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VAT increase will impact on dentists
27th May 2010
Keep a note of your practice profitability
With the announcement of George Osborne's emergency budget on 22 June, speculation is rising amongst business leaders that VAT is set to rise to 20%.
This, coupled with the sense of limbo caused by the change of government, the average dental practice has much to contend with.
This much-predicted tax rise will add further to the costs of general practice and comes on the back of additional expenditure made necessary by the need to comply with HTM 01-05 and increasing administrative burdens.
An additional 2.5% which, if introduced in one stage, will be added in one fell swoop to overheads, materials and equipment could be the final straw for many small practices.
The predicted tax rise further adds to costs which have hardly been offset by the 1% increase for salaried dentists announced earlier this year.
This pay ‘rise' has already been viewed by the profession in terms of an effective pay cut after increasing costs and inflation have been taken into account and this was before the latest budget predictions.
In the face of such financial pressures, there has never been a more important time to carefully manage the business aspects of a practice, predict income and expenditure and be able to monitor cashflow as well as patient attraction and retention.
A new business service from practice management software supplier Software of Excellence, launched at the beginning of May, helps practitioners to analyse the statistics from Exact and develop strategies to improve.
Thrive is already being used to help more than 100 practices, with reports of recall success rates improving by over 50% in some cases; statistics that are having a dramatic impact on bottom line profitability.
Jonathon McVeigh is a practitioner from Chew Magna, Somerset, and one of the first to benefit from the Thrive programme.
He says: ‘Getting involved in Thrive has certainly made me focus on how my business performs on a daily basis. We now have reports that run automatically and it requires little effort to get very useful in-depth information that immediately identifies issues or problems with a specific aspect of the practice management.'
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