#007 Finishing the Financial Dental and Hygiene Graphs
Where we finalize some financial numbers for a start-up dental practice
Last week, we created our first graph for overall production in a start-up dental practice. We discussed some of the reasons why team members, managers and principal dentists care about their production numbers.
The only decision we had to make last week was which type of money to track. We decided to track “production” on this one (as opposed to “collections”), because providers only have control over what they bill. It’s up to the admin team to make good on collecting payment. Once we get into tracking time, we are going to have a bunch more decisions to make, and I’d rather leave that until after we have settled the financial reports.
This week, we are going to:
add a graph to display goals for the restorative department,
complete the same graph as we did last week, but this time for the hygiene department,
find a way to display goals for each department, and
find a way to display individual goals for each provider in each department
We have a special opportunity this week. Since we just hit month-end, we can do all of our calculations as of July 1st, looking back over the whole month of June. This gives us a clear-cut month-over-month and year-over-year (since June has 30 days). Remember that we decided we were going to do this in rolling 30 day periods.
Before I go any further, here is the cleaned data I am using for these charts. I hope you’ll find it useful. If you can come up with more eloquent graphs than I have here, I’d love to see your results. Scroll through the tabs at the bottom of the worksheet for more data.
Before we get started, let’s talk a little bit about style. This image is from chapter 2 of The Big Book of Dashboards. I like the simple use of colour: grey with blue highlights. Today, I’m going to be working with pencil-on-paper. While I’m working, I am asking myself how I would use the blue colour to highlight the important information in my graphs.
Let’s start with the full practice graph. This is similar in style to what we developed last week. I’ve simply updated it with the month-end numbers. I would highlight the current 30 line blue, so it’s clear how we did these last 30 days. I would also consider making the $41.4k orange, to signal that we aren’t meeting goal.
One issue I had with how those numbers were displayed at the top of that last graph, was that it doesn’t give any sense of scale. Are we meeting goal or not? By how much? This next graph is one way to answer those questions. We have three bar charts representing the current 30 days (June 2023), the previous 30 days (May 2023), and last year’s 30 days (June 2022).
I’ve started to sketch out some goal lines. I like the idea of including the dotted line indicating the 40% mark on each bar. Usually, we like to see a 40%-60% split between hygiene and resto. I am not sure that I like the idea of setting three levels of goals (commit, stretch, and killing it). Melody Wilding suggests setting these three types of goals in Trust Yourself. She believes that it helps with motivation. I’m just not sure how helpful it would be when talking with a team. My concern is that it could make communication harder. How do we know which goal we are actually talking about?
After this, we have the hygiene department. I like to do the hygiene department first, because it’s the foundation of a general dental practice. At a glance, we can see here how busy the schedule was, as well as how we were doing year-over-year.
Looking at goals, we can see that in June, we were slightly short of goal. The more I see it, the more I want to remove killing it and stretch, and rename commit to goal, to make communication simpler. This graph doesn’t answer the question of why we didn’t meet goal. When we add in the time graphs, it will help clarify that. This is also a good opportunity to talk to the team in a monthly meeting to go over what’s working and what’s not working.
The next graph is a little bit unclear, simply because there is only one hygienist in the department. This is called a lollipop graph, and its job is to show where the individual is this month, and to show the change in month-over-month and year-over-year.
That concludes the hygiene department. We’ve answered the questions of how the department has done this period, compared it with last month and last year. We’ve displayed goals and put them in context. And we’ve displayed individual performance. Of course, in this case, since there is only one hygienist in the department, it’s a bit redundant! But we now have a process in place so that we can deal with more providers.
Onto the restorative department. Here are the overall numbers.
This next chart shows restorative goals. The more I look at it, the more I think this second chart could actually be incorporated into the one just above. The only additional information it displays is the goal line.
And finally, we have the lollipop graph for individual contributors. Note that these lollipop graphs go from left to right. This could be confusing for readers, and I might consider changing it to go up and down in the final product. What I like about this graph is that it shows a quick and easy comparison of all three doctors: where they are this month, and their progress month-over-month and year-over-year. It also starts to display where individual goals should be. We could also consider highlighting in orange where providers aren’t meeting goal, and in blue where they are.
The nice thing about this pencil-on-paper process is that we still haven’t made a firm commitment to the technology. We can eliminate and amalgamate graphs. For example, I like the separate “goals” graph for the full practice, but in the individual departments, it could easily be combined with the monthly production graph.
It’s easy to make these things more complicated than they need to be. The process of drawing this out helps identify opportunities to make things simpler.
Next week, we are going to talk about how to count time in each provider’s schedule. What constitutes available time? Productive time? Downtime?