A dental practice can be busy, bring in strong revenue and still have financial and operational problems that don't show up straight away.
Knowing your practice billed R1,2 million this year is useful. But that number alone won't tell you how much was actually collected, which treatments drove it, how each provider performed, or whether the practice is becoming more profitable.
Revenue is only part of the picture.
What should you be looking at?
1. Revenue and collections
How much did you bill, and how much did you actually collect?
The gap is bigger than most owners assume. In 2024, the average amount claimed from medical schemes for a visit to a general dentist was R1 709, but schemes paid only R1 417 of it. The R292 difference, about 17% of the average claim, is left for the patient to pay and often for the practice to chase.1 For members of open schemes, the gap was R519 a visit: more than a quarter of the claim.1
And it's widening. The unpaid portion per visit rose 9% in a year, almost twice as fast as the claim itself.1
For a practice billing R1,2 million a year through medical schemes, a 17% gap means about R200 000 that has to come from patients rather than schemes.2 If you aren't tracking that number, you can't manage it.
2. Patient and treatment trends
Are patient numbers rising? Which treatments bring in the most revenue? Is revenue per patient going up or down?
These trends reveal shifts that total revenue hides. A flat year can mask fewer patients spending more, or more patients spending less, and each calls for a different response.
3. Provider performance
Which providers generate the most production? How do their patient volumes and treatment mixes compare?
The point isn't to rank people. It's to understand what drives performance and where support or attention is needed.
4. Practice-to-practice performance
If you own more than one practice, the group total isn't enough. You need to see how each location performs on its own.
| Practice A | Practice B | |
|---|---|---|
| Annual revenue | R1,45m | R1,15m |
| Patients | 1 200 | 800 |
| Revenue per patient | R1 208 | R1 438 |
Illustrative example only.
At first glance, Practice A looks stronger: it brings in R300 000 more a year. But Practice B earns about R230 more per patient.
That raises a better question: why? Is Practice B doing more high-value procedures? Is Practice A seeing more patients but earning less from each?
And revenue per patient still isn't profit. If Practice B's higher-value work carries higher lab and materials costs, its advantage at the bottom line could shrink or disappear. Only by putting costs next to revenue can you tell which practice is genuinely more profitable, and where each one can improve.
From numbers to decisions
Good reporting tells you what happened. Good analytics helps you understand why.
Most practices already have reports. The accountant sends statements after month-end, the practice management system prints a day sheet, and someone keeps a spreadsheet of outstanding accounts. Each answers one narrow question, weeks after the fact, and none of them talk to each other.
By the time you've pieced them together, the month you're looking at is already over, and so is the chance to act on it.
Business intelligence joins that data up. It draws on what your practice already records, so you can check performance at any point without rebuilding the picture by hand. A practice owner should be able to see at a glance:
- Revenue and collections
- Patient volumes
- Treatment mix
- Provider performance
- Revenue per patient
- Practice-to-practice comparisons
- Trends over time
The value isn't more data. It's the right information when you need it. That's the difference between having data and using it to run your business.
Do you know where your money is going?
Your practice already generates the data you need. The challenge is turning it into a clear view of the business, without working through spreadsheets and reports just to see how you're doing.
StazaCare turns your practice data into business intelligence, giving you a clear view of financial and operational performance in one place.
If you can't answer that question quickly, you may not have a revenue problem. You may have a visibility problem.
Book a StazaCare demo and see what your practice looks like through its own numbers.
Practice A and Practice B, and the R1,2 million practice, are illustrative examples, not real practices.
Sources
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Council for Medical Schemes, Industry Report 2024: The Medical Schemes Industry in 2024, published December 2025. Table 14, "General dental practitioner health services (out-of-hospital) in 2023 and 2024", p. 56. Figures are averages per visit across all medical schemes; "paid" includes both risk and medical savings account payments. ↩ ↩2 ↩3
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StazaCare calculation: R292 ÷ R1 709 = 17,1% of each claim, applied to an illustrative practice billing R1,2 million a year through medical schemes. ↩
