Success Story: Disciplined profit analysis helps growing dental practice navigate market fluctuations

Village Family Dental: “In healthcare, both regulatory compliance and the pressure to maintain or improve each unit of profitability are intensifying, so cost containment is paramount. Sage Intacct helps us constantly watch our profits per case, per hour, and chair, and implement creative billing approaches to achieve a 90% higher overall revenue per unit and a 7% increase in gross margins.”

Virginia Jones, Ph.D. Chief Operating Officer,

Company overview

Village Family Dental is a mid-sized dental practice in North Carolina. The group specializes in treating the entire family, including pediatric dentistry, prosthodontics, and oral surgery, as well as administering oral sedation for dentistry patients across 11 locations and three ambulatory surgery centers.

Results with Sage Intacct

• 930% faster departmental reporting.
• 70% shorter monthly close cycle.
• 25% efficiency improvement.
• $350,000 savings through avoided headcount.
• Visibility of location and provider performance to maintain gross margin targets.

Untangling complexity by moving financials to the cloud

Village Family Dental is a multispecialty dental practice in North Carolina. It offers a variety of general and pediatric dental services as well as specialized services like oral surgeries and administering sedation for patients. Since starting out as a single small office in 1985, the healthcare provider has expanded to 11
locations and three ambulatory surgery centers.

In order to better manage the many financial workflows associated with these multi-entity operations, the group decided to replace its legacy on-premise accounting software with a cloud-based solution that could more effectively handle growing transaction volumes, automate manual data entry, and help the organization go paperless. By making the switch to Sage Intacct, Village Family Dental gained a more flexible financial management solution, which eased expense allocations, consolidated reporting, purchasing approvals, and fixed assets tracking—all while delivering more accurate information.

With these powerful capabilities, they achieved visibility into location and provider performance, helping leadership maintain precise gross margin targets. In addition, Village Family Dental’s finance team enjoys 930% faster departmental reporting, a 70% shorter monthly close cycle, and 25% greater productivity.

Scaling finance efficiently amid 500% growth

Virginia Jones, the chief operating officer at Village Family Dental, recalls what life was like before Sage Intacct, noting “Seven years ago, our controller was spending all of her time on manual journal entries and double-entering information from our payroll and patient management software. Since adopting Sage Intacct, we’ve integrated quite a few partner systems, including a Workforce Go payroll solution that transfers pay summaries by both department and by provider directly into Sage Intacct, and our Hybrent purchasing software that provides real-time pricing and shopping for office coordinators, with orders and invoices pushed seamlessly from the point of purchase into Sage Intacct,” Virginia said.

Sage Intacct offloads other tedious tasks as well, automating recurring entries, allocations, and intercompany payables and receivables, and allowing the team to import credit card expenses and reconcile cash on a daily basis, increasing their efficiency by 25%. “We especially love the system’s consolidation of entities,” shared Virginia. “Between our dental practices, our real estate companies, and our ambulatory surgery centers, I’m able to consolidate statements however I want and it’s very, very easy. I can even do departmental reporting that used to take 10 days in just 10 minutes,” Virginia said.

By capitalizing on the capabilities of Sage Intacct, the lean finance team scaled effortlessly, despite 500% headcount growth as the organization added new lines of business, new
surgery centers, and other complexities. “We were able to expand from three to 14 locations with only one addition to our finance staff, thanks to the automation and reporting we
have in Sage Intacct. This saved us over $350,000 in staffing costs,” said Virginia. “Sage Intacct and its partners also gave us the tools we needed to redefine the role of finance from a clerical, historical-focused department to a strategic, forward-thinking partner to the business,” said Virginia.

Uncovering granular profitability insights with dimensions

Now that Village Family Dental is able to allocate costs and revenues by location, individual provider, service line, or department in Sage Intacct, its leadership has new lenses
of multidimensional visibility with which to guide the organization’s future direction. Virginia uses Sage Intacct’s dimensions to drill into granular, accurate, timely data, and can instantly share reports across the organization to help internal stakeholders make better decisions.

“The system identifies which offices or service lines are making money (or not), so we can decide which lines of business to expand or reduce. Expanding on pediatrics and OR cases, and reducing certain insurance carriers has increased revenue by as much as $40,000 per month,” mentioned Virginia. “For instance, after we started offering frenectomies and sleep apnea services, it was simple to evaluate each one’s profitability and determine contributing factors.” Virginia added. “We once had a specialist who was producing very large dollars. However, when we looked at all the costs associated with him—including his fees, the number of assistants he required, and the fact that his equipment and supplies were more expensive—we discovered that he was our lowest profit provider, so we figured out ways to improve the situation and ultimately increase profitability in this area by 6%,” said Virginia.

Virginia uses a custom COO dashboard in Sage Intacct to closely monitor a wide range of organizational health indicators—such as cash balances, cash flow statements, EBITDA, burn rate, collections per month, production per month, daily net income, weekly A/P deadlines, and performance versus budget—alongside statistical metrics like total monthly cases, operating room days, surgery center caseloads, cost per case, and revenue per case. This valuable insight helps the group respond to greater scrutiny from both patients and government payers, in addition to its tightening margins as reimbursements decline and personnel costs increase.

Contact us at Akuna Solutions and explore with a Sage Intacct implementation specialist how to leverage the most modern technology available today to support your organisation’s mission. 

Photo by Quang Tri NGUYEN on Unsplash