Five numbers your systems already have.

Your PBX, cloud telephony or mobile carrier report. Ask for calls received and calls answered, split by hour, for one full month.

Answered between 20:00 and 08:00 ÷ received between 20:00 and 08:00.

Most providers who have never looked find this between 15% and 40%. Nearly everyone guesses high before they check.

Multiply the unanswered count by your enquiry-to-appointment conversion rate, then by your average first-visit value. For a considered procedure — implants, joint replacement, a scan package — use the procedure value, not the consult fee.

Your CRM if you have one, your OP register and WhatsApp if you do not. Count distinct enquiries in a month against appointments that came from them.

Appointments booked from enquiries ÷ total enquiries received.

The more useful finding is usually that this number cannot be produced at all, because enquiries live in three places and nobody owns the count. That itself is the diagnosis.

Every point of conversion is worth one percent of your entire enquiry volume. It is also the cheapest number to move, because the enquiries have already been paid for.

Your billing system or your TPA portal. Ask for claims submitted and claims rejected on first submission, for one quarter, with rejection reasons.

Rejected on first submission ÷ total submitted. Then split documentation reasons from clinical ones.

Documentation and eligibility reasons usually account for the majority. Those are the recoverable ones — and the ones nobody has time to chase.

Take the documentation share, multiply by average claim value, then by the proportion your team never resubmits. That last number is the one billing heads underestimate most.

Your scheduler. Booked slots against attended slots, over three months, excluding slots the practice itself moved.

Slots not attended ÷ slots booked.

Above roughly 12% and it is no longer noise, it is a process gap. Nobody is calling the waitlist within the ten minutes it takes to refill a slot.

Chair-hour or consultation-hour value multiplied by lost slots. In dentistry this is the single clearest number in the business, because the chair is the business.

Your treatment plan list and your patient list. Accepted plans with no procedure started after 60 days, and patients last seen more than nine months ago who are still local.

Sum the value of accepted-but-unstarted plans. Count dormant patients separately.

This is almost always the largest single recoverable number in a dental practice, and almost always the one nobody has ever added up.

Face value, discounted by whatever share you think is genuinely gone. Even at a quarter, most owners find it is larger than their entire marketing budget.