Dental Insurance Collection Calculator

PPO write-offs are amounts you agreed in your contracts not to collect, so including them would make the rate reflect your fee schedule rather than your billing performance. Removing them first means the rate shows how much contractually owed insurance revenue was actually received, and what was lost to denials, unpaid claims and errors.

The aim is to collect as close to all of insurance net production as possible, since net production is what carriers are expected to pay. There is no single published standard that fits every practice. Track your own rate over a rolling period, and investigate any drop by carrier, procedure type and claim age.

A rate above 100% usually means collections in the period include payments for production from earlier months. Insurance payments often arrive several weeks after treatment, so a slow month followed by a busy one can produce this. Comparing collections with production from a lagged period, or using a rolling quarter, gives a steadier figure.

Common causes include denied claims that are not appealed, claims never submitted or rejected without follow-up, missing attachments, frequency limitations, maximums reached and patient portions incorrectly left on insurance. Write-off adjustments posted to the wrong category can also distort the figures. An aging report of insurance claims by carrier usually shows where to look first.