Here's what you need to know about quarterly planning, what to track, and how to get started.

What Is a Quarterly Business Review?

A quarterly business review is a planned analysis meeting every three months (or quarter) to:

• Review your key indicators for your practice
• Assess progress toward short- and long-term goals
• Identify problems early so they do not become unmanageable
• Find opportunities for growth
• Celebrate success with your team and engage them to solve concerns

The quarterly business review is a way to take the pulse of your veterinary practice, discover new opportunities for realistic incremental growth, and work with your team to strengthen your practice culture and finances.

Having good data is paramount to a successful quarterly business review. If your practice management software and accounting software are not aligned, you may end up drawing erroneous conclusions. Avoid an exclusive focus on a few "hard" key indicators. Failure to measure and manage patient care, client satisfaction, and your practice culture are critical errors that can hurt your business.

After you conduct your quarterly business review, you can proactively plan what needs to change or what's working for the next quarter.

What to Track for Quarterly Planning

Critical factors that impact your quarterly planning include how your practice management database is set up, how robust your accounting software is, your eagerness to work on your veterinary business, and your willingness to put your assumptions to the test.

The primary key indicators you'll want to track include financial data, patient care indices, client satisfaction, practice productivity, and practice culture. Tracking these and working with veterinary benchmarks will be a great start.

Financial Indicators

We need data and not assumptions to manage our practices. The practice management software and accounting software need to be aligned for your data to be accurate. Tracking income and expenses for individual activity centers in your practice (such as surgery, hospitalization, preventive care, diagnostics, and imaging) would be the first place to start analyzing your practice profitability.

Know your gross margins (a percentage comprising a relationship between revenue and cost of goods sold) and review them quarterly. With strategic pricing, you need to track subcategories. For example, we had lower margins on preventive care diagnostics to drive utilization and increase per-appointment revenue. We created a subcategory in the practice management system and the accounting software. We realized we had higher margins for diagnostics that required more direct veterinarian time. Tracking this enabled us to maintain overall margins for the diagnostic category at the level we wanted.

Patient Care

Effectively measuring patient care can be challenging. As you begin quarterly reviews, start with a specific initiative. To use preventive care as an example, your team would develop a standard of care to reflect your recommendations about appropriate care. For example, you may have a protocol that recommends an exam, certain vaccines, and a baseline diagnostic panel with fecal analysis. Then you would track compliance by analyzing data from your practice management software.

Client Satisfaction

Client surveys are an effective way to track overall satisfaction. We send out a quick survey by email to our clients after every appointment. Practice managers can review their clients' feedback every quarter and make an effort to personally touch base with a sampling of clients to check their satisfaction and address any concerns.

Marketing Insights

Veterinary practice owners and managers often try the old spaghetti trick when it comes to marketing—throw it all at the wall and see what sticks. Instead, focus on one specific initiative and create a measurable goal. For example, our goal is to increase compliance with preventive care diagnostic recommendations by ten percent this quarter. To do this, we need to create education/marketing materials that support that recommendation and can be communicated to clients through email, blog posts, appointment reminders, and signage in the exam room. If we are not getting the results we expect at the end of the quarter, then we'll know we need to make some changes.

Practice Productivity and Culture

Taking care of your team is the key to a productive and efficient practice. Our primary indicators for operational efficiency included appointment time length (from our PMS), time spent on lunch and overtime (from our payroll system), and team meetings to identify roadblocks. If clients are coming in for 20-minute appointments that are stretching to 50 minutes, team members miss lunches or overtime skyrockets. Take a hard look at why your practice engine might be sputtering. A recent IDEXX study, Finding the Time, provides specific strategies and activities to improve your productivity. Doing this quarterly helps you avoid overreacting to the occasional rough week.

Preventive Care Example

Let's run through an example of a quarterly review focused on preventive care appointments. These appointments are the backbone of a successful veterinary practice—with them, we create lifelong bonds with our patients and clients. Preventive care appointments also have economic benefits when we increase per-appointment revenue and downstream revenue.

When it comes to tracking preventive care metrics, start by linking subcategory codes. For example, create separate codes for related activity centers like preventive care exams and specific preventive care diagnostic codes. This will enable you to track any initiatives you may develop for specific business.

For example, our reports show 1500 preventive care exams this quarter. According to our lab data, we have done 600 preventive care diagnostic codes. Our standard of care for preventive care includes fecal analysis and baseline bloodwork, so the 900-code-gap clearly indicates an opportunity for sustainable growth. When we're planning for the next quarter, we can take these metrics into consideration for how we need to approach preventive exams and wellness testing.

What Is the Next Step?

After your quarterly review, it's time to engage your team to make a strategic plan to go forward. Work to find the hurdles to strategic goals. Does your team clearly understand the "why" of your standard of care? Are you communicating the proper recommendations to each client? Do you have marketing materials to support those recommendations? Is price a frequently heard objection? Is there a bottleneck in our workflow? Lean on your team to analyze the challenges and agree on what to tackle first. Make the changes and then check on your results at the end of the quarter.

A good quarterly business review will provide you with the hard economic and productivity data you need, as well as opportunities to get clarity on your practice's softer elements like patient care, client satisfaction, and practice culture. When you can have this level of detail, you are much better able to track trends, identify both problems and opportunities, and make strategic decisions that align with your long-term goals for your practice's success. Use your quarterly planning to take the guesswork out of managing a practice that your family, your team, patients, and your clients depend on.