Money
If you haven’t been following the tech stack series, then the first three are here in relation to how you might want to consider integrating technology into your practice moving forwards.
We have worked long and hard on investigation and consideration of the tech stack in the practice and the introduction of Carl Dunstan to the practice as the business development director pushed this philosophy on much further to a position where we could really make clear and conscious decisions about how we would invest in technology moving forwards.
As I discussed in previous blogs, we opted for SaaS software systems which are service software systems which work seamlessly together and are designed on the same software platform and using the same language, so they click together like a jigsaw.
From our point of view, the integration of SaaS software systems now would be difficult to change but something that we feel has been the best move forwards and so Dentally and Dengro are both SaaS software systems and then clicked into that as another piece in the jigsaw is our financial management system.
We elected to go for Xero as a practice management system although there is other cloud-based financial accountancy systems available to use, Xero clicks beautifully in with Dentally.
This took some setting up to be able to work together but now all of our invoices from Dentally automatically link to Xero and so, the accountancy aspect of counting how we're doing and what's going on and our profit and loss at the end of the month is extraordinary.
Xero is the most powerful software that we've seen for financial management, but it's also really inexpensive in terms of its user costs and so this is an easy way to reduce costs overall and time spent on laborious, repetitive tasks in finance.
As another example though, it gives us the opportunity to have an instant balance sheet (something which is hard to get your head around) so, if you were that way inclined (which I'm absolutely not) I could see the value of my business on a day-to-day basis and if you're ever interested in selling your business, this is an extraordinary degree of detail to be able to achieve.
It then allows us on a monthly basis to review our finances with a fine-tooth comb around the key performance indicators that we look at and then allows us to have a series of ‘levers’ that we can pull should we be going in either way in the wrong direction.
It allows us much more scope to review our clinician’s performance to make sure that they're OK, but also to keep a handle on costs and to inform us when prices would have to change or when issues are occurring in relation to our cost base.
We were good at finances before, and in fact we were described by Chris Barrow at one point as being one of the best he'd ever seen but we are a lot better now, and that is definitely as a result of the integration of Xero into Dentally and the live and real time production of a ‘central point of truth’ in finance, knowing exactly where we are and exactly how much money we have.
This would not have been achievable to such a degree with such instantaneous insight without the integration of a proper tech stack.
Blog Post Number - 3353
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