Cost Management: Payroll, Procurement, and Laboratory Costs
Category: Marketing and Management
Instructor(s): Aleksey Snegirev
Course structure: Lessons: 3 lessons | Duration: 54 min
Course overview
The majority of clinics lose money not because of poor marketing, but because of uncontrolled expenses. Payroll, which consumes 60% of revenue, uncontrolled consumable materials, working with a laboratory without analyzing profitability — all of this directly affects the clinic’s profit. This course will help determine normative values for a financially healthy clinic for each key expense item and will provide practical tools to bring costs back into an effective range.
Learning objectives:
— Learn the normative values of the key expense items of a dental clinic
— Understand what percentage of physician remuneration is economically justified, and how to revise the motivation system without conflicts
— Learn to analyze material expenses and identify optimization points
— Figure out how to calculate the profitability of working with a dental laboratory
— Master the methodology for independently auditing clinic expenses in 2–3 hours
— Understand how to build a system of regular expense control without manual monitoring of each item
— Obtain a checklist of the main sources of financial losses and an algorithm for their elimination.
The course is built on a practical analysis of the cost structure of real dental clinics. Participants work with industry norms, determine what the share of payroll, procurement, and laboratory expenses in revenue should be, and compare these indicators with their own results.
Within the course concrete managerial scenarios are considered: how to discuss changes to the pay system with physicians, how to analyze purchases and identify excessive expenses, how to build effective interaction with a dental laboratory based on transparent economic indicators.
What you will learn
- Determine normative expense percentages and compare clinic figures to industry benchmarks.
- Calculate true employee cost and apply payment models to control the payroll fund.
- Conduct a price and materials audit to identify procurement and inventory optimization points.
- Compute laboratory profitability and implement a monitoring system to control lab-related costs.
Course lessons
Lesson 1. Anatomy of Expenses: Benchmarks for a Healthy Clinic and Hidden Leakages
We will start with basic mathematics and remove the rose-colored glasses regarding the cost structure of your clinic. You will understand why increasing patient flow does not save the business if internal expenses are not balanced. We will analyze strict industry standards and benchmarks: what percentage of revenue in a healthy business should go to rent, materials, and salaries. You will learn to correctly separate fixed and variable costs and lay a solid financial model for the clinic. Money is lost not where it is looked for: why the clinic loses profit on internal costs (payroll, materials, laboratory), not on marketing.
— Control begins with measurement: how to correctly record the amount of monthly expenses and calculate the percentage of each line item from total revenue
— Industry benchmarks: standards for each expense item for a financially healthy clinic
— Two types of expenses (variable and fixed): detailed composition and methods of effective management for each type
— Calculation of the financial model: learning to compare your actual figures with the market standard.
Lesson 2. Managing Payroll: How to Shift Doctors to KPIs and Pay Them Sustainably
Payroll fund is the main expense item of any medical center. In this lesson we will analyze how to stop being hostages of "star" doctors who work at inflated percentages. You will see the real cost of an employee for the business and will analyze 4 salary calculation models. We will study in detail the modern KPI model that motivates a doctor to care about a comprehensive treatment plan and patient retention. At the end of the lesson you will receive an algorithm for ecological and fair negotiations with the team about changing payment conditions.
— Payroll fund (FOT) as the largest, yet most controllable expense item of the clinic
— Hidden math: how much one doctor in your clinic actually costs
— Methodology for calculating and controlling the FOT of medical and administrative staff
— Comparative analysis of 4 physician payment models: classic %, % after material costs, fixed per service and KPI model
— KPI implementation: three key performance indicators that turn a doctor into a business partner
— Financial ceiling: how much you can maximally pay a doctor so the clinic does not operate at a loss
— Money ethics: how to conduct financial literacy training for the team and agree on new figures without conflicts or dismissals.
Lesson 3. Pricing, Materials, and the Lab: 6 Steps to Reduce Costs in 3 Hours
The final lesson is pure optimization practice. We will analyze how to correctly include equipment amortization, materials, and laboratory labor into service prices so as not to sell at a loss. You will learn to conduct a price audit, separate services into categories, and raise prices in a way that patients will not notice. We will find hidden reserves in inventories, implement a laboratory and procurement control system, and also go through a step-by-step express checklist. In just 3 hours this tool will allow you to identify all the "black holes" in the budget and build three horizons of expense control for the clinic.
— Technology for calculating the real cost of a medical service and rules for working with a price list
— Audit of the price list using the "3 service categories" method: three different managerial decisions to grow margin
— Safe price increases: 3 rules that will protect the clinic from patient outflow
— Deep analysis of material expenses: 2 key methods of managerial accounting in procurement
— Procurement optimization: 3 levers to reduce consumable costs without losing treatment quality
— How to calculate and control the profitability of a dental laboratory
— Practicum: express checklist for auditing clinic expenses in 6 steps in just 2–3 hours
— Where a review starts: profit and loss report (P&L) as the main tool
— Checklist "10 questions about your expenses" for the owner
— Three horizons of control: how to build an expense monitoring system (monthly, quarterly, annual).
