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.

Use it to properly structure your schedule

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve seen this result from the predicted production report early or in the middle of the month:

Contracts, same month previous year: 21

Predicted contracts, this month: 10 

Consult appointment slots available: 0 

With this data set, how in the world can we be expected to meet or beat that 21 contract number if there’s no additional room for new patients?  If you cannot fit anyone else in for the month, you might as well cut off the advertising in the near term (remember that you want to get patients in as quickly as possible after they call) and deal with a bad month.  In addition, this could point to the office pushing new patient appointments into the next month which means that patients have a much smaller chance of showing up.

Here, you want to revise your schedule to free up some new patient time or cut expensive advertising until you can accommodate the patients that might result from your marketing efforts.

On the flip side, I’ve seen a lot of this in the past with just 3-4 days left to go in the month:

Contracts, same month, previous year: 21 

Predicted contracts, this month: 20 

Consult appointment slots available: 26

Here, you can see that there’s a lot of new patient time available with just a few days left to go in the month.  Unless one of the Kardashians comes into your office that day, you are going to have a lot of excess new patient time.  That means people sitting around doing nothing.  Even if you only had 10 predicted contracts, with so few days left in the month, you still probably won’t fill all that time.  You might want to save some cost by shutting down some slots and reducing the number of staff available during those times.  If something surprising happens and a lot of new patients want to be seen in a short time, you can certainly re open that time.

While this might seem to be a small marginal change, any time you can eliminate idle time, you save money and add to profitability.

Use it to set your staffing and responsibilities

In addition to what we mentioned above, you also might want to consider that if a month is looking light on new patients, you might want to redeploy your manager and other key staff to visiting businesses, dentists, etc. Or, if things are really light, other folks can work on collections, developing longer term patient sources or communicating with patients to generate referrals.  Unless your office is a disaster zone, please do not assign an idle staff person to clean.  Replacing one non-productive task (sitting around) with another (cleaning) is simply a drain on your business.

If things are going great, you might want to open additional new patient time and redirect staff from other tasks to servicing those new patients.  Or, you can open up more new patient time and try to move next months’ patients into this month (with enough advance notice, of course).

A note about time periods

We’ve chosen monthly for the report, but you could also choose a quarterly period or a 30-day moving average.  After all, a month is simply a function of a calendar, but I prefer having a hard target with a deadline to push toward.  You don’t really get that with a moving average and a quarterly approach leads to changes made within the last month of the quarter even if the first 2 months weren’t great.  The monthly period, even though relatively short and arbitrary, provides enough healthy pressure to review results and make changes as necessary.

Questions, comments, need someone to handle generating that number for you?  Contact us by clicking here.