Predicted production report: how to use it

Following up on our last post, you now have a predicted production report with several useful numbers on there.  How do you use it?

Here are the best applications that I have seen.

Use it to set your marketing schedule 

Here’s the primary use for this schedule.  Let’s say that you are looking at the schedule on September 9 and the expected number of contracts is 10.  In September of the previous year, you had 23 contracts.  Unless something strange happened in September of the previous year, your month is going to come up short of where you were last year.  Unlike waiting to review a report at the end of the month, you now have 3 weeks to add marketing, revise your plan or reaffirm confidence in your existing marketing.  

Please do not make the mistake of substituting the predicted production report with looking at the number of contracts signed so far during the month and then simply extrapolating that number out to the rest of the month.  That ignores the consults on the books for the rest of the month, the structure of your schedule and other factors that drive your spending and marketing decisions.

Predicting production

If you run a practice of any size, you want to find problem areas without extensive searching.  If you have a group practice with multiple offices (cheap book plug: advice on building such a practice by clicking here), you absolutely have to summarize results into a meaningful, easily digestible format.

Here’s one report that I’ve found is easy to create, extremely informative and in a compact enough format to keep you from digging through mountains of data.  It’s called the Predicted Production Report and does exactly that.  It predicts what production will be for a given month so that you can make decisions about marketing, staffing and scheduling.

Here’s how it works: