A dental practice: finding why payments landed with the wrong provider

The job

The practice software kept assigning payments to a provider who had left years earlier. Month-end reports by provider came out wrong, and the practice relies on those reports. The problem had been there for years.

What I did

• Worked through the ledgers with the practice to find the pattern: old provider balances and credits were posting to one provider instead of being split.
• Confirmed the cause with the software company's support team on two separate cases.
• Wrote a plain-language guide for the office, so the team can see what happened and why. Cleaning up the old balances is the owner's decision.
• Set up an AI assistant for the person who keeps the practice's books, connected to the accounting file. Its read-back of last year's numbers matched the screen, and it passed every setup check.

What stayed in human hands

A written agreement was signed before any real practice data was involved. Patient names were kept out of recordings and notes. AI helped research and reason through the problem, but no patient records were sent to an AI tool. Any change to the ledger is the owner's call.

What I learned

I came in talking about AI. The most valuable thing turned out to be a plain diagnosis of a software problem. Sometimes the right fix is not AI, and saying so is part of the job.

Honest limits

I have no measured time savings to report from this practice yet, so I am not claiming any.

Written by Devan Borsboom. Client names and identifying details (city, team size and anything specific enough to place them) are left out on purpose.