5 Tips To Prepare Your Dental Practice For Sale

Melissa LuVisi
November 18, 2021 | 3 min read

When you sell your dental practice or dental service organization (DSO), you must be prepared for potential buyers to look through your financial reports and other M&A-related information  to determine the valuation of your business.

By presenting accurate and coherent data to potential buyers, you can boost your credibility and gain trust while making the negotiation process more constructive and the transition smoother. 

To set a solid foundation, start with cleaning up your dental practice’s data. Here’s how.

1. Collect Outstanding Patient Balances

Your productions and collections reports will impact the valuation of your practice. As such, you should get your collections in order. Have as many patients to pay down their invoices as possible while minimizing the accumulation of new balances. Purge uncollectible accounts receivable and focus on collecting those that are past due over 90 days.

Use dental practice management software to send out statements via email or text immediately after a visit. Set up the technology to take online payments and automate reminders and recurring invoices. You can also incentivize patients to pay early or pay in full by offering a discount.

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2. Clean Up Old Fee Schedules

Practices that use old server technologies are often hampered by cumbersome workflows. Instead of updating old fee schedules, many employees would just add new ones. This creates a build-up of unused and outdated schedules, which impacts the cost-efficiency of your operations while making your data confusing for potential buyers.

Take the opportunity to upgrade your technologies as you clean up your fee schedule to streamline future workflows. Cloud dental software allows you to manage all your productions and collections from a centralized location across multiple offices and implement a unified fee schedule.

3. Close Out Outstanding Claims

Review all your records to make sure that all the claims are paid. This will improve not only your collections but also your balance sheet. It’s easy for things to fall through the cracks if you’re still tracking insurance claims manually via multiple payer portals. 

Implement dental practice management software that offers seamless integration with electronic claims and attachments. You can track all submissions on a single dashboard and use intelligent workflows to eliminate errors that can cause delays in receiving your payments.

4. Update Old Patient Data

Your patient base is valuable to potential buyers. Boosting the number of active patients can help increase the valuation of your practice. Reach out to old patients to request their up-to-date information, which can help you build a high-quality list and inform your marketing campaigns to re-engage inactive patients.

Use cloud dental software with a robust patient engagement module to automate your outreach process through email and text. You can also include a link to an e-form where patients can fill out their information so you can streamline the process and improve the patient experience while minimizing errors.

5. Standardize Your System

Your technology stack key to ensuring an efficient operation. Potential buyers will evaluate your system and see how much additional work they need to do to become productive or merge it with their existing system. Anything that requires extra steps will make your practice less attractive.

Go through your current dental practice management software and workflows to see if everything is labeled in a way that others who don’t work in your office can understand. Identify ambiguous labels and replace them with recognizable ones according to industry conventions. This simple update is a low-hanging fruit that can help you make the transition more seamless.

Get Your Dental Practice Ready For Sale

Cleaning up your collections and claims, as well as workflows and procedures, can help you improve operational cost-efficiency, increase cash flow, and boost your bottom line. These improvements will make your practice more attractive to buyers and facilitate the process of migrating to new practice management.

An all-in-one dental practice management platform, such as tab32, allows you to handle everything from EHR, patient communication, and digital payments to online scheduling, billing, and revenue discovery all in one place. 

Request a demo to see how we can help you clean your data to ensure a seamless transition.

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