Collections

Collections is the number that pays the bills. It is what actually lands in the bank in a given month or year, after every insurance write-off, courtesy discount and patient balance that never gets paid has already been subtracted from production. Production tells you how busy the practice was; collections tells you how the practice actually did.

This is the target the whole numbers curriculum runs on. Ryan teaches 98%+ collections as a percentage of production as the benchmark worth building a practice around, because anything meaningfully below that is not a bad-luck problem. It is a system problem, in the fee schedule, the financial arrangements at treatment planning, or the follow-up on aging balances. A practice can be at 92% for years without anyone noticing, because the schedule still looks full and the lights stay on; the difference only shows up as a smaller number at the bottom of the P&L.

Track collections weekly, not just at tax time, and reconcile it against production and against your accounts receivable aging so a slipping percentage gets caught in a month, not a year. It is the single cleanest read of whether the front office and the fee schedule are actually working together.