BENEFITS


Payments In the Practice: What Trends Are Affecting Your Bottom Line?


by PHIL NIETO D


entistry can be an isolated profession, and it’s often difficult to know how your practice compares to your peers.


While no two practices are identical, how would you know if the trends in your office are being seen by others? There are some questions that can be embarrassing to ask another practitioner about, including prac- tice volume, profitability and other financial matters.


The landscape of the payments your practice accepts has probably changed drastically in the last few years, but those changes often can slip under the radar even when it is sig- nificantly affecting your bottom line.


Best Card, the endorsed payment proces- sor of the MDA and ADA Member Advan- tage, has been working with thousands of dental offices nationwide for more than 15 years, and we want to pull back the curtain on the uncomfortable questions you may not want to ask your fellow practitioners:


• How much does the average dental office collect in credit card payments?


• Have dentists raised their prices to keep up with inflation?


• What are other dentists paying to accept credit card payments?


• How much should you be paying?


Using our data from thousands of dental of- fices over the past 15 years, here’s a little peek into what the average dental practice has experienced!


AMOUNT THE AVERAGE DENTAL OFFICE COLLECT IN CREDIT CARDS


Dental offices have seen a large increase in the total amount of credit card payments collected over the past 10+ years and COVID


While accepting credit cards ensures offices can quickly and easily collect pay- ments, with more patients and insurance providers choosing to pay with cards, it is a much more substantial factor in the prac- tice’s total profitability than in the past.


HAVE PRACTICES RAISED COSTS TO KEEP UP WITH INFLATION


Every dentist knows that COVID and the resulting supply chain and inflation issues increased the costs of many items used regularly in the practice. As a result, many


The Consumer Price Index shows that infla- tion in the U.S. from 2019 to 2023 was 19.2 percent, so even though the increase in


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accelerated that trend considerably, as patients moved towards payment methods that were more convenient and involved less physical contact. Furthermore, many insurance providers started issuing virtual credit cards as payment for their remittanc- es, which also increased the amount of card payments dental practices are accepting.


•


In 2023, the average dental office ran $44,925 in credit card payments per month. − That’s a 45.5 percent increase over the 2019 average of $30,876.


− It’s a 195 percent increase over the 2009 average of $15,221. The average practice is now running almost three times as much in credit cards as in 2009!


dentists have had to raise their prices over the last several years in response to those in- creased business costs. We can see this trend clearly by looking at the size of the average payment across all practices.


• The average credit card payment accept- ed by dental offices in 2023 was $306 compared to $273 in 2019 — an increase of 11.87 percent in just four years.


• From 2009 to 2019, the average pay- ment only increased 0.12 percent over a 10-year period.


• 2023 saw a slight decrease in the average payment compared to 2022: from $307 to $306, indicating that increases due to inflation may be slowing.


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