The ROI of a Connected Payment System for Open Dental Practices
Most dental practices can tell you what they pay to process a credit card. Far fewer can tell you what it costs their team to manage the payment around the transaction.
Processing is only one part of the equation. Admin time spent entering payments, posting them to Open Dental, reconciling transactions, following up on patient balances, and correcting discrepancies represents an expense that never appears on a merchant statement.
In our three-part series, Convert More. Collect More. Keep Them Coming Back, we explored how connected workflows can help Open Dental practices improve patient conversion, collections, and retention. Now let's look at how practice owners and office leaders can evaluate the financial value of connecting those workflows.
Start With the Payment Costs You Can See
Processing fees, transaction fees, monthly software charges, and other merchant expenses are easy to identify. But comparing payment systems only on those costs leaves out much of the work that happens around the transaction.
When payment processing and Open Dental operate as separate workflows, a team member may enter the transaction amount, process the payment, post it in Open Dental, provide a receipt, verify the day's transactions, and reconcile payment activity against deposits.
When those steps require moving between systems or entering the same information more than once, the practice is paying for that work in staff time.
Calculate the Administrative Cost You Don't See
Start by observing how payments move through your practice. How much time does your team spend processing, posting, verifying, and reconciling payments? How often does someone correct a posting error or investigate a discrepancy?
Small amounts of wasted time add up when the same steps are repeated throughout the day.
Suppose a solo practice processes 300 patient payments per month and disconnected payment processes add an average of two minutes of administrative work to each transaction. That's about **10 hours each month, or 120 hours over the course of a year, **spent on those additional steps.
Your numbers may be higher or lower. The point is to identify a cost that is easy to overlook because it is embedded in the team's daily routine.
With FlexPayments, payments processed in Flex automatically post back to the correct patient ledger in Open Dental, reducing manual entry. Flex also provides transaction reporting and payout visibility to support the practice's normal reconciliation process.
Measure the Cost of Patient A/R
An unpaid balance can trigger another series of administrative tasks: generating statements, sending reminders, making calls, collecting payment information, processing the eventual transaction, and updating the patient ledger.
Take a look at how much patient A/R your practice carries, how long those balances remain outstanding, and how much of your team’s time is spent on statements and balance follow-up.
Connected payment options such as texting a statement and email payment requests, digital statements, secure cards on file, and automated recurring payment plans give patients ways to address balances without requiring the team to initiate every transaction manually.
Two potential sources of financial value are earlier collection of patient balances and less admin time devoted to manual A/R follow-up.
Look at What Happens Between Proposed and Completed Treatment
Payment workflows can also affect what happens between treatment presentation and completed care. A patient may accept the clinical recommendation but still need to determine how to manage the out-of-pocket cost.
Rather than assuming payment options improve treatment acceptance, look at your own numbers. How much treatment is proposed? How much is scheduled and ultimately completed? How often does your team identify cost or payment arrangements as a reason treatment does not move forward?
FlexPayments supports treatment-plan prepayments, appointment deposits when used with FlexSchedule, recurring payment plans, and multiple ways for patients to pay before, during, and after an appointment.
The ROI question is whether making financial arrangements easier to complete helps reduce payment-related friction between proposed, scheduled, and completed treatment in your practice.
Put a Value on the Time Your Team Gets Back
Saving time does not necessarily mean reducing payroll. If a connected payment workflow saves several hours each week, you may still have the same people working the same schedules.
The value comes from what your team can do with that time instead.
Time previously spent entering transactions, moving between systems, generating statements, or manually pursuing balances can be redirected toward scheduling, treatment follow-up, insurance verification, and patient communication.
That is why ROI should include more than labor savings. Practice owners and office leaders can also consider whether connected workflows give their teams additional capacity for work that supports patients and revenue.
Look Beyond the Processing Fee
You don't have to assign a dollar value to every part of your payment workflow to begin evaluating its return. Start with what you can measure: time spent managing payments, the amount of patient A/R and how long it remains outstanding, the percentage of proposed treatment that is scheduled and completed, and administrative processes that a connected workflow simplifies.
Then consider what could change if those payment workflows were connected. Could your team spend less time processing, posting, and following up on payments? Could patient balances be collected sooner? Could less of your team’s time be tied up in A/R? Could financial arrangements be completed earlier in the treatment process?
Processing fees will always be part of the comparison, but they don't tell you what it costs your practice to manage payments. Looking at the work surrounding each transaction gives you a better picture of what your current payment process costs, and what a connected payment system may be worth to your Open Dental practice.
Want to see how connected payments work with Open Dental?
Discover how FlexPayments can simplify payment collection and the administrative work surrounding it.