Most treatment plan templates give you a list of procedures and one total at the bottom. This one has a line for what each phase costs you and what each phase is priced at, so you can see where a case makes money before you present it. Print it, or let the spreadsheet add it up.
The plan itself, laid out by phase instead of by code. Chair time, lab and the patient fee at each stage, and a running line that tells you whether you are still up on the case at every step.
Where the number comes from. Starts at what an hour in your chair needs to produce, then builds one case up from the time it will really take.
| Phase | Type | Chair hrs | Lab, sedation, materials | Cost to you | Fee at your margin | Ahead or behind |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Consult and diagnostic | Chair | 0.75 | — | $600 | $720 | ($425) |
| Treatment phase | Chair | 2.50 | $1,200 | $3,200 | $3,840 | $2,255 |
| Healing phase | Between visits | — | — | — | — | $2,255 |
| Records phase | Chair | 1.00 | — | $800 | $960 | $1,455 |
| Lab phase | Between visits | — | $2,100 | $2,100 | $2,520 | ($645) |
| Try-in / delivery attempt | Chair | 1.50 | — | $1,200 | $1,440 | ($1,845) |
| Lab phase | Between visits | — | $350 | $350 | $420 | ($2,195) |
| Final delivery | Chair | 1.25 | — | $1,000 | $1,200 | ($3,195) |
| Coordination and workup, not a visit | — | — | — | $500 | $600 | — |
| Case total | — | 7.00 | $3,650 | $9,750 | $11,700 | ($3,695) |
Two kinds of phase, and the template keeps them apart. A chair phase consumes your time and carries a fee built from it. A between-visits phase consumes calendar, not chair, and can still carry a real cost: a lab bill lands in the lab phase whether or not anybody is in the room.
Note the two lab phases. Records go out, the lab makes it, the try-in is usually a delivery attempt, it goes back, and only then is there a final delivery. A single “try-in and lab” row hides both the send-back and the second lab bill. Phases are addable rows in the Excel version, so a case that needs a third lab turn just gets one.
Ahead or behind is the column to watch. It answers the question a total at the bottom cannot: if this patient stops after that row, are you still up on the case? In this example the worst point is $3,195 out of pocket, after the final delivery, and the file has a column beside it for what your software would actually have collected.
| Start here | Your number | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| What an hour in your chair needs to produce | $800 / hr | ||
| Rate for time spent away from the chair | $250 / hr | ||
| Margin you want on a case this demanding | 20.0% | ||
| Building the fee | Hours | Rate | Amount |
| Chair time, every phase added up | 7.00 | $800 | $5,600 |
| Coordination and workup that never gets a code | 2.00 | $250 | $500 |
| Lab and sedation fees | — | — | $2,450 |
| Materials | — | — | $1,200 |
| What the case costs you | — | — | $9,750 |
| Margin | — | 20.0% | $1,950 |
| Case fee | — | — | $11,700 |
| After the case is finished | Planned | Actual | Off by |
| Chair hours | 7.00 | 8.25 | 1.25 |
| Lab, sedation and materials | $3,650 | $3,900 | $250 |
| Margin over your hourly rate, whole case | $1,950 | $700 | ($1,250) |
Three blocks, one page. The shaded cells are the only ones you type. Everything else calculates, and every result stays blank until the cells it depends on are filled in, so a half-finished sheet never shows a number you could mistake for real.
The last block is the honest part. The case was planned at $1,950 over the hourly rate and came in at $700, because it ran an hour and a quarter long and the lab bill landed $250 high. That is one case at a time, which is exactly what a spreadsheet can do well. Twenty of them reconciled at once is what the software is for.
Search for a dental treatment plan template and you will find plenty of them. Nearly all are the same shape: a list of teeth, a list of codes, a fee beside each one, and a sum at the bottom. That is a billing document wearing the clothes of a plan.
It works, as far as it goes. What it cannot tell you is whether the case is worth doing. Work backward from any number on a code-based sheet and you land in the same place every time: a procedure code, times a fee from your schedule, adjusted for insurance. Nowhere in that chain is the question of what the case costs you. Not chair time. Not the lab bill on this case.
Take six crowns in the posterior and six crowns across the anterior of a patient with a high lip line. Same six codes, same six fees, same total on the plan. The posterior six are forgiving: margin placement has room to work with, shade has room to breathe, and nobody studies the result in a mirror. The anterior six are the opposite case. The smile line dictates where the margins go rather than what is convenient, shade has to hold across six units sitting side by side, and nothing goes to final until it looks right, which means at least one try-in appointment and often two. Hours of chair time apart, and a much larger lab bill, priced identically.
The other thing a code list hides is when the money shows up. On a long case the early phases are the expensive ones: the surgery, the materials, the longest appointments. You spend most of what the case will cost you well before you have collected most of what it will pay. Only in the later phases does what is coming in pull ahead of what has gone out. A single total at the bottom cannot show you where that crossover sits, which is why a patient leaving halfway through hurts so much more than the size of the case suggests it should.
Both templates here are built around phases for that reason. Fill one in by hand and the shape of the case shows up on the page.
The worksheet begins with one number: what an hour in your chair needs to produce to hit your goals. Every fee in it is built up from that, times the time the case will genuinely take, plus lab and materials, plus a margin you choose for how demanding the case is.
If you do not know your hourly number yet, that is the first thing to fix, and it takes about a minute.
No signup, no email. Put in your overhead, your days, and what you want to take home, and it gives you the number every case fee should be built on.
Open the calculatorYes. Both documents and all four files are free. We ask for an email address once, and one address unlocks everything on this page.
PDF and Excel, for both documents. The PDF is for printing and filling in by hand. The Excel version does the arithmetic, which matters most on the cost and fee-per-phase columns, and it carries a worked example on a second tab.
The Excel version, yes. Phase names, rows and rates are all editable, so you can shape it around how your practice sequences a case. The sheet is protected so a stray keystroke cannot wipe a formula, and there is no password on it. The PDF is fixed layout by design, so it prints the same every time.
No. Both documents stand on their own and plenty of practices will never need more than the spreadsheet. CaseFee Pro does the same job across every case at once, and tracks what each one actually took against what you estimated.
Your software prices the procedure against your fee schedule. It has no field for chair time, lab cost on this case, or the coordination hours that never carry a code, so it cannot tell you what a case costs to deliver. These templates are built from exactly those inputs, and the template has a column for what your software charges so you can put the two numbers side by side.
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