Dental chair-hour cost calculator
A dental clinic sells chair time. Put in your chairs, opening hours and monthly costs, and see what one chair-hour costs you, what it earns at the utilisation you run today, and how full the chairs must be before the month makes money.
How to use it
Count the chair time
Chairs, open days a month and open hours a day give the chair-hours you have to sell. Add the share of them that is actually booked.
Add the fixed costs
Rent, salaries of everyone but the dentists, utilities, equipment lease or depreciation, software, marketing and the rest.
Add what moves with the work
Materials and lab as a share of revenue, and the dentists’ percentage if they are paid one.
Put in production
Average production per booked hour, or an average fee and appointment length. Then read the results, and download them to Excel.
A worked example
Three chairs open 24 days a month, 9 hours a day, give 648 chair-hours. Fixed costs of SAR 67,200 a month work out at about SAR 104 for every hour a chair is open. At 55% utilisation only 356 of those hours are booked, so each booked hour carries about SAR 189 of fixed cost.
If a booked hour produces SAR 650 and materials, lab and the dentists’ percentage take 48% of it, each booked hour leaves SAR 338 towards the fixed costs. The clinic breaks even at about 31% utilisation and makes roughly SAR 53,000 a month at 55%.
Ten more points of utilisation, from 55% to 65%, is another 65 booked hours a month and about SAR 21,900 of profit, with no new chair, no new dentist and no higher prices. That is the number to set against the cost of a reminder system, a waitlist or a second assistant.
Available hours or booked hours?
Cost per available hour is what a chair costs simply by being open, and it falls only if costs fall or hours grow. Cost per booked hour is what each appointment hour has to cover, and it falls every time an empty slot is filled. Most clinics can move the second far faster than the first.
Save your design
Without saving, your clinic details, design and templates are cleared when the page reloads. Leave your email and they are kept in this browser from now on, and we will show you how they work in a Dentolize account, on every device and attached to patient files.
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Questions
How do I measure utilisation?
Booked chair-hours divided by open chair-hours, for a normal month. Count the time a patient is in the chair plus set-up, and leave out gaps, late starts and no-shows.
Where do dentists’ salaries go?
A dentist on a fixed salary is a fixed cost: put the salary in Other fixed costs. A dentist paid a percentage of production goes in the dentists’ percentage, because that cost rises and falls with the work.
Why is the cost per hour only the fixed costs?
Because materials, lab and the dentists’ percentage are spent only when the chair is working. They come off each hour’s revenue instead, which is what makes the break-even honest.
What if the break-even says out of reach?
Then each booked hour leaves too little after materials, lab and the dentists’ share to ever cover the fixed costs, however full the chairs are. Look at prices and the percentage paid before looking at the diary.
Is anything saved?
Only if you press Save my design: then your figures stay in this browser for next month. Nothing is sent to us.
Utilisation measured, not estimated
Dentolize reports booked and available hours per chair, per dentist and per weekday, from the appointments themselves. Thirty minutes on your own clinic.