Production

Production is what your practice would earn if every patient paid your full fee, in full, the day the work was done. It is the number on the schedule before insurance discounts and write-offs take their cut, which is exactly why it is the wrong number to run a practice on by itself. You bank collections, not production, and a practice can look busy on production while quietly losing money on collections.

Even so, production is the right number for judging the clinical side of the business. Every practice management system reports it by provider, by day and by month, and it feeds almost every other metric a practice tracks: overhead percentage is measured against collections, but case acceptance, hygiene production and production per hour all start here. Watch it against a target rather than against last month alone: a slow Tuesday and a slow month look identical in a single snapshot but mean very different things for the year.

Say a practice produces $150,000 in a month on a plan-heavy schedule and collects $138,000. That gap is normal for the mix; it only becomes a problem when it keeps widening or nobody can explain where it went.