Hi there,

Picture the end of the month in your own practice. You pull the export from your practice management system. You open the spreadsheet you built years ago and have been patching ever since. You split NHS from private. You deduct lab fees and materials for each associate individually. You check the total once. Then, because something about it never quite sits right, you check it again.

Three days. Sometimes four. Every single month, for one pay run.

Then an associate emails with a perfectly reasonable question about their number, and the whole process starts again from the top, because you cannot answer them from memory, and you are not confident enough in the spreadsheet to answer from that either.

The real cost here is not the three or four days. Practices absorb three or four days. The real cost is that nobody in the building fully trusts the figure at the end of it, including the associate who is about to be paid from it. That is not a comfortable thing to admit, and I do not think owners say it to each other very often.

I will offer you one thing that might be a relief on its own. This is close to universal. I have sat across the table from dozens of owners over the years and heard some version of this exact process described back to me, spreadsheet included. If this is your month end too, you are not managing it worse than everyone else. You are managing it the way almost everyone does.

I am not going to offer you a fix this week. That is deliberately not the point of this email.

Next week I want to talk about something related. Why your year end accounts, however good your accountant is, cannot help you with any of this while it is actually happening. It is a timing problem, not a competence one, and it is worth understanding properly before we go any further.

Speak soon,

Arun

Separately: seats are still open for Owner, Not Operator on 14 October in Central London, an evening with Smita and me on building a practice that does not depend on you being in the room. Details here.