End of year planning can be both an exciting and stressful time for your veterinary practice. It allows you to make plans for the coming year, and set goals and budgets that will help your clinic thrive and grow.
However, to make a plan that will be effective and generate results, you need to understand what’s happened during the past year. This is why end-of-year reporting is crucial for your clinic. Read on to find out why this is so important for practice success.
Reporting lets you evaluate success
End-of-year reporting allows you to understand your clinic’s performance over the past year and evaluate your successes. For example, did you meet the previous year’s goals, what areas of the clinic are performing best, and what areas need some attention? It also gives you a better understanding of your financial situation so you can make an informed and realistic plan for the year to come.
How’s your practice financial health?
From a monetary standpoint, end-of-year reporting helps you weigh up the financial health of your practice. This includes where you may need to invest more for optimal success, or where you may need to prune costs. This will help you plan for hiring potential new staff, investing in staff training or increasing staff pay if appropriate.
What are inventory trends?
Inventory is another key area to focus on when planning for the year ahead. Ideally, inventory management is an ongoing process done throughout the year. However, taking time at the end of the year to understand overall spend and spot the trends of medical, prescription and retail stock will allow you to budget for the coming year, negotiate better rates with suppliers, and adjust order numbers.
How are your staff performing?
As mentioned earlier, end-of-year is often a time for business owners to review staff pay. This is also an ideal time to review staff performance and identify opportunities for training and further professional development.
Effective reporting can also help you evaluate the overall efficiency of your practice and identify wasted time and effort. If your staff aren’t comprehensively trained in your practice management software, for example, they could be spending more time than necessary completing tasks and transactions. This could be losing your clinic money through inefficient processes and taking attention away from your valuable clients in-clinic.
Don’t go it alone
While it may be tempting to lock yourself in your office and do it by yourself, end-of-year planning is best done as a team. Take the time to sit down with your team, go through the reports, and come up with actions to take over the coming year together. This could be done in a full day off-site team meeting, or a couple of hours each day over a week or two. Whatever works best for your practice hours of operation.
Involving your team will help them be more engaged and invested in the outcome. It also gives them the opportunity to bring their frontline experience into the decision making process. And, they may identify areas in which they feel they can improve their performance. This way you’re able to provide the right training and development solution to benefit them and your practice.
It’s important to make sure that your practice management software not only has the functionality to generate the reports you need but that you have the skills and training to run them easily. This will help make your end of year planning more accurate and less time-consuming and stressful.