,

I could look to see, all right, my highest hitters are XYZ. This one's $500, this one's $1,000. Do I still need these? Are we still using them? Is there a cheaper competitor that I could switch to? Where am I at? And all these things. What I love about this is it helps you just look to see where your money's going because at the bottom it has a grand total. And then what's nice is I then can look to see, is this grand total what my CPA is telling me I'm spending every single month? Do they line up?

And if not, where's the discrepancy and where is it? I also can look at future things. if I'm going to be increasing or I'm going to be adding team members or we're going to be looking to add say another subscription or another piece, what is that going to change my monthly amount? And am I okay on my production and collection side to be able to afford it? So many people are like, I talked to my CPA to see if I can afford it. And I want to just say that yes, it's great to have a CPA there. It's also better to know instead of being like a parent child.

if you can spend it. I want my CPA to give me my books, my reconciliation. I want them to talk to me about my tax strategy, but I don't want them to be the ones telling me, can I afford something or can I not? I wanna go to them and say, I know I can afford this. This is what I think. Do you think it's a good idea? Then I'm counseling with them rather than being told. And this goes for all of my executive board. I want to know as much as I possibly can. So that way when I show up, like even financial advisors, even my...

My lawyers, like I do a lot of research before I go into those because I don't want to just blindly follow. I want to actively participate. So we're making the best decisions. I believe they're all in the best interest. I don't believe my CPA telling me to do something or not to do something is the end all be all. I feel like we are great at counseling together. They give me their opinion. I know the numbers. They know the numbers. We know where the business is going. And then my job is to make the best decision for the business and for myself.

So this is where I just really obsessed because right now I'm looking and I'm like, wow, what I'm currently paying based on bringing in some new hires, we're gonna do a $30,000 increase. And I look at that I wonder, is that wise? Is that what I wanna do? Is that what we as a business wanna do? Is that smart for the business? Or is it something like, then I get to sit here and I get to innovate and we get to think of like, what other ideas could we do? That's why I went down the list, because I wanna hire some more people. It's a little premature for these hires.

So I was like, okay, let's go back to the list. Let's look at the list. Like where could I like cut some costs to see, could I free up any cash in other areas or do we need to make different decisions? Or is it like, I need to put a pause on hiring that person for a little while until the business gets to X amount and then we can bring on those different hires. So when you look at this, that's how I do it. I use this spreadsheet. I'm not kidding. I I hold, I can tell you exactly because what's great on Google Sheets is they can literally tell you all the different versions. Okay.

So let's just go back to, I'm going to go, this is embarrassing. I'm going to go to June. Okay, so I'll just go back a few months for you guys. I logged into this spreadsheet of the monthly costs. June 5th, June 10th, June 16th, June 19th, June 24th, June 24th, again, June 25th, July 2nd, multiple times, July 7th, July 8th, July 9th, July 10th, 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 24.

The only reason it stopped there is because I went out of town August 3rd, August 6th, August 7th. As you can see, I'm in this spreadsheet almost daily. If not every other day. That's insane. I mean, I can go back to April. I can go back to March, February, January, December, December. I'm in here all the time. November, October of last year. I'm just going down. October. I was in there 10 because that's when I started to do projections. So you better believe I was in there a lot more during that time. October. There's about 20 entries September. So when I tell you this is a tool,

that I have found that works so insanely well. Clients love it. Cause then we're like, our overhead's high. We can go over to our costs and say, why is it high? What is causing this? I'm looking at people's loans that they have and I'm like, do you really use the Seric? Do we need to continue to use this? Are we using all these different like plan Mecca and all these other loans that we have on the practice? Are we still using that? And if so, that's fine. But let's at least know where our money's going.

so then we can make better decisions of do we wanna continue that? And so hopefully, like I said, it's not a fun topic. Like it is, this one, if you can't tell, the passion, the fun, like it's really fun for me to look to say like, okay, where is it? This is where I decided it was time for us to close our headquarters down in Reno. We used to have one, but I was looking for how can I cut costs? Where can I, because for me, I'd rather not spend it on a physical location. I'd rather buy, like spend that money on different softwares that are gonna make us more efficient, being able to hire better employees.

Like I'd rather reallocate those dollars to something that's gonna benefit the company more. And so for you, just feel like this is such a great tool to help you truly know where your money's going, know where you can cut. And like I said, I do this for personal. I'm like, all right, give me all your costs. Give me your credit card. We're gonna look at every single thing. And then like, what could we do differently? I mean, my cell phone, let alone, I used to pay almost a hundred bucks a month for my cell phone. It's now, hold please. I'll tell you the exact amount. Cause I can tell you it's literally right here.

Um, it is a telephone right here, $35 a month. And I used to pay 95, but that was once again, like Verizon got a competitor. have a sister company called visible. I could even get it down to 20, but I didn't want to like drop that far. But we went from 90 to 35 and there was no change or disruption. I watched it for several years. I had people do it, then made the change. Is there a better company out there for X, Y, or Z? Is there a better processing company? And I know again, this seems annoying.

But annually around September, October is when I start to do projections and I start to look at everything. Cause I'm looking at costs. What could I cut? But monthly, daily, I'm looking to see who can I hire? Where can I do things? Change it, adjust it. And what's amazing is when doctors and OMS have this tool available, now you're like, can we afford to hire this person? You can answer with confidence rather than hoping and praying you're going to be able to make it. Just like what I used to do. was like, let's just hope and pray we're going to hire them and hope it works out.

now I can have way more confident decisions. And like, think as a business owner, being able to have confident, like one of the strongest things you need to do as a business owner is be able to make decisions. And I think the second piece to that is being able to make more confident decisions, utilizing tools like this one that I'm sharing with you. So if you want help, reach out, [email protected]. Like I said, I love to put this together for clients. I love to give them the tools and resources to where they can actually be here and know. And also I say if you're here,

Like go get your credit card, list everything out that you're spending money on. Look at your P &L, see if it matches up, see if you can figure it out. And this was something that's been evolved over the course of honestly, probably eight years. I started it when I was really new into the business. I made this myself because I'm like, I don't even know where my money's going. How am I supposed to be able to make decisions? And I could not figure out why my overhead was so high. Now I can tell you exactly this is what we're spending every month. This is why we're spending it. This is what we want to do. This is where we're going. These are the numbers that we need to do.

It just gives you so much confidence, clarity. And so that's why I just love to share it and to help you. ⁓ I believe, like we said in the yes model, you as a person need to know where your vision is. Then we need to have your earnings and your profit where it needs to be. And then we need to figure out the systems and team development to support all of those pieces. And that's what we love. It's what I'm obsessed with. So reach out, ⁓ even if you're like, I don't know. I don't know if I'm a good fit. Let's just have a call. It's literally no commitment, no stress.

just clarity and confidence to get you the momentum that you deserve. So reach out [email protected]. Go fall in love with numbers and spreadsheets. And as always, thanks for listening. I'll catch you next time on the Dental A Team Podcast.