Dental Practice Advisory & CFO Services NJ & NY Dental Practices
Growing Collections Do Not Always Mean Growing Profitability
Customized Strategies for Dental Practices and DSOs.
Many practice owners find that production increases year over year while owner compensation remains largely unchanged. The explanation is rarely a single cause. More often it reflects gradual shifts across several areas at once: staff costs rising as a percentage of collections, supply and lab expenses drifting upward, or one location within a group performing well below the others.
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These changes are difficult to identify from an annual tax return. A return is a compliance document prepared after the year has closed, and it is not designed to support operational decisions. By the time it is filed, the decisions that shaped the result have already been made. We examine this pattern in more detail in five practice management decisions that protect profitability.
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MRL Advisory Group provides the reporting and analysis that fills this gap. We monitor the indicators that determine practice profitability — overhead by category, collections ratio, production per provider, new patient value, and hygiene performance — and review them with you throughout the year, while there is still time to act on what they show. Additional analysis is available in our practice profitability and management library.
Dental KPI Benchmarking and Performance Analysis
An individual metric has limited value without context. Overhead at 62 percent of collections may be entirely appropriate or clearly excessive depending on your specialty, geographic market, associate structure, and whether the practice owns its facility. Meaningful benchmarking requires comparison against practices with similar characteristics.
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Because our firm works exclusively with dental practices throughout New Jersey and New York, we are able to evaluate your results against a relevant peer group: the same specialty, comparable practice size, and similar payer mix. When a category falls outside the expected range, we can quantify the variance and identify the operational or structural factors that typically account for it.
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Case acceptance is a representative example. It is among the most significant determinants of production, yet many practices do not measure it consistently. Our analysis of how case acceptance translates diagnosis into completed treatment illustrates the kind of operational detail that benchmarking is intended to surface.
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We then translate that analysis into a prioritized set of recommendations, ordered by financial impact, so that you can address the areas offering the greatest return first. Reliable benchmarking depends on accurate underlying records, which is why our advisory work is frequently paired with our dental accounting and bookkeeping services.
Advisory Support Across the Life of Your Practice
Advisory needs change as a practice develops. An owner three years into ownership faces different questions than one preparing for a transition, and our engagements are structured to reflect that.
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Practices in a growth phase generally focus on benchmarking, overhead control, and the financial modeling that supports hiring an associate or adding operatories. Established practices more often concentrate on profitability refinement, retirement funding, and the coordination between practice income and personal tax exposure, which connects directly to our dental tax planning services.
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Owners considering an acquisition, a partnership, or a sale require valuation analysis, quality of earnings review, and deal structure evaluation, which we provide through our practice acquisition advisory services. Our articles on buying, selling, and practice transitions address the questions owners most often raise before entering that process.
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Practices operating in a changing market environment also benefit from advance planning around reimbursement pressure, staffing costs, and technology investment. Our commentary on current dental industry trends and technology examines these developments as they affect practice economics.
Dental Practice Advisory Frequently Asked Questions
What does a CFO do for a dental practice?
A dental CFO converts financial data into information that supports decisions. This includes monthly reporting, benchmarking against comparable practices, cash-flow forecasting, budgeting, and analysis of significant decisions before they are made, whether adding an operatory, hiring an associate, acquiring imaging technology, or opening an additional location. Bookkeeping records what has occurred and tax preparation reports it; CFO services address what should happen next.
Which KPIs should a dental practice track?
At a minimum: dental supplies, laboratory bills, rent expense, and staff salaries as a percentage of collections, collections as a percentage of production, production per provider and per operatory, hygiene production as a share of total production, new patient count and lifetime value, case acceptance rate, and accounts receivable aged beyond 90 days. Appropriate targets vary by specialty — an oral surgery practice and a pediatric practice should not be evaluated against the same overhead benchmark, which is why context is essential to interpretation.
Do you work with DSOs and multi-location dental groups?
Yes. We provide consolidated reporting across all entities together with location-level detail, allowing each office to be evaluated independently and the organization to be assessed as a whole. This includes inter-entity allocations, partner and associate compensation analysis, and financial modeling to support acquisition and expansion decisions.
How do advisory services differ from what my current accountant provides?
Most accounting relationships are compliance-oriented: closing the books and filing accurate returns, which is necessary and important work. Advisory services are forward-looking. They address what your financial results should be, why they differ from that expectation, and which specific measures will close the gap. If you have not reviewed your practice's performance against comparable practices, that analysis is likely absent from your current relationship.
When should a dental practice consider outsourced CFO services?
Common indicators include approaching or exceeding $1 million in annual collections, adding a second location, bringing on an associate or partner, evaluating an acquisition, or observing that increases in collections are not producing corresponding increases in owner compensation. Practices making substantial capital and staffing decisions generally benefit from formal financial analysis supporting those decisions.
What Our Advisory Services Include
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Dental KPI Benchmarking
Evaluate your practice against specialty-specific benchmarks, including overhead ratio, collections percentage, production per provider and per operatory, hygiene production share, and new patient acquisition cost.
Cost Monitoring
Analyze staff, supply, laboratory, facility, and marketing costs as a percentage of collections, tracked over time, to identify categories operating outside expected ranges and the adjustments available to address them.
Revenue Optimization Strategies
Improve collections ratio, reduce outstanding accounts receivable, evaluate your fee schedule against regional norms, and assess PPO participation and reimbursement performance.
Location-Specific Insights for DSOs, and Multi-Office Practices
Consolidated financial statements with detailed reporting by location, enabling consistent comparison across offices and accountability to location-specific targets.
CDT Code Analysis
Ensure accurate billing and identify additional revenue opportunities by analyzing CDT codes for dental practices
CFO Services
CFO Services including monthly financial reporting, budgeting and forecasting, cash-flow management, capital expenditure planning, & debt strategy.
Why Choose MRL Advisory Group?
Our firm concentrates on dentistry. That focus means we are already familiar with the benchmarks, overhead ratios, equipment cycles, and reimbursement conditions that characterize your specialty, from the fee-for-service dynamics of an orthodontic practice to the referral patterns of an endodontic or periodontic office to the operational requirements of a DSO. You can learn more about our firm and our team and review what distinguishes our approach.
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This specialization allows us to work more efficiently and in greater depth. We understand which questions are relevant and which considerations warrant attention, which means our discussions begin at a more advanced starting point. You work with advisors who read production reports and practice management data with the same fluency as financial statements, and who can interpret those figures for your practice during the conversation rather than afterward.
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Our advisory work also connects directly to the balance of your financial picture. The findings from benchmarking inform your tax planning, your monthly accounting, and any acquisition or transition under consideration, all managed by one team working from a single set of figures. A summary of our full range of services for dental practices is available for review.
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