Dental Practice P&L Template

Download the .xlsx file and open it in Excel or Google Sheets. Start with the Monthly P&L tab: review the pre-loaded procedure categories and expense line items and adjust them to match your practice's chart of accounts. Most practices keep the structure as-is and rename a few line items — for example, adding specific specialty codes if you offer orthodontics or oral surgery, or splitting dental supplies into consumables and equipment maintenance if your CPA tracks those separately. This initial setup takes about 15 minutes.

Once the categories look right, enter your net collections by procedure type for the current month — use your practice management software (Dentrix, Eaglesoft, Open Dental, etc.) to pull production and collection totals by procedure category. Enter your adjustments in the Production vs Collections sheet using the aging or adjustment reports your software generates. Then enter expenses from your accounting system or bank statement. The Monthly P&L calculates gross margin, overhead ratio, and net income automatically. Fill in Provider Productivity from your PM software's provider production reports.

The template pays off over time. Close each month within 10 days of month-end — that's usually enough for most insurance payments to post. Check your collection rate in the Production vs Collections sheet first; a rate that dips below 96% often means a billing problem or a new denial pattern that your front desk hasn't caught yet. Review overhead ratio monthly and compare lab fees and supply costs against the prior-month percentages. Most dental practice owners who run this review monthly say it takes 30 minutes and surfaces problems early — before a billing drift or a supply cost creep compounds into a serious margin issue.

Dental practices generate revenue differently than most businesses, and a generic P&L template misses the mechanics. In dentistry, revenue starts as production — the sum of your full fee schedule charges before insurance adjustments. From there, you subtract contractual write-offs (the difference between your fee schedule and what your insurance contracts allow), leaving net production. Then you track what you actually collect from that net production, which gives you your collection rate. A practice running a 94% collection rate on $1.2M in net production is leaving $72,000 on the table annually — money that's owed but being written off or not followed up on. That gap is invisible in a standard P&L that only shows cash in and cash out.

On the expense side, dental practices have cost categories that don't appear in other businesses. Lab fees — paid to outside dental labs for crowns, dentures, implant components, and orthodontic appliances — typically run 8–12% of collections and are entirely variable based on how many restorative cases you complete. Dental supplies (chairside materials, anesthetics, gloves, barriers) add another 5–8%. Together, these two line items can represent 15–20% of collections, and they move based on your procedure mix, not just your patient volume. The template tracks both as percentages of collections so you can spot when your lab costs are drifting up — often a sign that your fee schedule hasn't kept pace with what labs are charging.

The overhead benchmark that matters most in dentistry is total overhead as a percentage of collections, with 59–65% being the widely cited target for a healthy general practice. But overhead alone doesn't tell the whole story — you need to know whether you're within that range because your clinical costs are lean or because you're understaffed on the administrative side and missing collections. This template separates clinical overhead (supplies, labs, clinical staff) from administrative overhead (billing, software, front desk) and facility overhead (rent, equipment, utilities) so you can see exactly where your overhead sits relative to industry benchmarks — and what to fix when it doesn't.