Running an optometric practice is expensive. While most practice owners expect that they’ll incur fees for utilities and rent, there are dozens of smaller expenses that many owners don’t consider. From choosing the right equipment and the right optometry software, to calculating employee turnovers and perks, hidden fees can add up and make a serious impact on finances.
Whether you’re thinking about opening a practice cold, or you want to get a better handle of where your practice profits are going, review the six hidden costs of running an optometric practice and see how these costs are affecting your practice.
Is Your Optometric Practice Affected By These Hidden Costs?
Turnover Costs
Having a staff member leave your optometric practice can be a pain. It can also be costly. Consider the costs of having to take time to write job descriptions, posts to job boards, and interview candidates. Sometimes, the free job boards won’t provide you with enough candidates so you’ll have to spend a bit to posts on other sites. Once a candidate is hired, you have to focus on training the individual, which adds to the cost.
Employee Perks
If you want to build staff loyalty in your practice and reduce turnover, you’ll have to offer some perks to keep your staff happy and engaged. Monthly lunches, gift cards for the top salesperson, or cake for someone’s birthday may seem like small expenses, but it will add up over time. The good news is that these perks will keep morale high and reduce the expensive burden of having to hire new employees.
Legal Fees
Whether you’re putting together an employee handbook, firing a patient from your practice, or you need a hand looking over contracts, seeking legal advice will help guide you on how to protect your practice from risky business decisions. But, these safeguards will come at a price.
Equipment and Maintenance
Modern optometry practices are leveraging technology to provide optimal care to their patients. Although this equipment can be costly, you can reduce some of the expenses by moving from a server-based practice management and EHR solution to a cloud-based practice management and EHR software. With a cloud-based solution, you don’t have to focus on buying and maintaining expensive servers, and the vendor is responsible for updating the software. Since the cloud-based optometry software is accessible from anywhere with an internet connection, you don’t have to pay an IT consultant to install or update the software on your devices.
Insurance
Having a physical location requires you to have different types of insurance to protect your business. Some policies that your optometric practice will need to consider are liability insurance and property insurance.
Shrinkage
Most optometric practices have an optical shop where visitors can come in and try on the frames displayed on the frame board. Unfortunately, because visitors can freely access the frames, the risk of inventory shrinkage occurring from theft increases. But inventory shrinkage can come from other forms like damaged goods or fake sales.
If you try to combat inventory shrinkage by installing security cameras, then you start to incur other expenses.
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