“I can’t believe those are the numbers.”

Every headline number your practice has, on one board, each against a target you set and can adjust, so the amber ones find you rather than the other way round. One practice or the whole group, combined or in isolation, in whatever shape your organisation actually has.

It covers the whole revenue picture, including a calculation of the plan income Dentally never surfaces. It separates what the practice keeps from what it billed, because associates work on their own terms and those terms decide what is left behind. And every operational figure opens into a checkable list of names and phone numbers rather than stopping at a headline.

So the board does not start you anywhere in particular. It shows you where starting would be most useful.

Every view carries the same filter along the top, and changing it re-answers the whole page. Practice, site, role, practitioner, and whichever period you want to look through: the last three months, the last twelve, or the financial year so far.

Roles are yours to define. They arrive set up along the obvious lines, but you can cut them however your practice actually works, so that people doing similar work are compared with each other rather than with a practice average that describes nobody.

Which is what makes a figure answerable. A number for the whole practice says only that something has moved. The same number for one role, over one quarter, says where.

It doesn’t, and that matters more than it first sounds. The plan provider collects the money, so it never arrives in Dentally as a payment at all.

So all the dashboard numbers would be useless! Not slightly out, but describing a different business from the one you are running, and a year-end set of accounts says so nine months late.

What we do about it is hold each plan’s capitation rate, and Dentally hold the patients on it, so plan income is calculated month by month and sits beside private and NHS revenue in the same view, per practitioner and per site. Underneath the total, the same screen breaks the week down by treatment category, so you can see which work is earning and where the mix is moving.

Revenue per associate shows you who is busy. What it does not show is what the practice is left with once they have been paid.

So you set each associate’s share once, configurable in the app (it defaults to 50%).

Associates are given freedom, and mostly that is right. Occasionally what they need is direction, and that conversation goes better with a screen than with an impression.

Each clinician can be given their own page and nothing else: their revenue, revenue per clinical hour, chair utilisation, diary fill, days to their next free slot, and their open courses, each against their own target rather than the practice’s. It costs £24 a month per clinician, and it takes the guesswork out of an appraisal.

Then you describe your organisation once, sites inside practices, practices inside areas, areas inside regions, and every level becomes selectable on the same board. Nothing is re-keyed and there is no second report.

The Day Book is where insights can be actioned, and it is aimed at reception and support staff rather than at the owner. Where the board shows that something has moved, this turns it into lists somebody can pick up and work through this morning.

Cancellations and DNAs to rebook. Open courses of treatment waiting on an appointment to finish them. Recalls that went out and were never taken up. Each opens into the patients behind it, with their contact details, so the front desk gets a morning’s work rather than a statistic.

It also reads per clinician, which is where the shape of a problem usually shows, and where you can see which associates could do with more support. Beside the lists, the diary-fill map runs out across the coming weeks, clinician by clinician.