Bank reconciliation sounds mundane. In the context of dental embezzlement, it is one of the most powerful theft-prevention tools available — and one of the most commonly neglected. In this episode, Prosperident's Amber Weber, Wendy Askins, and David Harris walk through the core financial safeguards every dental practice must have in place, explaining clearly what should be done by staff, what should be outsourced, and what the practice owner must personally own.
The title captures the choice every dental practice owner makes by default: either you reconcile your accounts regularly with appropriate oversight, or you are operating recklessly — and leaving the door open for theft that may not be discovered for years. This episode explains exactly how to choose reconciliation.
Topics covered include:
The dentists who are hardest to steal from are not the ones with the most sophisticated systems — they are the ones who consistently do the basics. This episode tells you exactly what those basics are.
To learn more about protecting your practice, visit www.prosperident.com, www.dentalembezzlement.com, or call 888-398-2327. Schedule a consultation at www.prosperident.com/meetwithdavid.
Timestamps:
0:00 - Introduction / Show open
3:49 - Why bank reconciliation is the single most important embezzlement deterrent
11:27 - How to reconcile practice accounts correctly and what to look for
19:05 - The frequency and format of reconciliation that provides meaningful protect
24:00 - Which financial tasks can be safely delegated to staff
32:00 - When and how to use outsourced bookkeeping or accounting services
40:00 - The financial oversight tasks that only the practice owner should perform
48:00 - How embezzlers exploit practices that skip or superficially perform reconci
56:00 - The role of your practice management software in financial oversight
1:04:00 - Building a monthly financial oversight routine that provides real protectio
1:12:31 - Closing / How to contact Prosperident
Auto-generated transcript: Reconcile or Reckless - You Decide!
You are listening to the dental practice owner's podcast. Brought to you by Prosperident From our unique perspective as dentistry's and bezel-lit experts, Prosperident's team can bring you the information that is important to practice owners. The dental practice owner's podcast brings you strategies, tools and tips that you can use, and dentistry's thought leaders as guests. So sit back, relax, and listen to Prosperident's Amber Weber, and listen to Prosperident's and let's listen to the videos I mean,
Ph.D., when they ask us and David Harris talk about the issues that matter to you. You are listening to the dental practice owner's podcast. Brought to you by Prosperident. From our unique perspective as dentistry's and bezel-lit experts, Prosperident's team can bring you the information that is important to practice owners. The dental practice owner's podcast brings you strategies, tools and tips that you can use, guests. So sit back, relax and listen to
prosperity, amber, weather, Wendy Askins, and David Harris. Talk about the issues that matter to you. Good day to all family. Thank you for joining us for the prosperity and C.B.
19 webinar series. This particular webinar is going to talk about reconcile or reckless. You decide which one you want to be. I'm joined today by Amber, the amazing amber. The first day said in our beloved CEO, prosperity, David Harris.
And with that, you can take it away, David. Let's start with a couple of definitions. And I don't think you're going to find these in the dictionary anywhere, but these are the way we're going to talk about fixed.
So we talk about two different activities. And one is balancing and balancing is what's left. And you can see what it's trying to do. The primary purpose is to make sure that the bank deposit agrees with. And I assume we all know this, but I'll say, PMS here refers to practice management software,
not the other thing. So we want to make sure that the deposit agrees with the software and that no treatment has been missed or left out. And there are also some procedures that staff do at the end of a month to close that month out in your software and elsewhere. So when we talk about balancing, we're talking about the staff activities. And when we talk about reconciliation,
we're talking about normally to practice on, and in some cases in a really large practice, this might be the office manager who's doing this stuff. And also some things that could be outsourced. So here we're talking about the supervision of the activities as opposed to doing them. And we're not really intending here to teach doctors how to do their staff job,
because that'll just make a huge mess in every practice. What we're really talking about is how to supervise that job. And that's going to be a lot of our focus today. And really, Brian terms, there are two kinds of investment. And the first one, I call reconciliation death. So this happens if either there's no reconciliation being done in a practice, or there is, but it's incomplete or it's ineffective. If I'm a staff member and I realize that nobody other than me
is taking an interest in whether the bank deposit blinds up with the practice management software, stealing is really easy. All I do is short the bank deposit. So the practice management software says that $2,400 should be going in the bank today. And I deposit some lower number. This is easy theft.
And it happens when there's no oversight. If the balancing activity is supervised, now what I have to do is what I call concealment theft. And that means that I have to do something to individual patient accounts, so that today looks like it's going to balance. This is a lot more sophisticated. So I guess what I'll say is really the primary purpose
of that oversight or reconciliation process. If I can be a little fesciest about it, is to weed out the stupid thieves or the lazy ones. And make it so that at a minimum, if somebody's going to steal from you, they have to work a little higher at it. One thing I want to tackle specifically is that I hear a lot of doctors when they call me initially, and they're talking to me about the possibility
that their practice is being enveloped. And one thing they say to me is, but I protect myself because I take the deposit to the bank myself. And I could tell you that that activity is not nearly as valuable as people think it is. The question I ask a lot of these doctors next to kind of some of them is, okay, but how do you know that the amount that you left the practice with was the right amount?
And that's where the shoulders kind of get shrugged, and somebody's at all, I guess when you put it that way. To me, it's what's more important than who carries the money to the bank is that the practice owner can confirm that the amount that left the practice was the right amount. And the amount that showed up at the bank was the right amount. So you don't need to do the deposit to do that. All you need to do is have online making,
and have a concept of what the right amount should have been. And that's what we're going to talk about with you minutes.
The other danger I'm going to caution people on is relying on daily data and not looking at monthly data.
I know a lot of doctors, for example, who will look at the merchant account. And the merchant account just to make sure everybody knows what we're talking about is that the facility in the practice for incoming credit card payments. So that's why we're shooting at half, that's tied to the merchant account. So people will look at the daily tape from the merchant account and compare the interest of the practice management software. And if those two line up as far as they're concerned, they're fine. The problem is your practice is not open 24 hours a day,
and it's not open seven days a week. In fact, right now it's probably not open at all, in normal times. So you can look at a tape that comes out of that machine and balance it to the practice management software. And then somebody else can... come in and do more transactions and then. So we really need to look at monthly stuff as well as daily stuff because things can happen outside of when the practice is open. So there's
a definite danger in daily in relying on daily stuff. So let's say back to about 30 years ago, it used to be a lot more simple when we needed to track what happened in our business on a daily monthly basis. This makes me think back to my first job I had, helping at a restaurant back in the 80s, where you swipe the credit card and you thought you were really cool because you were running that swipe and at the end of the day all of the different types of payments that you had received were separated in a paper amount, you know, your seats for credit cards cash, check
