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This Dental Specific Podcast is dedicated to the Dental "Entrepreneur" Michael Dinsio, Founder of Next Level Consultants, delivers #TRUTH when starting up a dental practice. From the very first step to getting the keys of a dental practice, Michael shares his raw & unscripted playbook with you. Not only does this podcast provide you with "What To Do" but more importantly "What Not To Do". With over over 15 years of experience & over 150 past clients, Michael delivers an educational and informative program in a real and genuine way. Start w/ Episode 01 - as we go through a STEP by STEP process.
00:03
question is so low to John, I don't even know where to start with that question. guess the problem is, and by the way, I love that question. Interesting, interesting. This is an interesting topic. What's the solution here? Show up, understand your part, and just crush it. Pay per click, social media, we can talk about all this stuff, but what really matters is patient experience, that wow factor.
00:34
Starup unscripted, the questions you have with the truths you need to hear. Now your hosts, Michael Dinsio and John Bertagni.
00:49
All right, all right, guys. Welcome to the show. As always, thanks for getting in and subscribing and listening to two yahoos that kind of are in the dental industry that love what we do and interview really great people. I'm your host, Michael D'Incio, founder of Next Level Consultants, and of course, Mr. John Bertagni, my co-host. How you doing, John? I'm doing great. I'm doing great, Michael. We've got a great guest today, man.
01:18
We do. this is like, you know, we constantly say we, you know, there's foundational pieces to our show, you know, in our interviewees, but this is actually one. This is, you know, this could have been early on, but I think this is the right time to bring this piece in. And the only reason why it's early on is you got to set up that entity in order to get a loan. But, you know, we're going into accounting. We've got Kevin Bray from Dental Accounting Pros.
01:47
They're just studs. do everything from soup to nuts, from an accounting bookkeeping tax perspective. You know, I think they just give a good insight. We're going to primarily focus today on that bookkeeping piece, right? And really looking at those numbers on a month to month basis. And we're going to drill Kevin and ask some ridiculous questions on how some of these dentists just actually don't even know how their businesses are being run.
02:17
My dad, including, like he was horrible at books, accounting. So we're gonna follow the money today. Follow the money, baby. So Kevin, with no further ado, welcome to the show, brother. Tell us a little bit about you and the firm and like a two minute elevator pitch. Two minutes? What are you talking about? 30 seconds, 30 seconds. Go, go. Michael, John, thanks for having me.
02:47
Like you said, Kevin Bray with Dental Accounting Pros. We're a bookkeeping and tax firm. We work with dentists across the country and our foundation is really helping newer practice owners through the startup or transition set up process and help them understand their numbers. Of course, we work with practices at all stages of their careers, but we really enjoy the education piece. know, bringing people up to speed with how to.
03:13
understand the numbers side of their business, you know, because delivering dentistry is one thing, you know, dropping numbers in boxes and planning for the future is another. Well, and Kevin, you bring up a good point, like bringing that information and educating. I would say most people and most businesses in general don't understand how to read a P &L and balance sheet. And so it's nothing against a dentist. Like I'm saying everyone cannot. And
03:42
But they're so important because it actually, you know, it shows the heartbeat of the business itself, where there's profits, losses, where there's bleed out, potentially even where people are absconding money from your business. you know, like, help me understand and why isn't there just someone that gives a report on a month to month basis and just drops it in their lap saying, Hey, here's a, you know,
04:11
Here's something to look at here. Or do you guys do that? We do do that. But we mostly work with consultants and the tax team when it gets to that part. We found that if you just send a report over, like you said, a lot of small business owners don't understand how to read a profit and loss. know, debits and credits can be confusing to some people. But we like to put more visuals to it and put more storytelling to it.
04:41
We'll hop on a call and walk a doc through how to read a financial statement. we love utilizing tools like Fathom HQ, which is a visualization tool that helps build reports to give a cash flow snapshot. You know, sending the reports is one thing, but following through with a team like Next Level, you know, kind of walk through the numbers. That's really important. We found that just sending reports and emails
05:10
You look at it a couple of times and you walk away. You don't really bring it to action. Well, what's interesting is this. Sorry, Mike, that I'm just jumping in, for some reason I'm like on fire. For some reason, I'm really into accounting today. I'm not sure why. You never were before, but okay. know, come July, you're to be posting in Arkansas. That's right. That's right. But if you really think about it, like, here's the reality. Some of these startups,
05:40
And because, you know, I did M &A or selling practices, I dabble in it now, but some people actually sell their practice after two, three years, right? And they move on and build another one or they move to another state. So getting your business in order, you're not thinking 30 years down the line like my dad did. You could actually be thinking three years, five years down the line that you want to turn this. Plus banks now are requiring
06:10
these updates on P &L and balance sheets on an ongoing basis more than ever. Well, let me piggyback off of that. Hold on, Kevin. Let me piggyback off and throw it back to you. What I find with these startups, well, just with dentists in general, but specifically for startups, you know, they have nowhere to start. They don't know how the process works. They
06:36
They don't know what to expect. They're 30, 60 days out from opening. They know they need payroll. They've heard of this software called QuickBooks. They don't know even know where to start. you know, I guess big picture, what are the first steps of getting in to those softwares and getting them up and running so that they are prepared day one? Kevin, just...
07:05
kind of break down those first steps of how you get these guys prepped for what's to come in their first 30 days of business. Definitely. And that's something that we shine in. We get involved, of course, during a transition. We love to get involved, especially about 30 days prior to closing or 30 to 60 days prior to opening, because there's some pieces like
07:33
payroll, for example, it's kind of an afterthought. think a lot of owners think they can just open up an account, you know, and put employees names in and click, you know, process. But there's some behind the scenes compliance pieces you have to get set up. Of course, before that, you need to have your business entity. So a lot of attorneys will set that up for clients in each state's a little different. But here in Washington, you know, you'll likely be a PLC.
08:01
And then from there you go to the IRS website. It's a very simple form. It takes about five minutes to apply for an EIN number. the business entity is taxed at a federal level. But then from there, you have to apply for a business license in your state. So like for Washington, for example, you really need to click that you have employees that you're going to be having because that triggers an event behind the scenes to open up what's called LNI.
08:30
a laborers and industries workers' comp account. And that's crucial for payroll setup. And a lot of owners don't know that. So we get involved about 30 days prior. We get all of these headache compliance pieces set up, get the payroll onboarded. There's a lot of stuff happening behind the scenes. We love using Gusto. It's a very streamlined platform for payroll. Everything's on the so Kevin, you do payroll, right? So lately we've been having owners DIY their payroll with Gusto.
08:59
Okay, very streamlined platform. We will help educate on the front end and help with setup. And then owners are off to the races takes all five minutes to set it up. Yeah, because here's the thing, Kevin, we see a lot of times
09:15
payroll companies, right? That are just hammering these new entities, ADP, and then, you know, who knows? I mean, it's just constant paychecks where they're trying to do all these bolt-ons of value adds to the actual payroll. the cost per employee can get insane. every, you know, all these add-ons seem beautiful from the get-go, but man, I, know.
09:42
And I got caught up in it. And then we went online piece, which was so much easier and so much cheaper to run that payroll. Um, and also the other piece that people have to keep in mind is sometimes you have to do off, off period checks off cycle payrolls. Yeah, dude. And some that's gets insane in the dollar amounts with some of these big boxes where some of these online. They're, they're a little bit more, you know,
10:12
nimble and they don't charge you as much to do those sort of off cycles. What do you think? It all adds up. And that's why we love Gusto. You can run as many payrolls as you want. It's just a flat fee per company, per employee or contractor. But going back to the payroll providers, it comes down to support and reports. Those are the two biggest factors that
10:38
we want to see. like ADP has great reports, Gusto has great reports in support. There's some other providers out there where if something goes wrong, you're on like a chat support and you're talking to someone who doesn't even understand payroll sometimes. And that's a nightmare. mean, sometimes you have to pull back a payroll, you ended an extra zero or something, something went wrong, it's going to a wrong bank account. And it's such
11:06
routine thing that can be such a headache because employees want to get paid on time. You don't pay an employee on time all of a sudden it's one more reason why they want to go somewhere else. All right. So we set up the EIN. We set up the payroll system. We have employees in. We're also in this bookkeeping piece. So now we're going to start getting into bookkeeping because we're getting supplies. We're getting
11:36
Um, you know, marketing going out the door. Tell me, tell me that process. What does that look like? Are these, are you guys actually just looking into their bank account and seeing how these things are getting categorized? Are these guys sending you turbo scan, you know, receipts? Tell me how, you know, in your world, what you want that to look like. And, um, what do you think? Definitely. Um,
12:03
I think the accounting world has changed a lot in the last 10 years. There's a lot of buzzwords like cloud accounting that you hear now. Yeah. 10 years ago, know, QuickBooks desktop paper invoices, old school journal entering of payroll. Like when you process payroll, you'll have a list of debits and credits and manually entering that in. That has changed. Now QuickBooks online is the standard. We sync it with banking credit card accounts.
12:32
brings in all those transactions automatically. We sync in payroll providers so it maps in the journal entries. And there's some other third party apps like Hubdoc, for example, Receipt Bank is another one. You can take pictures on your phone and it uploads it and categorizes it. Hubdoc has a great feature we use for vendors. There's a unique URL email where you can ask the accounts receivable
13:02
to email copies of invoices to that. So automatically you have this data in the cloud. And so if you ever get audited, that's a big time saver. So I don't know if you've been through an audit, but if you don't have your back office in order, it's a headache. So that's where we come in. I mean, we onboard docs all the time where one comes to mind, they were using an Excel spreadsheet, you know, and another one,
13:31
you know, they're they weren't using a double entry accounting program. So it was only capturing some categories, but it wasn't really useful, you know, come tax time. Well, and that's one of the things that, you know, dentists are notorious and small businesses are notorious for just running their lives through their business, which, you started. I know, I know. But I mean, it just happens. I know. And and it's a it's just a matter of keeping these things in check.
14:01
and working with your bookkeeping slash accounting firm so that everything is categorized correctly. And let me explain, it's not only from a tax perspective, right? It's also if you ever want to transition your business. Exactly. All of these monies show lack of profitability if you're buying everything for your home and you know,
14:27
John, it's not only that, if a prospective buyer with a good consultant or CPA worth their salt is looking at the financials in detail, they'll see the garbage in there. And all of a sudden, they don't have faith in the deal because they look at all the bookkeeping records they'll pass three years and they've been running their personal life through it. And then they don't trust that you're running a squeaky clean operation. Well, and that's where you do need to hire a reputable firm to... Exactly.
14:55
to do the ad backs and things like that, that's for another show. know, bottom line is you need someone to keep those categories right. And you need someone that you can, you know, touch and feel and talk to you to get these things on an ongoing basis. And even if there's a huge red flag from a bookkeeping standpoint, it doesn't go all the way to the end of the year and, you know, and come tax time to say, Hey, we've been doing this wrong for nine months.
15:26
That's why bookkeeping is so darn important. It's really the foundation. If you don't have good books, can't give good, bad input equals bad output. You need a good scorecard to really give advisory on how the business is operating. Yeah. So from your standpoint, the payroll system, whether it's the online piece or the ADP,
15:55
the banking piece, should dentists feel concerned that you guys are absolutely looking under the covers and have access to all of this information and kind of talk about that security piece, how you guys work so that people don't feel weird that, you you have access to their bank account, you have access to their payroll, all that kind of stuff. Definitely. so we get third party access most times when we can.
16:25
And it, you know, people worrying about online banking that has changed a lot, I think 10 years ago, people were very skeptical, but now you just give them permissions, right? Right. Right. You know, now it's kind of the norm. You know, you, you do, you have all the apps on your phone for all your banks. You expect it almost to be all online in sync. So we, have some protocols in place behind the scenes.
16:54
You know, we don't give too much access to just one individual, for example, and just, you know, checks and balances. That's that's really the safeguard of all small business. You know, don't put too much responsibility in the hands of one person. Well, it's true. And the bottom line is, Kevin, you don't you know, you're not writing checks. No, a lot of times we, you know, bill pay has changed to we still do bill pay, but we use like bill dot com.
17:23
The dog logs in and approves the bills. So it's not necessarily, we don't have full control of every single piece, you know. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. So tell me a little bit more about how, you know, who are you dealing with typically at a dental practice? Are you dealing with the dentist owner?
17:51
office manager, how does that, what are you seeing, especially in startups? And then also that transition when it does go to an office manager who's doing the payroll and, you know, doing some other aspects of the business. Tell me what that might look like for our listeners. Definitely. I'd say 80 to 90 % of the time we're dealing with owners. So the owner doc, we work with the office managers too.
18:19
it just depends to what degree they're involved in managing the business. If we're, for example, giving weekly deposit reports, which is part of our EFT recon process, you know, our team members are in contact with the office managers quite often. And a lot of times, you know, the team at a dental office, a question comes up like a payroll tax question or
18:48
you know, excise tax question and they reach out to us. So we're not just a resource for the owner. We're resource for their business. You know, we're a sounding board for anything accounting, payroll, tax compliance. Gotcha. Yeah. And I mean, that's the interesting piece is, you these dentists, they'll get 941 for, you know, payments that they'll have to do. They'll get things from the state where they need to
19:17
you know, just constant data sets that are coming from an accounting standpoint, from a banking standpoint. What you're saying, Kevin, is this information can get passed on to you, especially, you know, the amount that comes from the state, from the federal, from, you know, banking perspectives. You're going to be able to say, hey, this is what we're doing here. This is how we're going to do this.
19:44
This is what we're, you know, from a tax planning standpoint, from bookkeeping standpoint, do you guys dive into all that and help your customers? Or is it just compartmentalized into where your bookkeeper, where your accounting firm, et cetera? Anything compliance, bookkeeping, tax planning, that's really our foundation. Business mechanics. We're not a financial planner. We're not an in-office consultant. That's not what we do.
20:13
Yeah. We really just focus on the numbers side and streamlining archaic older business systems. we don't paper file or e-file 941s anymore. We get docs set up on a full service payroll platform. So that's just taken care of. It's just one less thing to worry about. And honestly, Kevin, that's what I was hoping you would say. And truly from a viewership and listeners and followers standpoint.
20:43
Get with a firm that does full service and really almost puts it on auto magic where you don't have to be, you know, dinking around with this stuff on a day-to-day basis. There's so much that's going on from, you know, from a startup, but also, you know, mature business that trying to figure this stuff out on your own or having your sister-in-law do it, it's only going to result in problems. Getting a firm.
21:11
like dental accounting pros, which by the way, I don't even know how you got that name. how generic sounding keywords possible when back in like 1843, like how did you grab that? That's so ridiculous. We'll rebrand at some point to some catchy two syllable tech word, but you know, general accounting pros. It's unbelievable. But yeah, just just use a firm that understands the whole business.
21:41
and then let them take you to the, you know, the promised land, which is profitability and making sure you understand where the money's flowing. You gotta be profitable. That's the main thing. All right, well, Kevin, this was exactly what we wanted from a foundational standpoint. And we keep on saying that throughout this showgram here, that it's so important to work with individuals that know what the hell they're doing and they have your back.
22:11
And so finding trusted partners, that's the key in starting a small business. You know, don't go for the cheapest, don't go for the most expensive, go for the perfect fit for what you're trying to do. And they'll bring you to that, you know, place that you feel comfortable and dental accounting pros, national footprint. Kevin's information is going to be here on our site. It's also
22:41
seen below if you're watching but Kevin Bray I can't thank you enough for being a part of this this was exactly what we were looking for man man. John, Mike thanks for having me look forward to working with you guys more in the future. Love it man thank you. soon. Bye bye.
23:05
Thanks for listening. Tune in next week for another truth-filled episode of Startup Unscripted.
23:16
Check out Startup Unscripted on Facebook and YouTube. Click like, subscribe, and interact with Michael and John.