Dental Practice Heroes
Where dentists learn how to cut clinical days while increasing profits - without sacrificing patient care, cutting corners, or cranking volume. We teach you how to grow a scalable practice through communication, leadership, and effective management.
Hosted by Dr. Paul Etchison, author of two books on dental practice management, dental coach, and owner of a $6M collections group practice in the south suburbs of Chicago, we provide actionable advice for practice owners who want to intentionally create more time to enjoy their families, wealth, and deep personal fulfillment.
If you want to build a scalable practice framework that no longer stresses, drains, or relies on you for every little thing, we will teach you how and share stories of other dentists who have done it!
Dental Practice Heroes
Tax Hacks Your Regular Accountant Won't Tell You w/ Mike Bark
You might be missing out on tens of thousands in tax savings and not even know it. But all that can change with the help of a dental CPA. Mike Bark of Bull Moose Financial joins me today to talk profitability, tax mistakes and strategies that dentists overlook far too often.
We dive into the tax landscape of dentistry, explore what a good dental CPA can do for your practice, and unpack how shifting your tax entity could be the smartest move you make this year. If you want to save more next tax season or find out how to benchmark your practice’s performance, this episode is packed with insights you won’t want to miss!
Topics discussed in this episode:
- Why you should hire a dental CPA
- Common tax mistakes in dental practices
- S corporation vs. C corporation vs. LLC
- Rising staff costs and labor shortages
- Business deductions: home office, vehicles kids on payroll
- Bull Moose Financial’s approach to dental services
Connect with Mike Bark:
https://www.bullmoosefinancial.com/
mbark@bullmoosefinancial.com
(414)-759-9629
Special offer: Mention the Dental Practice Heroes to waive the $2,500 onboarding fee at Bull Moose Financial!
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I help dentists take more time off while making more money through systematization, team empowerment, and creating leadership teams.
Join the DPH Hero Collective and get the tools, training, and support you need to transform your practice:
- Team and Doctor Training for every aspect of Practice Management
- Comprehensive Training: Boost profit, efficiency, and team engagement.
- Live Q&A Sessions: Get personalized help when you need it most.
- Supportive Community: Connect with practice owners on the same journey.
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Ready to build a practice that works for you? Visit www.DentalPracticeHeroes.com to learn more.
You could be missing out on tens of thousands in tax savings without even realizing it. Actually, most dentists are, but it's not because they're doing anything wrong, they just aren't getting the best advice. Well, today you can start changing that. Tax season has just ended and today I'm joined by dental CPA Mike Bark and we're covering the biggest mistakes. Dentists make tax planning moves that can save you money and strategies to help you keep more of what you earn and build a stronger, more profitable practice.
Speaker 1:You are listening to Dental Practice Heroes, where we help you create and scale your dental practice so that you are no longer tied to the chair. I'm Dr Paul Etcheson, author of two books on dental practice management, dental coach and owner of a $6 million group practice in the suburbs of Chicago. I want to teach you how to grow and systematize your dental practice so you can spend less time practicing and more time enjoying a life that you love. Let's get started. Hey everyone, welcome back to Dental Practice Heroes Podcast. I am your host, dr Paul Edgison, and I'm very excited for my guest. This is my previous dental CPA and you're like why isn't he in your CPA anymore? And it's because I partnered up with MB2 and it was included, but this is somebody I'd still be working with. I worked with for a long time when I had my dental practice all by myself before I went with the DSO route. But this is a CPA from Bull Moose Financial, the founder, and he's still doing taxes and still helping Dennis, mike Bark. What's happening, mike? How you doing man?
Speaker 2:Well, great to talk to you, Paul, In the middle of tax season. We were sorry to see you go at the time. You were a good client.
Speaker 1:Now, you know, when I opened my practice I didn't know what to do. Like man, does anyone know a good accountant? And then one of my buddies was like this is who does my taxes every year? And this is who I started with. And then eventually, as my practice grew maybe two, three years into it I realized this might require a little bit more of a maybe dental-specific CPA or something with just a little bit more caliber than what I was working with. I know this is a common thing that a lot of dentists do is they start with some personal accountant that they've been using year after year? Why would anyone want a dental CPA? And what does a dental CPA bring that the normal mom and pop accountant doesn't?
Speaker 2:Sure, I think the first thing is dentists need to realize right from the get-go their business is in a unique position in that they're not a micro business where you can just rely on a compliance package, if you will, from a CPA like an H&R Block or a Jackson Hughes who's just going to do the return, and they're not quite big enough to have an internal controller or CFO in their business. So there's a lot going on with the business that they need, in my opinion, somebody who's able to look out for their taxes, for their financial statements. It's usually not a core competency of dentists. Sometimes I know when I'm talking numbers of dentists, you can see them glaze over as we're talking about it. So I think it's an area where they have to spend a little bit of money on it. It's not an area where they need to be gouged by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm doing a valuation right now for one of my clients. They're targeting a specialty practice. The specialty practice is doing $1.4 million in profit and we're looking at the financial statements and the tax returns.
Speaker 2:First thing we notice is they own their own building and they're not paying themselves rent. I'm like, well, that's unusual, both from a liability standpoint and even a tax savings standpoint. So this is a small change of paying themselves. Rent would net them $2,000 a year. Then we notice well, why are you a Schedule C for tax purposes? You know it's a stable owner, solo practitioner. Given their level of income they should for sure be an S corporation. That for them would be another $30,000 to $35,000 a year in tax savings. Finally, they could have been paying their state taxes at the entity level. That would have netted them, based on where they were located, another $40,000, $45,000 of tax savings. So all in, you know, $75,000, $80,000 of tax.
Speaker 2:I mean that's an extreme scenario, but we looked at their accounting fees every year and they were paying $3,500 a year. The tax returns were correct but there was no planning, there was no advice. This person is having my buyer put together a valuation because they have no idea what their practice might be worth. Wow, because they have no idea what their practice might be worth Wow. So where a dental CPA can come in is would he reach those decision points of your business, be it bringing in an associate selling to a DSO, bringing in an associate to see your business expanding your practice. All of our clients have been there and done that, and that's important because we've seen what they've done well, what they haven't done well, we'll have connections in terms of banks, builders, attorneys, other people who could do a really good job on your account and be able to guide you through those decision points as you come through them, because we've seen them a million times.
Speaker 1:Totally. I remember working with my person that worked before you and I'd asked him I said is my business like really profitable? He goes, your business is so profitable and I wanted to know, like, what about like dental offices? And I think that's awesome because, like when I switched to you, I got to, I was able to see, I mean, at least like how, like my numbers compared to other dental offices. I find a lot of dentists just don't even know how to use their P&L like what it's even useful for. They'll send me their profit and loss and I start going through it and I ask them questions about it and they have no idea. They can't tell like where any of their money's going or what their profit is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I'm for a very simple financial statement that we want our clients to be able to look at four different numbers, maybe within their financial, and know whether or not they're doing well. So I mean, the first thing they're going to take a look at is the overall staff expense. That's the biggest cost and I think every dental practice we have with the exception of maybe endodontists, who will sometimes spend a little more on supplies, supplies and labs should be together and should be evaluated as its own number. Then you have your general and administrative costs. So these are the costs that aren't going to change relative to your production all that much Advertising, continuing education, computer expense, insurance, meeting expense, office supplies, professional fees.
Speaker 2:Then you look at your occupancy expense. So occupancy is your rent, your utilities, your repairs and maintenance, real estate taxes, if you have to pay them, and all those numbers will come down to what's called operating income, and operating income is important because if you take that number minus 100%, that's your overhead and then we'll have items that are what we call below the line. So that's doctor's pay, associate pay, Some clients will have kids on their payroll, some clients will do some things that are a little more tax motivated, if you will, that will drop below the line or they may have a one-time consulting fee.
Speaker 1:So as far as, like, staff expense goes, I mean, this is a really hot button issue that's come out in the past like two, three years, as we saw just. The market rate for dental labor has increased significantly and I think most dentists are PPOs where they don't get the corresponding increase in the fees that they're getting to increase their income to offset that. What are you seeing as far as staff expense, like non-doctor staff expense right now as a percentage of collections?
Speaker 2:So what it used to be is most of our clients were 24% or less. So that included the payroll, payroll taxes, retirement contributions, if you had health insurance or any employees, staff benefits, uniforms, temporary labor was 24% or less. Since COVID it got as high for our clients as just under 30%. We're starting to see that come back down for our average client, where we're just a shade over 28% right now. In my opinion, even looking at our industry and accounting and how hard it is to hire somebody, my belief is if you're a professional service, you're going to have to be able to do or be compensated more with less resources than he had in the past. If my $12 an hour dental assistant quits, no worries, another one's right up the block, I'll get them in here. If my hygienist who's making $28 an hour quits, no worries, there's this wealth of them. That's not the case. I think we have a long-term labor shortage in this country. They called it the baby boom for a reason. Those people are retiring. There's not as many Gen X or millennials coming up behind. So big thing dental practices are going to have to look at is if they are a network and they have a waiting list to get in to see them. First thing you need to be looking at is getting out of network.
Speaker 2:We have seen over the past two years about 30% of our clients exit, being preferred providers and going out of network, and the good thing is we can tell people who are going to go out of it.
Speaker 2:Yes, you can still come here as a patient, because you have to understand as a patient. If I get a letter saying you're going out of network, I'm going to assume I can't come to you and that's not the case. They're still going to use my insurance. It just may mean if I like going to you, I'm going to have to pay a little bit out of pocket every time for that experience, that level of service. And what clients are finding is their collections now are starting to go up as a result of getting out of it, and now they are starting to see the staff costs go back down to normal levels. And what we're trying to tell people is if that old model was a million dollars and you were writing off 25%, you still would do a million dollars of dentistry. So why don't we just get it to where we're doing a million dollars of dentistry and getting paid for a million dollars?
Speaker 1:or as close to it as possible. You mentioned 30%, and then your staff expenses started coming down recently. Was that due to anything other than going out of network? Were there some other strategies that dentists were using, or just getting more efficient?
Speaker 2:No, I think for the most part it was people getting out of being in network. We haven't really seen a reduction in headcount yet, but what we've encouraged clients to do is, if somebody does quit their office, really make a determination. Is that person really needed? Are you able to either leverage technology or some other resources to not have to fill that position? But by and large, they're still going to as best they can fill it. So it has been people leaving. Insurance Collections are starting to go up. We have seen a flattening in wages.
Speaker 2:It seemed two, three years ago there was a hygiene shortage that was coming. I think even pre-COVID. When I first started, every hygienist was 55, 60 years old. Started, every hygienist was 55 60 years old. And the problem there was hygienists when I first started, way back in 2000, made 28 to 30 dollars an hour. Fast forward to about 2016, they were still making 28 to 30 dollars an hour. So I think a lot of people who would have went into that profession chose well, maybe I'll be a nurse or I'll be something different with this, because I can get paid a lot more to do it. But we went through a period of time where we saw hygiene went from 30, also it was 35. You blink and it was up to 40. You blink again, it was 45. And it has seemed to have settled in somewhere between 45 to $50 an hour for a hygienist. I think the hope there is now that those wages have come up to probably what reality is, you'll see more people in the pipeline who want to go through hygiene school.
Speaker 1:Have you seen any lessening of the admin staff in dental offices due to the recent coming and popularity of AI software and administrative stuff?
Speaker 2:No, I think that's an area where our clients are going to be slow to adapt to.
Speaker 2:I mean, we are seeing clients who are using recall procedures that are a little more innovative than what they have in the past, but we have seen those wages essentially flatten out too.
Speaker 2:I think people have taken more of an approach that if I could get a person with a good personality, I can train them to be an admin. But what I would tell anybody is if you look at the base level wage in this country, we were at a place called Quick Trip, which is a huge gas station chain in Wisconsin yesterday. Their entry level is $21 an hour Wow. So if their entry level is $21 an hour, what they're looking for at Quick Trip is, yes, it's known for being very friendly. It's known for being very customer service orientated. Well, okay, that means the baseline in a professional dental office is going to be somewhere north of $21 an hour in most cases. So again, I think that's where dentists really need to consider their insurance relationships and starting to go hey, if I'm going to run a private practice, I need to be paid 100% of what it is I'm producing, Wow.
Speaker 1:I just did a YouTube video that I recorded and I was talking about how we need to start hiring outside of dentistry for front desk, because for the admin people, because there's just not enough people and it's hard to find great attitudes when you're limiting yourself to people with only dental experience. And I had said on my video that I mean someone that's working down at the store at some fast food place or some restaurant that maybe wants to get their nights and weekends back. They might be making $15 an hour and I had no idea that. I mean, is that $21 an hour? Is that common?
Speaker 2:That's common. I mean, big national gas station Buc-ee's is moving into our area. You can be the car wash manager there and make $175,000. Jeez, they're paying people who are again. I mean, they're trying to create a good experience. You're going to have to compensate people accordingly If you want somebody coming in to do that job. Who's going to be friendly with their staff responsible.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's interesting. I mean we dropped Delta about a year and a half ago and what I mean we were at capacity, but what prompted it is that I kept raising my staff wages and it got to the point where it's like this doesn't make sense and I wanted friendly people that take great care of people. But the problem was I couldn't keep them because they were going somewhere else for an extra like $2 to $5 an hour and eventually I'm like, well, I don't have money to give to raise it, and we just had to do it, and I think we did the same thing. Our payroll actually went up to about 32%. Right now it's about 29%, and it boggles my mind just how quickly all that change happened. Let's talk about, like you mentioned, the S-corp versus the C-corp thing. I know this comes up a lot for dentists. What does that mean and why? How do we know what we should be?
Speaker 2:Sure. So most dentists will incorporate as an LLC or a PLLC based on their state and those are what are called disregarded entities. So it means you have the choice in how you want to be taxed. Going forward corporations, somebody forms their LLC and they make that S corporation election right away. And what they did a factor into all this is in 2018, when the tax law changed and introduced the qualified business income tax deduction that in a lot of cases they'd be better off as just a sole proprietor taxed or LLC taxed as a sole proprietor. So again, it's just an area where, if they're not getting advice and their situation's not being looked at, they will jump the gun on that election.
Speaker 2:S-corporations also have the issue of taking distributions in excess of basis, meaning if you take money out and you do not have enough money that you put in or enough past profits, you have capital gains taxes. So young practices struggle to be an S corporation. Now where the savings in an S corporation comes in, in that example I gave earlier had a dentist do about $1.4 million of compensation. They could have set a reasonable compensation up for themselves even if we were going nuts and let's just say we were going to pay them $700,000 a year. The remaining $700,000 would come out without the FICA and Medicare tax At 2.9% between the employer and the employee side. On that simple change, they're saving $21,000 of taxes right from the jump. Wow. If they wanted to be even reasonably aggressive, they could have said let's set our W-2 up at 345. That's the maximum that a 401k will consider. Well, now we're talking a million dollar differential and that 2.9% also becomes $30,000.
Speaker 2:So S-Corporation is a great place to be for a doctor who's going to be a sole owner. They don't really have any intention of having partners in the future and has a mature practice in that they have previously taxed profits within the business. But as they're starting out again, they need to have a conversation at minimum with a good tax person to discuss what entity works best for me and we have a few new clients and what we've told them is, as we do our tax planning meetings, it's going to be wait and see. We'll see how's your practice performing. Are you buying a bunch of assets that we could take section 179 on? What are all those things that go into it, to see what entity works best for you and your situation?
Speaker 2:A lot of times it's going to be S-Corporation for some partners, c-corp's not going to work really well. In dental there's a few isolated cases. I could think of that it might. The advantage of that is you essentially you don't have any pass-throughs. You pay a corporate level tax, which right now is 21% versus 35%. If you are in a situation where you are going to have a C corporation and your intention is to build up and buy multiple practices and conserve your cash, maybe C corporation's the best way to go, but it's a limited situation.
Speaker 1:So how hard is it to change and bounce between the few and change the election?
Speaker 2:So when you start an LLC, they default you to being a sole proprietor. So you have to proactively make an S-corporation election or C-corp or partnership. Once you make that election, you're locked for five years. So again, you want to not only look at your current situation but where do you see yourself being, at least for the foreseeable future? To me, where most money gets left on the table in terms of tax planning is people who aren't the right entity in a lot of cases. So we'll see them again. The situation where clear-cut S corporation they could be saving $35,000 a year simply by filing a different tax return, and that doesn't even consider paying their income taxes at the state level. Then too, yeah, that's free money. That's not even exotic tax planning, that's just 101 kind of stuff. Yeah. But if you're just paying somebody for compliance, I empathize with that preparer because their business is built on high volume. We're going to get the work done and we're not in the advice giving business, which is fine.
Speaker 1:So around tax time we will always see a post on one of the Facebook forums, and it's does somebody recommend a good accountant? I feel like I'm paying way too much in taxes and I'm sure you get this all the time. What is your response to that?
Speaker 2:Well, let's even take a look at the $1.4 million example. One way or the other, that guy's going to pay a lot in taxes. I mean, you get to certain income levels and you are going to pay a lot of taxes. I think another thing dentists need to keep in mind is the tax code is somewhat biased against professional service companies, in that once our income goes over a certain level, we don't get the qualified business deduction. Some of the manufacturing and research and development credits that are out there don't really apply to professional services. So if you're successful, you're going to pay a lot of taxes.
Speaker 2:But again, in this guy's particular situation, okay, we could have saved $75,000 by doing his tax return differently. Could he have implemented a cash balance plan to defer even more tax? Absolutely, I mean a relatively small staff it was a specialty office that he could have probably saved another two 300,000. But even then, at the end of the day, it's still going to pay a lot in taxes. It's just that's kind of the way it goes if you're high income. Now, that's not to say there's not things that could be done differently to bring that down a little, but there's not a magic bullet where we can go. Hey, you're the guy making 1.4,. Let's get you down to zero. There's no mechanism to do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'd like to see the accountant advertising we don't even pay taxes, like that's your tagline. I mean, if I figured it out I wouldn't be paying any. Not to talk politics. I don't want to go into politics, but you know we had the, the beefing up of the IRS, and now we've got a change in leadership in the federal government. I wonder, what did you guys see with your clients? Did you see an uptick in audits?
Speaker 2:I haven't had a client audit in about 20 years. Oh, wow, that's fantastic. Now one could say, okay, mike, it's probably because you're telling everybody no on deductions. The fact of the matter is the IRS is woefully understaffed. Wow. So the IRS does not have the manpower, nor have they had the manpower to audit.
Speaker 2:Secondly, I think dentists just aren't a relatively big target. They know what your revenues are. You're not a big cash business, so there's not a lot of concealment of income that could happen. They know your biggest expense because W-2s get reported to them. So now it comes down to if I'm going to come in and audit a dentist, I'm going to audit a dentist. Are they paying their kids too much? Are they doing some vacation? Slip through the books? It's not huge dollar amounts, so they're not big targets to begin with.
Speaker 2:But I think the problem is that has led to the rise of the tax newsletters coming out. What are the tax newsletters? What do you mean? So I mean there's a couple of good ones, like the McGill tax newsletter is one I think any dentist should look at subscribing to. They do a really good job of laying out different tax issues in plain English, very readable.
Speaker 2:But there's Kiplinger's out there, there's Wake Coat Investor and a lot of what they will talk about is okay, just had a newborn baby, let's pay them $15,000 a year to be a model. Now they don't have to prepare tax returns, they face no preparer penalty. That's fine, well and good and they're probably right. That's probably not going to get audited. However, if it does, that's eliminated immediately. Number one because you usually don't hire models for your business, and it's just.
Speaker 2:Why is a newborn making $15,000? And they happen to have the same last name as you do? So they're recommending aggressive strategies that us, as CPAs. We have what they call circular 230 responsibility to our clients to advise them as to what the tax law is. My fear is with some of this stuff is as AI does get better, I don't see it. The IRS probably isn't going to lead the spear on this charge, but you can see how AI could be a really powerful tool in terms of auditing. They could input tax returns, they could go run a query and go tell me everybody who has kids on the payroll.
Speaker 1:I talk about the kids on the payroll. Is that something that you recommend and you do with your clients? I know that comes up a lot.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean it comes up all the time. I would say most of our clients had their kids on the payroll and in time memoriam ever since I first started, back when the exemption was only $4,000, there was a whole industry of kids who cleaned the office and made like $3,500 a year. What's different now is that standard deduction is up to $15,000. So you can pay a kid up to $15,000 a year and not pay any income tax on it. Our advice to our clients is you have to be reasonable with it.
Speaker 2:So if you look at a dental office, what are jobs your kids could do around that office? You know there's the bags that every dentist gives their patient. That's a toothbrush, toothpaste. They can do that. They can certainly shred documents. They can probably. Even if you're doing events or things like that, they could be there. They can probably clean your office to a point where you're paying your actual cleaner a little bit less. But be reasonable with the wages. I mean I would not advise somebody to put the newborn on it. But again, the hard part of all this is the IRS isn't auditing anything. So it has led to people wanting to be aggressive and it's ultimately the client's call.
Speaker 1:Are things like this if they do get audited, are they like pay a penalty and pay the tax, or is it like go to tax prison?
Speaker 2:You only go to tax prison like you think of Al Capone going. Al Capone was to prison because he was concealing income. If you conceal income, if you were doing a big cash dental business, that's when they come in with the windbreakers and take all your computers and you go to prison. If you overstate deductions, your fallout is going to be you pay the tax, you pay the interest on it and then you can have up to a 25% understatement penalty.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what are some other hot button stuff, like maybe what is the Augusta rule?
Speaker 2:So what the Augusta rule is, as its name implies, is it came about because people used to rent their homes during the Masters Tournament down in Augusta, Georgia. What the IRS actually came in and said is if you just have this occasional thing where you rent out your home, you don't have to pay income tax on it, you don't have to go through the record keeping. So it's really well-intentioned. Where it evolved was tax newsletters at some point decided to say why don't you rent your home to your business? And that's a tax deduction. What's good, though, about this particular rule is a court case did come down, where the court actually affirmed its usage for business purposes and basically said as long as there's a business purpose could be a shareholder meeting, could be staff meeting, could be staff party there are legitimate reasons to do it. The key thing, though, is your reimbursement rate has to be fair value.
Speaker 2:In this particular court case, they were trying to claim a. I want to say it was like a $300,000 tax deduction for rental of their home, and the IRS said that's a little strong. We're going to give you $750 a day, but if you rent your house for less than 14 days, you can do it. You can take the income as an individual and your business can deduct it. So how we advised our clients this year was to here's what the rule says. Here's what the legitimate uses are. If this occurred to you and I understand, some people are just going to probably write down oh yeah, I had 12 staff meetings at the CASA and we're going to deduct this amount. Again, key is be reasonable with the reimbursement rates. Think of what your house might go for as an Airbnb, or if you were to rent a conference room, they'd do the same thing. So we told clients to have $500 to maybe $1,000 a day, maybe a little bit more, depending on your location. Be reasonable. Make sure you have a business purpose or you can document a business purpose Awesome.
Speaker 1:What about the home office? I remember this was like kind of a hot button issue at one point.
Speaker 2:So the thing with home office. Again, the old rule basically said you had to be able to replicate anything you did at your primary job at your home office. So for an accountant that's pretty easy to do. I could have a computer, I could have a 10-key calculator and I could do my job pretty much anywhere. For a dentist it was always a little bit trickier, because what are you going to do? Are you going to set up a dental chair? Sterilization and all those things.
Speaker 2:A court case did come into play.
Speaker 2:That basically said, as long as they're able to do an element of your job at your home office, it's a valid deduction.
Speaker 2:So if you think of a dental practice, they might be doing record keeping, they could be doing HR, they could be doing their QuickBooks, they could be doing charting, any number of things that aren't related or are related to their job that they don't feel a comfort level doing at their place of business, where staff might be privy to things. And how that deduction works is you take a prorated portion of your utilities your mortgage interest, real estate taxes, repairs and maintenance insurance and you compare that against the square footage of your home that you're using and you generate a deduction. It's not a massive one. For most of our clients it's a $4,000 to $6,000 a year deduction but, as I would tell any client, if you saw $1,000 laying there, you're going to pick it up. So it's not a massive deduction. It's not one that is going to bring somebody way down, but it's a legitimate deduction. Again, as long as you document it, you're fine with it. It's not a red flag by any stretch.
Speaker 1:And what about the auto? Like leasing versus buying a car or something that wants to be a large car. What's that?
Speaker 2:So there's a tax advantage to buying larger vehicles, or what they call $6,000 curb weight on it. The key thing in my opinion is there should be a business use to it and there should be a personal use. And it's important to either come up with a ratio of what that business and personal is going to be or track that and then add back the personal use every year to your tax return. We would suggest most people are 60 to 70% business. The remainder is personal.
Speaker 2:You do have to consider is it has to be titled under your business. You have to take a look at your insurance. Premiums in your business tend to be higher than it does for you personally, so you have to weigh that. So we have a lot of clients who simply do mileage reimbursements every month or have what's called an accountable plan where we say all right, every month write yourself out a check for $500 and we'll do some type of true up at the end of the year to figure out what your mileage was, and then that way you're kind of writing off the vehicle anyway by doing it at that measure. You mentioned the AI thing.
Speaker 1:I've searched things on Google about taxes and I have like hesitated and I'm like are they going to know that? Why am I looking at this? What is this going to look like to the IRS?
Speaker 2:No, I think it's an easy thing for them, if they wanted to, to enforce it. I don't know that the will is going to be there to enforce it for the foreseeable future. But again, I think, as long as people are reasonable with their deductions, everybody who owns a business has some measure of things that in theory are deductible. It could be a meal that they went out for, could be a computer that they bought for their home that went through the business. There's always some element to it and the old analogy I used to use with clients is if you're driving 74 or less on the freeway back when the speed limit was 65 everywhere, you're not going to get pulled over. So if I'm looking at your financial statements and everything looks like it might be going 74, if I'm not questioning it, irs is not going to question it. We understand everybody's probably has some element that they're putting through the business that isn't 100% legit, Absolutely.
Speaker 1:So tell the listeners about what you guys provide at Bull Moose Financial.
Speaker 2:as far as two dentists, so for our dental clients we kind of have three different levels of service. Start of everything starts with bookkeeping and making sure we have accurate financial statements. We'll give them some feedback as to what's going on with those financial statements. We meet with every client at least twice a year to go over their financials, go over their tax projections. If a client needs to meet more than that during the year, we definitely take the meeting. If they have something going on, we do all their tax returns. We're providing them with things like wage surveys, fee surveys, benchmarking reports when we do their financial statements so you can kind of see where their numbers are lining up versus our other clients and look for areas of improvement. And then we take on special projects as they come up. You know clients need valuations of their practice or they want to do a business plan, Like if I get out of insurance, what does that all?
Speaker 1:look like Mike. Now correct me if I'm wrong.
Speaker 2:Like Bull Moose Financial only sees dental clients, right, that's correct, and between my three partners and I we have quite a few dental practices really across the country. I used to be a moderator on Dentaltown and that started to bring in a more national presence for us. We're able to see the numbers from hundreds of dental practices a year between the ones that we serve and the ones that we do practice valuations for, and I think that gives our clients some meaningful data that they can use to benchmark their performance against.
Speaker 1:Now, if anyone wants to reach out to you and possibly get a consultation to work with you, where do they find you?
Speaker 2:Sure, I mean they can give me a call. My number's 414-759-9629. My email is mbark B-A-R-K at bullmoosefinancialcom, and a website that we're in the process of redoing will be at bullmoosefinancialcom.
Speaker 1:Awesome, and you've got an offer for the listeners for Dental Practice Heroes.
Speaker 2:Sure, what we do is we waive our onboarding fee If they say you know they came from the Dental Practice Heroes podcast, paul Etcheson. What that means is we're going to review your prior tax returns and before we even give a proposal, kind of let you know if there's anything we would be doing differently, how the relationship would work. But typically we charge $2,500 to onboard a client and set up all their depreciation schedules and get everything they have into our system. That gets waived. If you mentioned Paul Etchison Awesome or the Dental Practice Heroes podcast, Awesome, well, thanks so much, mike.
Speaker 1:I really appreciate you coming on, dude, always loved working with you and it's a shame that we don't anymore. But I know a lot of my listeners like the people that I like and they're going to love working with you. If they reach out to you, appreciate it, paul. All right, take care.
