6 Numbers Physical Therapy and Chiropractic Owners Should Check Every Month
Sam's List Editorial | 2026-07-27
6 Numbers Physical Therapy and Chiropractic Owners Should Check Every Month Gross charges are the most comforting number in a physical therapy or chiropractic practice and the least useful. You bill 180 dollars, the contract says 78, the patient owes a 30 dollar copay, and 12 dollars of it never arrives. The charge told you nothing. Practices that scale well watch a different set of physical therapy practice financial metrics, and they watch them monthly rather than at tax time. Six of them do almost all the work. None of these require new software. They require your billing system and your books to be pointed at each other once a month. 1. Net Collections Per Visit This is the number. Total cash actually collected in the month divided by total visits in the month. It answers the only question that matters at the unit level: what does one patient walking through the door produce in real money? Charges do not tell you. Contracted rates do not tell you, because they ignore denials, patient balances that never get paid, and write-offs. Track it monthly and it becomes an early-warning system. A drift from 74 to 68 over two quarters is a real problem and it is invisible in a revenue total that is growing on visit volume. The limitation: net collections per visit lags, because cash arrives 30 to 90 days after the visit. Watching it alongside the next number is what makes the timing readable rather than confusing. 2. Days in Accounts Receivable, Split by Payer Total AR days tells you there is a problem. AR days by payer tells you where it is. One commercial payer that has quietly moved from 32 days to 61 is a different problem from a patient-responsibility balance pile that is 140 days old. The first is a payer relationship and possibly a claims-submission issue. The second is a front-desk collection policy issue. Blended AR days averages them into something you cannot act on. Also track the percentage of AR over 90 days. In most practices, a balance past 90 days collects at a materially lower rate than a fresh one, which means aging AR is not just slow money. Some of it is not money at all. 3. Provider Productivity Against Fully Loaded Provider Cost Visits per provider per day is a scheduling metric, not a financial one. The financial version compares each provider's net collections to that provider's fully loaded cost: salary or draw, payroll taxes, benefits, malpractice, continuing education, and a fair share of support staff time. Practices routinely find that their busiest provider is not their most profitable one, because volume was achieved with a payer...
