EBITDA Visibility
EBITDA visibility and margin leakage analysis for DSOs
Know exactly where profit is created and where it leaks — down to the location, provider, payer and procedure — with a clean bridge from budget to actual.
ARQ Dental is an Executive Operating Intelligence Platform built specifically for multi location dental service organizations. It unifies PMS, finance, payroll and HR data to provide standardized KPIs, performance visibility, root cause analysis and prioritized actions that help leadership improve EBITDA.
Last updated: · Published · By Arqipelago, Inc.
- Budget-to-actual EBITDA waterfall
- Leakage attributed to a specific driver
- Location and provider contribution ranking
- Board- and lender-ready outputs
Where DSO margin actually leaks
Margin rarely disappears in one place. It erodes through under-scheduled chair time, uncollected AR, fee schedules that were never renegotiated, adjustment creep and labor cost drifting ahead of production. Most reporting tools stop at the symptom.
- Payer mix and fee schedule underperformance
- Adjustment and write-off creep
- Unfilled schedule and provider utilization gaps
- Labor cost as a share of net revenue
- Supply and lab spend per procedure
A waterfall that survives the board meeting
ARQ Dental builds the bridge from budgeted EBITDA to actual EBITDA and quantifies each contributing driver, so finance can explain the variance in the meeting rather than the week after it.
Root cause, then recommended action
Every variance links through to the underlying operational behavior, and Hali — the built-in AI assistant — summarizes the cause and suggests the intervention most likely to recover margin.
Valuation follows data maturity
Sponsors and lenders pay for EBITDA quality, not just EBITDA. Clean, reconciled, defensible reporting shortens diligence and strengthens your position at exit.
Frequently asked questions
How do DSOs find EBITDA leakage?
By reconciling clinical production against financial actuals and attributing each variance to a driver — payer mix, adjustments, utilization, labor cost or supply spend — at location and provider level.
Can ARQ Dental produce board and lender reporting?
Yes. ARQ Dental generates reconciled budget-to-actual EBITDA waterfalls and location-level contribution reporting suitable for board packs and lender reviews.
Does this replace our accounting system?
No. ARQ Dental reads from your general ledger and PMS and layers analysis on top — your finance stack stays where it is.
What is a good EBITDA margin for a dental group?
Well-run multi-location groups typically run 18–22% EBITDA margin at the location level before corporate overhead, though payer mix, labor market and specialty mix move that range materially.
What is an EBITDA bridge or waterfall in a DSO?
An EBITDA bridge explains the gap between budgeted and actual EBITDA by attributing each dollar of variance to a driver such as volume, price, payer mix, adjustments, clinical labor, support labor or supply cost.
How do you calculate location-level EBITDA accurately?
By combining PMS collections with general-ledger costs and allocating shared overhead on a consistent, documented basis, so no location is flattered or penalised by an arbitrary allocation.
What causes the most EBITDA leakage in dental groups?
In most networks the largest drivers are uncontrolled adjustments and write-offs, chair and hygiene under-utilization, clinical labor cost per production hour drifting above plan, and payer contracts that no longer cover their delivery cost.
How does this help with add-back and quality-of-earnings work?
Because every EBITDA figure is reconciled to source ledger data with a documented calculation, add-backs are traceable and diligence teams can validate numbers rather than rebuild them.
Can we see EBITDA by provider as well as by location?
Yes. Contribution can be attributed at provider level within each location, so leadership can see where margin is generated rather than only where revenue lands.
Find the margin you're already earning
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