← Dental PPO write-off calculator
Your practice management system already holds every number on this page. It reports production and it reports contractual adjustments, both as dollar columns, usually organised by provider, by procedure, or by day. What it does not do is divide one by the other per carrier — because that division only means something once you fix a period and a contract, which is not how the reports are grouped.
So the figure a practice ends up holding is a practice-wide write-off total: real money, correctly reported, and impossible to act on, because it names no contract. The contractual adjustment is posted at the same moment as the claim, never ages, is chased by nobody, and appears in no collections report. It is the only money a practice loses that never looks like a loss. This calculator takes three figures per plan off a report you already run and turns them into a rate the contracts can be compared on.
| Question | Where to answer it |
|---|---|
| What did we produce and what did we write off last quarter? | Your practice management system. It is the system of record and this page cannot replace it. |
| Which claims are outstanding, and what is on tomorrow's schedule? | Your practice management system. This page holds no ledger, no claims and no patient data. |
| What rate is each carrier actually reimbursing us at? | This calculator's effective reimbursement rate, per plan and blended — net over gross at your own fee schedule. |
| Which contract is costing us the most — not which has the worst rate? | This calculator's plan table, ranked by write-off dollars with the rate printed beside it. The worst rate is routinely not the biggest number. |
| Is any plan buying chair time for less than the chair costs to keep open? | This calculator's break-even reimbursement rate, stated as a rate so it lines up against the per-plan rates by eye. |
| Is our write-off one bad contract or eight mediocre ones? | This calculator's concentration reading — how many carriers make up half of it. The same total, two entirely different problems. |
| If we raise the fee schedule, what would we actually collect? | This calculator's fee-increase model, which separates what an increase collects from what it merely adds to the write-off. |
No account, upload, or subscription: it is a static page, the arithmetic runs in your browser, and your figures stay on your device. Every input is a period total for a carrier — production, write-off, chair hours, payroll, overhead — so no protected health information is involved at any point. Saving a scenario writes to this browser's own storage only.
Whatever your system calls a production-by-carrier or insurance-analysis report, for one closed period. You need three figures per plan: gross production at your own fee schedule, the contractual adjustment written off, and the period the two cover. Practice-wide you need chair hours worked, payroll and provider compensation, and practice overhead. Every one of those is a period total, not a patient record, so nothing protected leaves your system and nothing needs to be exported anywhere.
Some systems can be made to, with a custom report or a query, and if yours already prints a reimbursement rate per carrier then you do not need this page for that number. What no stock report does is rank the plans by the write-off dollars they take, state a break-even rate to compare them against, or separate what a fee schedule increase would collect from what it would merely add to the write-off. Those are the three outputs this calculator exists for.
No, and it could not replace one. Your management system is the system of record: it holds the ledger, the claims, the schedule and the patient data, and every figure typed here comes out of it. This is a single-screen piece of arithmetic you run on top of a report you already have, for a question the report is not organised to answer. Check its output back against your own numbers before acting on it.
Because the division only means something once you fix a period and a carrier. A practice-wide adjustment total names no contract, so it cannot be acted on: there is no decision whose answer changes when the total moves. A rate per carrier is the form in which two contracts can be compared, and comparing them is the only reason to compute it. The carrier labels stay in your browser and are never uploaded.
No. This page names no specific practice management system, makes no claim about any particular vendor's reports or features, and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any of them. It describes practice management systems as a category, because every practice has one and the reports they produce are organised the same way for this purpose.
What is my effective reimbursement rate? works through the arithmetic itself, with a worked example.