4 quick and easy ways to boost dental cash flow this quarter

When you’re struggling with cash flow as a dental business owner, you might think there's no way to increase revenue quickly, even if you optimize your processes right now. Well, you can make small changes that lead to big financial wins within a couple of weeks — and we’re here to show you how.

Cash flow is the life force of your dental practice. When it’s strong and consistent, you and your team can focus on delivering excellent patient care without the constant stress of financial uncertainty.

Scheduling inefficiencies, billing delays, and insurance roadblocks can slow cash flow to a trickle, making it feel impossible to catch up. 

This results from chaotic workflows and inefficient processes, leading to team burnout, high staff turnover, and a decrease in the quality of patient care.

So, you need stronger cash flow now. What’s a fast solution?

DCS, a full-service dental revenue cycle management provider, helps ensure your business maintains consistent cash flow to thrive in today’s dynamic dental industry. Our services and software will help you increase efficiency and through that, your overall revenue.

Drawing from our experience with dental businesses like yours, we’ll share 4 quick, proven ways you can boost your dental cash flow this quarter.

Key takeaways on boosting dental cash flow fast: 

• Small changes lead to big financial wins
• Automation is your friend when it comes to critical routine workflows
• Dental insurance claims expertise is absolutely essential if you want to speed up and increase claims revenue, specifically

Cash Flow Booster #1. Expand office hours to accommodate more patients

One of the easiest ways to increase revenue is to open up your schedule for more appointments. Limited availability means fewer patients seen, and fewer patients seen mean less revenue.

We’re not suggesting you force your team to keep the dental practice open every weekend and holiday. But a few additional days or hours here and there can make a positive difference to your revenue and cash flow. 

For example, instead of closing the entire week of Thanksgiving, maybe stay open one or two days that week, even if they’re only half days. The week between Christmas and New Year’s Day is a golden opportunity to schedule grade-school children and college students during their extended winter breaks.

You might open, or stay open one hour later, on Fridays — a day when many dentists are closed. You could stagger your dental team’s shifts to maintain office efficiency without overwhelming them with longer work days and shorter breaks.

Read more: Dental revenue down during the holidays? Get 3 tips to keep cash flowing

Here are the benefits you’ll see: 

• You’ll make space for more patients with busy schedules
• You’ll have slots for patients with inflexible work schedules
• You’ll accommodate parents who align their work holidays with school calendars
• More availability means more completed treatments, including high-revenue procedures like implants and orthodontics.

Quick tip: Track appointment time trends and requests before committing to extended hours. Work smarter, not harder!

Cash Flow Booster #2. Follow-up on unscheduled treatment plans

Every unscheduled treatment is a missed opportunity to earn revenue. If a patient walks out the door without booking their next visit, there’s a good chance they’ll forget or delay scheduling it, and then your team will have to follow up to remind them.

It’s worth making some time every week to sit down and review your list of patients with unscheduled treatment. Have your team give them a call to remind them:

• They haven’t yet scheduled their next appointment
• The purpose and importance of their treatment, and
• The next available date on your calendar. 

And if your team is too busy for manual follow ups, you can also turn to automation that reaches out to patients with unscheduled treatment. Plus, automated solutions that offer payment plans make it easier for them to pay for treatment.

For example, our ScheduleFlow software is an easy way to simplify online scheduling for patients — and your team. You can set up ScheduleFlow to send out scheduling reminders via text or email to patients with unscheduled treatment. 

Your team can also utilize ZeroBalance, our patient collections software that seamlessly integrates with your PMS to send patients automated payment reminders via text and/or email with a direct payment link. 

Thanks to today’s technology, you can keep your calendar full, and make it easy for patients to pay, further enticing them to follow through on unscheduled treatment.

Your patients will love the convenience of 24/7 online scheduling — early morning, late at night, or on the weekend — and you’ll benefit from ScheduleFlow’s effective capacity management, even if you have a unique, complex schedule. ZeroBalance adds further convenience by offering flexible payment options, including monthly installments.

Best of all, we can have ScheduleFlow set up within 2 days and ZeroBalance running within a week to provide a fast boost to your cash flow!

Read more: Dental patient scheduling services: How to fill your calendar and increase production

Read more: Instant insights: The easy way to check your patient billing revenue

Here are the benefits you’ll see: 

• Reliable modern scheduling for your patients, making it easier for them to fill your calendar
• Reduced no-shows due to the appointment reminder feature
• Self-managed rescheduling, and payment reminders, keeping patients on your calendar to ultimately boost your revenue with their easy payments

Quick Tip: Prioritize high-value procedures when contacting patients to get unscheduled treatments on your calendar.

Cash Flow Booster #3. Use automation to streamline billing and collections

Paper billing is an inefficient manual process that slows your cash flow and buries your team in tedious administrative work when they could be taking care of patients.

Plus, you can’t completely rely on mailed bills to arrive in your patients mailboxes in a timely manner — if they arrive at all. Not to mention, the rising cost of postage raises your practice’s overhead costs every year.

Read more: Avoid rising postage rates: Get automated dental patient billing and go paperless!

Patients today expect the same convenience they get from other industries—digital, easy, and instant online payment options. This is possible through automated software. For example, ZeroBalance is how DCS’ client-partners collect easily from patients. ZeroBalance sends patients automatic payment reminders via text and/or email with a direct payment link, making it easy for patients to pay their balance anywhere, anytime. 

Combine ZeroBalance with our merchant services product, QuantaPay, and you’ll collect easily from patients without steep merchant fees. You’ll see automatic write-backs to your PMS, recording every transaction in your practice management system the next business day.

You’ll get paid more without sacrificing your revenue to high fees.

Here are the benefits you’ll see: 

• Convenient, easy payments for patients using any digital device
• Less paperwork, data entry and follow-up for your in-house team
• Receive patient payments 24/7/365, including weekends and holidays
• Influx of patient payments directly to your bank account within days of setup
• Streamlined end-of-month reporting

Quick Tip: Highlight your paperless online payment options during patient check-ins to encourage use. The easier it is for patients to pay, the more likely — and the sooner! — they will.

Cash Flow Booster #4. Dedicate more time to dental Insurance claims work

Denied claims become delayed payments, and they are one of the biggest cash flow disruptors for dental practices. If you’re not consistently working your insurance aging report each week, you’re missing out on earned revenue.

According to Dental Intelligence, the average collections percentage for a dental practice is 91%. Why isn’t it closer to 100%? And what happens to that remaining 9% of revenue? 

For many dental practices, that 9% is lost revenue from denied insurance claims that weren’t appealed, weren’t successfully appealed, or fell past the timely filing deadline. And since 50% of typical in-network dental practice revenue comes from insurance, why isn’t this work getting done correctly and on time? 

In our partnership with dental businesses of all shapes and sizes, we’ve seen this happen due to inconsistent follow-up on their insurance aging report, mistakes on a high number of insurance claims, or disorganized workflows — or all of the above.

Daily operational demands often force dental teams to deprioritize insurance claims management, despite its critical importance to revenue. And unfortunately, this means cash flow and the overall revenue of the practice take a hit.

To maximize your revenue and sustain consistent cash flow, we highly recommend investing in a dedicated insurance claims specialist. That means either:

• Employing a seasoned dental insurance coordinator or
• Outsourcing a dental insurance billing expert through an RCM company like DCS

It’s essential that this person be trained, experienced, and current with the specialized knowledge needed — and entirely focused on your insurance billing. If they are distracted by other tasks or learning “on the fly”, they won’t be able to manage your dental insurance claims creation, submission, and follow-up effectively, and your bottom line will suffer for it. 

Learn more: Get DCS' Dental Insurance Billing services for cash flow you can count on

Here are the benefits you’ll see: 

• Less insurance claims work for your administrative team
• Fewer insurance claim denials
• Higher claims revenue received sooner

Quick Tip: If your team doesn’t have more time to dedicate to insurance claims, outsource management of this vital revenue stream to experts.

You can have more dental revenue, better workflows, and a happier team this quarter — and every quarter

To recap, here are 4 ways to boost cash flow fast: 

• Cash Flow Booster #1. Expand office hours to accommodate more patients
• Cash Flow Booster #2. Follow-up on unscheduled treatment plans
• Cash Flow Booster #3. Use automation to streamline billing and collections
• Cash Flow Booster #4. Dedicate more time to dental Insurance claims work

While high production matters, the true key drivers of dental revenue at your dental business are efficient workflows, automated technology, and expert insurance billing ensuring you collect everything you’ve earned from both patients and insurance providers. 

All 3 keys are quickly achievable, especially when you partner with DCS. 

Our end-to-end revenue cycle management solutions cover all the bases when it comes to the behind-the-scenes administrative side of your dental business — from insurance verification to balance billing. 

Let our modern automated software and dental billing experts get you more revenue and consistent cash flow this quarter: Book a free 30-minute consultation today.