Dentist CFO services: run the practice on production per hour, not gut feel

What CFO work looks like inside a dental practice

Your bookkeeper records what the practice did; CFO work decides what it does next. For a Dentistry Professional Corporation that means a monthly cadence on top of clean accrual books: production by provider and by chair, hygiene department profitability after hygienist wages, overhead ratio against your own trend rather than a generic benchmark, and a rolling cash and debt plan. Fixed fees, quoted after a discovery call.

Dentists usually bring us in at a decision point — an associate asking for a contract, a landlord offering the unit next door, a practice listed one plaza over, or a purchase offer from a dental service organization. The recurring dashboard exists so those moments are priced from your data, not from a broker's pitch deck.

Chair utilization and production per hour: the practice in two numbers

A dental office is a high-fixed-cost machine: rent, equipment leases, sterilization, admin wages, and hygiene payroll run whether the chairs are full or not, so the profit lives in how many scheduled hours you fill and what each hour produces. We track utilization — booked hours against available chair hours — and production per scheduled hour, separately for dentistry and hygiene. With provincial fee guides anchoring most prices, you cannot fix a soft month by raising fees; the levers are recall effectiveness, procedure mix, block scheduling, and reducing the short-notice cancellations that turn paid staff hours into idle ones.

The hygiene department deserves its own line. Run properly it is both a profit centre and the feed for restorative diagnosis; run loosely it is a wage bill with a recall list nobody works. We measure it monthly so drift shows up early.

Associate or expansion: price the capacity decision

The right move depends on which constraint actually binds — clinician hours or physical chairs — and owners often guess wrong because both feel like being busy. Before you commit, the model looks like this:

Either path is financed out of the same future production, so we model both against your utilization data and let the weaker case eliminate itself.

Buying a practice: due diligence the appraisal will not do

An appraisal summarizes the seller's story; your diligence has to verify it, because you will be repaying the bank from what the charts actually produce. We dig into active patient counts under a defined recency window, the hygiene-to-dentist production ratio, recall compliance, staff tenure and contracts, equipment age, and the lease — including any demolition clause that could evict the practice you just financed. Seller earnings get normalized: family members on payroll, personal expenses, below-market rent when the seller owns the building.

Banks lend readily against dental cash flow, which is exactly why the debt-service model must use post-close reality — some attrition when the seller departs, and your own ramp — rather than the listing's best year.

Selling: LCGE readiness is a multi-year project

A share sale of a qualifying DPC can shelter up to $1.25 million of gain per shareholder under the lifetime capital gains exemption, but qualification is tested over time: broadly, substantially all assets active at sale and a majority-active test through the preceding 24 months. A corporation stuffed with passive investments fails until it is purified — so the clock starts years before the sale, and our tax team plans it alongside the CFO work. Consolidators price on normalized EBITDA and discount whatever they cannot verify, so two or three years of clean statements are part of the sale price. If you trained or worked in the US and still hold accounts there, settle that side early too — our cross-border guide for dentists covers what repatriated dentists bring home.

Source: CRA — Capital gains deduction (line 25400).