Practice management for Australian dentists
Your busiest chair is the one nobody booked.
Practices do not usually lose patients to the surgery down the road. They lose them to a recall that never went out, a plan nobody followed up, and an enquiry that arrived on Saturday. Cadence closes those gaps, because that is where the money already is.
A full book is the goal. The gap between this and your actual Tuesday is what the rest of this page is about.
Do this on your own numbers
The gap is bigger than it looks
Not a case study. Four numbers you already know, multiplied together. Take thirty seconds and use your own.
Active patients
How many patients have been in over the last two years?
Overdue for recall
What share of them are past due? Most principals guess low, then check.
Average check-up and clean
Your fee for an 011 and a 111, together.
Times a year
Every one of those patients should appear roughly twice.
Multiply them. That is the revenue sitting in your existing patient list, not in a marketing budget. It is also the number no practice-management report will show you, because the patients who never came back are the ones the report cannot see.
We are not going to tell you what that number usually is. We have not seen your list, and a made-up average would be worth nothing to you.
Where it actually leaks
Four gaps, all of them quiet
None of these breaks anything. That is precisely why they persist — a failure that makes noise gets fixed by Friday.
The recall that never went out
A six-month recall is the cheapest appointment a practice will ever book: no advertising, no new-patient discount, a patient who already trusts you. It is also first to slip when reception is under water, and nothing breaks when it does. The patient simply does not come back, and no report lists the ones who did not.
Costs you: the cheapest appointments you had
The plan presented and never chased
A treatment plan that was not accepted is rarely a no. It is usually a patient who meant to ring back after payday. Without a list of who is sitting on what, and for how long, the follow-up depends on somebody happening to remember.
Costs you: work already diagnosed and quoted
The enquiry that arrived on Saturday
Your website form emails the practice inbox. By Monday it is under thirty others. A patient in pain does not wait — they ring the next practice on the list, and that practice answers.
Costs you: new patients, at their most motivated
The question nobody can answer
How many new patients came from the website last month? What was presented versus accepted, by dentist? Most practices cannot answer without an afternoon in a spreadsheet — so nobody asks, and nothing gets managed.
Costs you: every decision made on a hunch
How it fits together
One patient record, the whole way round
Each of these exists in your practice already. Usually in four products that do not talk to each other, and a spreadsheet holding them together. The joining is the product.
Found
A site on your own domain, with your services, dentists and hours — pages built from real records, not generated from a keyword list.
Booked
Online booking writes into the appointment book. Not an inbox somebody re-keys at 8am.
Treated
Charting, notes and consent against one record. Amendments tracked, never silently overwritten.
Quoted
Plans priced by ADA item number, presented, and visible as a follow-up list rather than a filing cabinet.
Paid
Accepted plans become invoices without retyping a figure. Part payments and refunds tracked to the cent.
Recalled
The recall generates itself and goes out on time. Which is where this loop starts again.
Built here
Written for Australia, not translated into it
Most practice software sold here was built for another market and adapted. The differences are not cosmetic, and you meet all four of them in the first week.
ADA item numbers from day one
A starter catalogue of the items a general practice uses daily — 011, 012, 022, 111, 311, 522 — ready to price and edit. Not an empty table you populate yourself before the software does anything useful.
GST that is right by default
Dental services supplied by a registered dentist are GST-free under s38-10 of the GST Act. A whitening kit is not. Tax is set per invoice line so one invoice carries both, and the default is no GST — which is correct for nearly every line you will ever raise.
Retention clocks that know about children
Seven years from last service. And where the patient was under 18, until they turn 25. Both clocks run, the longer one wins, and nothing is destroyed on a timer a lawyer has not reviewed. Get this wrong in the wrong direction and you have destroyed a record you were required to keep.
Privacy Act work, with the clock running
Consent, access requests and the breach register are in the product rather than a folder on the practice manager’s desktop. Log a suspected breach and the 30-day assessment window under s26WH(2) starts counting, on somebody’s task list.
Before you get excited
What it does not do yet
Said here, on the homepage, rather than in the third demo.
- No HICAPS or Tyro claiming yet. Your terminal keeps working exactly as it does now — but a claim is still a separate action from raising the invoice.
- No Medicare CDBS or DVA claiming yet.
- No imaging or intraoral sensor integration. Radiographs attach to the record as files.
- One practice, or a small group on a shared patient list. Twelve sites with separate ledgers is not us yet.
These are the roadmap, in roughly that order. If one of them is the reason you would say no, tell us on the call and we will tell you honestly whether to wait for us or stay where you are.
The questions you were going to ask anyway
Straight answers
- We already have a system. Why would we move?
- Mostly you would not, and we will say so. Moving is disruptive and your clinical software probably works. The practices this suits are the ones paying separately for a website, a recall tool and a booking widget that do not talk to each other — where the second system is the problem, not the first.
- How bad is the migration?
- Honestly, it depends entirely on what you are on. Some systems export cleanly and some export a CSV with the clinical notes in one column. Tell us which you use and we will tell you before you commit, not after.
- What happens to our data if we leave?
- You export it, and you keep read access to your records. A practice cannot function without its patient history and we are not going to use that as leverage to keep you. It is also the thing we would want promised to us.
- Who can see our patient records?
- Your staff, by role. Not us — support has no clinical access by default. When a problem genuinely requires it, access is granted for a fixed window with a written reason, and you can see every time it happened.
Twenty minutes, your practice, your numbers
Not a slide deck and not a discovery call. We open the product, load a practice shaped like yours, and you push on the parts you think will break. If it is not a fit, we will say so on the call rather than three emails later.