Case study · Monthly bookkeeping

Day-wise collection reconciliation for a group of four dental clinics

Collections across cash, UPI and cards are reconciled day by day for each clinic. Vendor payments run weekly, per-clinic P&L is ready by the 7th and the owner dropped the parallel Excel.

Monthly bookkeeping
Four clinics
Cash, UPI and cards

Client details and figures changed to protect confidentiality.

4
clinics reconciled daily: 7th
per-clinic P&L ready: Weekly
vendor payment run

Context and challenge

The situation

A dental group runs four clinics under one owner. Patients pay in cash, by UPI to a QR code and by card at a machine. Each clinic buys consumables from the same handful of suppliers and pays visiting doctors a share of fees, with TDS.

Each clinic front desk sent a daily collection note on WhatsApp. The owner copied it into an Excel sheet. The accountant kept the real books separately, usually weeks behind. The two never agreed completely, so the owner trusted the Excel.

The owner had started with one clinic and grown to four in five years. The accounting had not changed along the way. It had simply been made bigger, with more sheets and more WhatsApp messages. He wanted to know which clinic made money and which did not.

What to watch for

What made it tricky

The bank shows UPI and card settlements in batches that do not match daily collections. Card machines settle after a day or two, minus charges. Cash is deposited when someone gets to the bank.
Doctor payouts are a percentage of fees collected, less TDS. If collections are wrong, payouts are wrong.
The owner wanted to compare clinics, so every entry had to be tagged to a clinic. Shared costs such as the central lab and head-office salaries needed a clear rule for splitting.
Front-desk staff change often and are not trained in accounts. Any process that needs them to understand debits and credits will fail. The daily form had to be something a new receptionist could fill in on the first day, and anything unusual had to be easy to flag.

How it ran

What we did

1
Set each clinic up as a branch or reporting tag so that income and cost are always tagged. The same masters are used by all four.
2
Replaced the WhatsApp note with a one-page daily form: cash, UPI and card totals as per the clinic software, cash deposited and notes. The form is booked each day.
3
Reconciled each clinic by day. Cash counted against cash deposited, UPI and card collections against settlements, with machine charges booked as an expense. Differences are listed for the front desk to explain.
4
Moved vendor bills to a weekly payment run. Bills are entered as they arrive, checked, and the owner approves one list each week instead of paying ad hoc.
5
Calculated doctor payouts from the verified collection, booked TDS under the right section and kept the monthly challan details ready for the CA.
6
Added an agreed rule for splitting shared costs, applied each month in a single journal.
7
Produced a per-clinic profit and loss by the 7th.
8
Trained one person at each clinic on the daily form in a short session, and reviewed the first two weeks of forms with them.

Outcome

Results

Day-wise collections reconcile to cash and bank for each clinic, with exceptions explained within a day or two.
Vendor payments move to a weekly run. Early-payment discounts are no longer missed and nothing is paid twice.
Per-clinic profit and loss is ready by the 7th of the month.
The owner stopped maintaining a parallel Excel, since the books now answer the questions the Excel did.

Operational impact

Before

Daily collection notes sent on WhatsApp and copied into Excel.
The real books ran weeks behind and never agreed with the Excel.

After

Day-wise collections reconcile to cash and bank for each clinic.
Per-clinic profit and loss by the 7th.
The owner stopped maintaining a parallel Excel.

What the CA or owner gets now

The CA gets closed books each month with a TDS working for doctor payouts, a bank reconciliation for each account and a clinic-wise P&L.
There is no year-end scramble to rebuild collections from bank statements.
The owner opens a clinic-wise report on the phone and sees which clinic is ahead on collections and which has rising consumable costs, without waiting for month end.

More reading: Tally vs Zoho Books: an honest comparison for Indian businesses

Client details and figures changed to protect confidentiality.

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