Why the total lies
A flat month can be one injector up and two down. A record month can be one neurotoxin promotion and nothing else moving. Growth can be ads buying every new patient while returning patients quietly stop coming. The total cannot tell you which, and by the time it can, the quarter is gone. The cuts are how you see it in the first week of the month.
What each of the four cuts answers
| Cut | The question it answers | The decision it drives |
|---|---|---|
| By provider | Who is booked, who is rebooking their own patients, and who the practice depends on | Schedules, hiring, who gets the new-patient calls, what happens if one person leaves |
| By treatment | What the practice sells, what is growing, and what is on the menu for no reason | Where marketing goes, what gets a launch, what gets quietly retired |
| New versus returning | Is growth earned, or is marketing replacing the patients who left | Whether the money goes to acquisition or to the comeback |
| By source | Which channel the new patients came from, and what each one is worth after their second visit | Which spend to double, which to stop, and whether referrals are being asked for |
How to pull them from any record system
- Export every completed appointment or transaction for the month with the date, the patient, the provider, the service and the amount paid. Every booking, EMR and point-of-sale system exports this, usually as a spreadsheet.
- Export the patient list with the date each patient was created and the source field, if you capture one. If you do not, add the field to intake this month; the cut by source starts with next month's patients.
- Join the two on the patient. A patient whose first-ever visit falls in this month is new; everyone else is returning.
- Build four pivot tables: amount by provider, amount by service, amount by new or returning, amount by source. Save the file with the month in the name so next month's compares to it.
- Read each cut against last month and the same month last year before you read it against a target.
A worked example, labelled illustrative
Say the month closed at $84,000, flat against last month, and the owner shrugs. In this illustrative practice the cut by provider shows one injector at $51,000, up from $44,000, and the other two down a combined $7,000. The cut by treatment shows tox up and every laser line down, and new versus returning shows new-patient revenue up while returning revenue fell by about the same amount. The flat total was a growing injector covering a retention problem, and the flat month was the month to act. Replace every figure with your own.
When one provider or one treatment carries the practice
- Name it. A practice where most of the revenue runs through one person is one resignation from a crisis, and the owner often knows it and has not written it down.
- Route new patients to the second provider on purpose, with the lead provider's endorsement in the booking message, and watch that provider's rebooking rate rather than their first-visit revenue.
- Give the carrying treatment a companion. The patients already in the chair for tox are the easiest audience for the next treatment, and the launch goes to them first.
- Put the dependence on the dashboard as a share: the top provider's revenue over the total, and the top treatment's over the total. Watch it fall on purpose.
How to run it on Monday
- Pull last month's two exports before the first appointment.
- Build the four pivots and write one sentence under each: what moved, and why you think so.
- Pick the one cut that worried you most and schedule one action against it this week.
- Repeat on the first Monday of every month. The second month is where the pattern shows.
What to do next
NorthCore's Know your numbers solution builds the live dashboard on top of your record system: the four cuts by provider, treatment, new versus returning and source, refreshed without the export. Scoped in writing and covered by the promise on this site: results in 90 days, or we keep working until you have them.
