The eight numbers a clinic owner should look at every week

Why weekly

A month is long enough for a problem to become a habit. By the time a monthly report shows the no-show rate rising, the reason is six weeks old and nobody remembers what changed. Weekly numbers are noisier and far more actionable, because the cause is still in living memory.

Eight numbers. Thirty minutes. Same day each week.

1. New versus returning patients

Two different businesses in one clinic. New patients measure whether people can find you; returning patients measure whether they wanted to come back.

A clinic with strong new numbers and weak returning ones has a retention problem that marketing will make more expensive, not better. Watch the ratio, not either alone.

2. No-show rate

Booked, not attended, not cancelled in advance — over booked. Split by doctor and by slot time, because it is almost never evenly spread.

Under 10% is good, 15–30% is typical, andmost of it is addressable.

3. Average waiting time

Arrival to consultation start. Watch the worst 10% as well as the average — the long tail is what people talk about.How to shorten it.

4. Collection rate

Collected this week over billed this week. Below 90% and you are building an outstanding balance faster than you are clearing one.

Split by payment mode too. A sudden rise in the cash share, with no change in footfall, is worth understanding.

5. Outstanding, by age

Not the total — the ageing. 0–30, 30–60, 60–90, over 90. A growing over-90 bucket is a process failure at the desk rather than a patient problem.A collection process that works.

6. Stock value at cost

For clinics that dispense, this is often the largest number on the balance sheet after the fit-out, and the one nobody looks at. Rising stock value with flat dispensing revenue means you are buying faster than you are selling.

7. Value expiring in 90 days

Money that will be thrown away unless somebody acts. Ninety days is enough warning to use it, return it, or stop reordering. Discovering expiry on the expiry date is a choice.Managing expiry properly.

8. Revenue per patient

Total collected over patients seen. It moves for three reasons — your prices, your case mix, orthings being done and not billed. A falling figure with rising footfall almost always means the third.

What to leave out

• Vanity numbers. Cumulative patients registered since opening tells you nothing you can act on.
• Anything you cannot influence this week. If a number cannot change a decision, it is decoration.
• Twenty metrics. A dashboard nobody reads is worse than eight numbers on a sheet of paper that somebody does.

The habit

Same day, same time, thirty minutes. Write the eight numbers down — on paper is fine — so you have a series rather than a snapshot. The value is entirely in the trend; a single week's figure means almost nothing.

Clinikr reports all eight from live data, by doctor and by period, without an export or a spreadsheet.