Profit First Instant Assessment
Maple Street Chiropractic · Prepared for Sample Owner · Jul 2024 – Jun 2025
The practice earns real money, but almost none of it is reaching you or the bank. You're paying yourself a fraction of what a practice this size can support, setting aside far too little for taxes, and roughly $248,500 a year in loan payments is quietly draining the rest. Nothing here is broken — it's a visibility and allocation problem, and it's fixable.
A few things worth a look before you rely on these numbers
While analyzing your books we noticed a few items that may need review. None of this is a problem to fix today — but cleaning these up will make your assessment (and your decisions) more accurate. Consider reviewing them, then re-running this assessment with updated numbers.
- Undeposited Funds is negative. The Undeposited Funds account is sitting at −$4,210, which usually means payments were recorded as deposited before the matching sales receipts were entered. It can slightly distort monthly income timing until it's cleared.
- A mid-year expense reclass. In February, about $18,600 of equipment-loan payments appears to have been reclassified from interest expense to principal. It's the right call, but it makes the first-half-vs-second-half expense trend look bumpier than it really is.
- An owner draw booked as an expense. A recurring $2,500/month transfer is coded to 'Office Expense' but looks like an owner draw. If so, it's overstating operating expenses and understating what you actually paid yourself.
- Intercompany receivable with no activity. A 'Due from Maple Street Wellness LLC' receivable of $11,750 hasn't moved all year. Worth confirming whether it's collectible or should be cleaned up so it isn't quietly tying up cash.
Our team does a deep review of your QuickBooks, fixes what's off, and gives you recommendations + a quote — so you can trust your numbers and make confident decisions.
Get a Cleanup Quote →These were hard to separate cleanly from your QuickBooks data, so we estimated them from what we could see. The numbers in this report reflect these:
- Owner's W-2 salary: $48,000
- Owner income taxes paid: $38,970
How Your Revenue Breaks Down
A healthy practice is easier to read when you split its revenue into four buckets — the money you take home (Owner's Pay), what you keep as Profit, what's set aside for Tax, and what runs the practice (Operating Expenses). Here's how your revenue divides across them today, with how that compares to other practices your size.
Overview
You're not bad at running this practice — you've built something that brings in more than a million dollars a year in patient care. The problem isn't effort or volume. It's that everything runs through one account, so the money you earn, the money you owe, and the money you get to keep all blur together.
You can't see what's really yours, so you pay yourself last, hope there's enough left for taxes, and feel the squeeze even in a strong year. This assessment fixes that by separating your money into four buckets — so for the first time, you can see exactly where every dollar goes.
Your Real Revenue
Real Revenue is what's left after the costs you pass straight through to deliver care — supplements and retail products you resell, plus outside imaging and lab work. Here that's $1,025,530. It's the honest number to measure everything else against, because it's the money the practice actually gets to work with after those pass-through costs.
Where Your Money Goes
Three things are quietly eating your cash: you're underpaying yourself (7.2% vs. ~20% typical), under-reserving for taxes (3.8% vs. ~15%), and carrying heavy overhead and debt (85.9% vs. ~55%). None is dramatic on its own. Together, they're why a profitable year still leaves you feeling broke — and why tax season is a scramble every single time.
The Most Recent Quarter
The most recent quarter is a touch healthier than the full year — owner's pay ticked up to 8.3%, tax reserves to 5.2%, and operating expenses eased to 82.4%. That's movement in the right direction, but it's nowhere near where a practice your size typically sits. The point isn't that one good quarter fixes it; it's that small, repeatable shifts compound.
This quarter vs. the full year
The same four buckets over just the most recent three months — an early read on whether the trend is moving.
Recent-quarter Real Revenue: $268,140.
Owner's Pay
You took home about 7.2% of Real Revenue — roughly $73,838 on more than a million dollars of patient care. For an owner-run practice this size, around 20% is more typical. In plain terms: you're paying your associates, your front desk, your landlord, and your lenders before yourself, and your paycheck is whatever's left. For the doctor who built the practice, that's backwards.
Tax
Only about 3.8% was set aside for taxes, but a practice at this profit level usually owes closer to 15%. That gap is why tax season feels like a gut-punch every year — the money was never reserved, so the bill always lands as a surprise you scramble to cover, often on a credit card or by skipping your own pay.
Profit
Your books show a profit — about 3.1% — so on paper the year looks fine. But there's almost no cash in the bank to match it. That's the classic 'profitable on paper, broke in real life' trap, and for a busy practice it's almost always a visibility and allocation problem, not a patient-volume problem.
Operating Expenses
85.9% of every dollar is going back out to run the practice — well above the ~55% typical at your size. A big piece is the roughly $248,500 a year in term-loan payments (the build-out, the equipment, the decompression tables) quietly draining your cash before you ever see it. With everything flowing through one account, it's nearly impossible to feel where it's all going.
Your Rollout Plan
You don't fix this overnight — you nudge each bucket toward where it should be, one quarter at a time, so cash flow keeps working while it shifts. The glide path below moves owner's pay and tax reserves up a point or two each quarter and lets operating expenses come down to match.
Start the very next deposit. Even moving 1% at a time is enough to feel the difference within a quarter, and it builds the habit that makes the bigger moves — like tackling the loan balance — possible.
Next Steps
Open a few separate accounts so your money stops blurring together. Start paying yourself a set amount on a schedule. Sweep a fixed slice of every deposit to tax and profit before you spend a dollar. Then work the expense list and that $248,500-a-year loan load. Small, repeatable moves — that's how a practice this size finally gets the doctor paid and keeps what it earns.
Expense Insights
Here's where your money actually went this year — the categories and vendors taking the biggest bites out of the practice, and the spots most worth a second look.
Staff payroll and clinic rent are your two largest lines, which is normal for a practice. The surprises are the size of your debt service, your software-and-merchant-fee stack, and a handful of discretionary items that have quietly crept up through the year.
Your biggest vendors
Quick wins — Eliminate → Reduce → Renegotiate
Worked in Profit First order: cut what you can (Eliminate), then trim what stays (Reduce), then shop for a better rate on the rest (Renegotiate).
Eliminate — stop paying entirely
Reduce — lower the amount or frequency
Renegotiate — same service, better rate or terms
Discretionary & owner-personal — often the easiest wins
Watch items
- Chiropractic supplies & supplements — climbing faster than visit volume; set par levels and a single vendor.
- Software & subscriptions — creeping up all year; audit for duplicates and outgrown plans.
- Merchant fees — re-shop processors and route large balances to ACH or in-house financing.
- Outside billing percentage — re-bid it against your collections, or model in-house.
- Marketing cost per new patient — track by channel so spend follows what fills the schedule.
- Debt service — the heaviest single drain at ~$248,500/yr; explore consolidation or refinance.
- Owner-personal charges on the business card — clean these off to sharpen both books and taxes.
Spending crept up steadily through the year while owner's pay stayed roughly flat — a sign the practice grew but the cash discipline didn't keep pace. The first half ran lighter on supplies and marketing; both stepped up in the second half as new-patient pushes and inventory re-orders landed.
How to run your review
Go line by line, marking each expense Keep, Reduce, or Cut. Put a target number and an owner on each chosen item, then revisit next quarter. Small repeatable savings compound into real profit — and into a real paycheck for you.
Where to focus
Start with the controllable overhead — software, merchant fees, billing percentage, and discretionary/owner-personal items — not the direct costs of caring for patients. Then tackle the debt, which is the biggest single lever on your cash.
Your Reports
Where to start: Open Your Profit Game Plan for the full read, then use the Keep / Reduce / Cut worksheet to find the savings.
All four open as real, fully detailed sample files — the two PDFs and both Excel workbooks. Yours come with your own QuickBooks numbers.
Ready to put this into action?
Your assessment shows the path — these are the fastest ways to walk it with us.
Walk through your assessment with an advisor and map your next steps.
Book a Call →Set your target allocations and roll out the bank-account system together.
Schedule →Go line-by-line through your expenses to find and lock in real savings.
Schedule →Done-with-you coaching for real, sustainable profitability, quarter over quarter.
Learn More →See your own numbers
This took about five minutes and pulled straight from QuickBooks. Yours will read just like it — with your real figures, not a fictional practice's.
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