Essential Accounting Tips for Dental and Healthcare Clinic Owners
Looking for accounting tips for dental or healthcare clinics? Here’s a few pointers to help your practice thrive.
Over 80% of business failures today are attributable to insufficient cash flow management. Dental and healthcare clinics are no exception to the rule when it comes to this cash flow mismanagement consequence.
No matter how well run your business is in other areas, simply failing to manage your cash flow properly can be dangerous to a business’s long-term success. However, the more consistently thorough and effective your bookkeeping process is, the more effectively you’ll be able to manage your cash flow. Following are a few essential tips for keeping
Brush up on bookkeeping terminology
Even without being an expert, you can still benefit massively from becoming well-studied in the relevant financial terminologies and their implications for your clinic. For example, some make the mistake of treating the terms “cash flow” and “profit” as interchangeable, when in reality, only the latter reflects earnings after operating expenses. Cash flow refers to all money that revolves in and out of the business, which is why it is both potentially challenging to track and so essential to keep track of.
Every minute spent familiarizing yourself with the ins and outs of accounting terms and their distinctions will be well worth it.
Incorporating your practice
Dental and healthcare practices are high-liability businesses. Consider incorporating your business, as it limits the liability of your shareholders so that they are not personally responsible for liabilities in case of a lawsuit.
Strategic equipment purchases
Modern dental and healthcare clinic equipment relies on the latest technology, so much of it will be take a considerable investment. Consider buying big-ticket items before your year-end. This has the effect of increasing tax-deductible expenses by way of the increased capital cost allowance (depreciation).
Invest in professional support
When it comes to accounting and bookkeeping, automated software support should be balanced out by the human intuition involved in routine financial reviews. While you could review the numbers yourself, the most rational thing to do would be to commission an accountant’s eyes for the task. With their expertise, professional accountants will be able to analyze potential discrepancies and red flags in your financial reports that may have otherwise been overlooked.
Proactive detection is the most powerful piece of value that a trustworthy accountant can bring to the table. The earlier that subtle signs of a problem are identified and resolved, the healthier your clinic will be and the longer it will live on to continue supporting the health of your patients.
Accounting can quickly become a heavy burden without the best-advised practices in play; however, so long as you keep the accounting tips for dental and healthcare clinics in mind, you can always remain in the most powerful position to keep your numbers perfectly accurate.
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