The ABCs of Medical Practice Accounting: Accounting, Bookkeeping and Controllership

If you’ve been looking over the OMS Partners, LLC website and feel like you’re reading another language, we understand! Medical Practice Accounting is practically a language in and of itself! You’re the expert at dentistry or your specific medical specialty, not crunching numbers for the CPA or IRS. To help you better navigate the ins and outs of what steps your dental or medical practice should be taking, we’ve put together this list of the ABCs of Medical Practice Accounting.

“A” is for Accounting

With all the schooling you’ve had to get your DDS or MD, it’s likely you’ve taken an accounting class at some point in your life. Maybe you thought it was fun. Or perhaps you sat in the back of the lecture hall dreading coming to class every day! Whatever the case, we’re here to give you a refresher on Accounting 101.

Accounting is the most basic process of medical billing practice for your business. With it, you:

• Record all financial transactions
• Sort, retrieve, summarize, and present various reports and analyses
• Create financial statements, including a Balance Sheet and Income Statement that comply with the United States’ Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, often referred to as GAAP

“B” is for Bookkeeping

In medical practice accounting, bookkeeping on a daily basis is very important. It’s the process of recording, storing and retrieving your dental and medical practice’s transactions at any given point in time when they are needed.

Bookkeepers perform a lot of important tasks, including:

• Billing clients for the dental or medical services you’ve provided, including billing insurance companies and patients for their patient responsibility
• Recording all receipts from your patients
• Verifying and recording all invoices from your dental or medical suppliers, from the company you buy floss from to the vendor you purchase stickers from to hand out to your youngest most well-behaved patients
• Paying suppliers’ invoices before they’re due
• Performing payroll and government-related reports
• Monitoring all your accounts receivables from patients
• Recording depreciation and other adjusting entries, such as for your X-Ray machines
• Providing you with financial reports whenever you request them so you always know where your practice stands financially

“C” is for Controllership

Controllership is the responsibility of a controller or comptroller within a medical practice accounting business or a medical or dental practice. This person oversees all your practice’s financials, and:

• Always has his or her eyes out for inside cost savings
• Creates a strategic financial plan for your practice
• When he or she has a dental or medical practice, utilizes that knowledge to operating and production costs
• Understands your practice’s business cycles, such as fewer appointments around major holidays, less well checks for kids during school hours, etc.

Team Up with OMS Partners, LLC for Your Medical Practice Accounting Needs

As you can see, the financial side of your dental or medical practice can require a trained accounting staff of its own if you’re going to maintain your financial information properly. That just isn’t feasible for most dentists and doctors, nor is it usually an option to delegate these important financial tasks to your office staff who works to run your office smoothly by greeting patients, enrolling new patients, scheduling an appointment and making appointment reminder calls.

For this reason, OMS Partners, LLC has been working with dentists and doctors just like you for over a decade. If you have questions about how we can take the ABS of medical practice accounting off your plate, call us today at (713) 961-2723.