Practice Planning Tool

Translate overhead into a patient-volume target

Break-Even Visit Volume

Estimate how many completed visits the practice needs each month, week, and clinic day to cover its real operating obligations.

✓Contribution earned from each completed visit

✓Operating, owner-pay, and cash break-even targets

✓Capacity, scheduling, and reimbursement stress checks

What does a completed visit actually contribute?

Use expected cash collections—not billed charges—and subtract the expenses that rise when another patient is seen. This creates the amount available from each visit to pay the practice’s monthly overhead.

Collected revenue

Use a realistic average

Average collected revenue per completed visit ?

Do not use the fee schedule, gross charge, or the highest-paying insurer.

Other stable monthly contribution ?

This is net contribution, not gross ancillary, procedure, membership, or product revenue.

Costs that change with volume

Do not also enter these as fixed costs

Costs charged as a percentage of collections ?

Direct cost for each completed visit ?

Reimbursement stress test

Shows the volume required if collected revenue per visit is lower than planned.

Contribution is not profit. It is the amount left from a completed visit after its direct and collection-linked costs. That amount must still pay staff, occupancy, insurance, technology, owner compensation, debt, and every other monthly obligation.

What must the practice pay every month?

Enter a normal mature month. Convert quarterly and annual bills to monthly amounts, and keep owner compensation and debt separate so the results can show progressively more complete break-even targets.

People

Monthly employer cost

Clinical and administrative employee wages

Employed physician and APP wages

Payroll taxes, workers’ compensation, and benefits ?

Practice overhead

Include the easily missed costs

Rent, CAM/NNN, utilities, and facility services

EHR, software, phones, internet, and IT/cybersecurity

Malpractice and other business insurance

Accounting, legal, compliance, licensing, and management

Marketing, office administration, and logistics

Other recurring fixed or semi-fixed costs

Owner and financing obligations

Shown as separate break-even layers

Physician-owner compensation and employer-paid benefits ?

Monthly business loan and equipment payments ?

Can the planned clinical schedule support the target?

Break-even is based on completed visits. The schedule must include enough appointment slots to absorb cancellations and no-shows without requiring an unsafe or unrealistic daily workload.

Provider capacity

Use sustainable—not heroic—throughput

Providers seeing patients

Clinic days per provider each month

days

Sustainable completed visits per provider per clinic day ?

visits

Expected use of available clinical capacity

Allows for ramp, open slots, leave, and normal schedule variation.

Appointments that become completed visits

For example, 90% means 10% of scheduled appointments do not become completed visits.

Planning cushion above cash break-even

Adds room for costs and collection performance that miss the plan.

A full schedule is not the same as a completed visit. Cancellations and no-shows increase the number of appointment slots needed, but they do not produce the collections required to cover overhead.

Review the assumptions

Confirm the average visit economics, monthly obligations, and practical clinical capacity. The results will show several break-even layers because covering rent while paying the physician nothing is not a complete business model.

Your break-even visit target

The result reflects the assumptions entered above.

Cash break-even completed visits0 / monthIncludes owner compensation and business debt payments

Completed visits per clinic day0Across the entered providers and clinic days

Appointments that must be scheduled0 / monthAdjusted for the entered appointment completion rate

Planned capacity difference0 visits

Monthly target	Costs supported	Completed visits	Completed visits/week	Visit collections

Important: This educational planning tool provides estimates based solely on user-entered assumptions and a simplified break-even model. It is not a budget, business plan, pro forma, valuation, reimbursement analysis, coding determination, financing commitment, or legal, tax, accounting, investment, employment, clinical, or lending advice. Actual collections, contractual adjustments, denials, patient payments, payer mix, visit mix, staffing needs, costs, capacity, and operating results vary materially. Break-even does not mean the practice has adequate working capital, positive accounting profit, sufficient debt-service coverage, or a safe clinical schedule. Verify all assumptions with qualified accounting, legal, reimbursement, operational, clinical, and lending advisors before acting. Do not enter protected health information or other confidential information.

Planning reference: U.S. Small Business Administration — Break-Even Point