A dental office pays almost nobody on a flat salary. Associates and hygienists run on production, assistants and the front desk run hourly, the doctors sign off, and every clinician carries a license that expires on its own clock. WageTime sets production splits up once as earning codes, runs minimum-wage processing and weighted overtime on mixed weeks, tracks every license, DEA, and CPR card with expiration alerts, and runs each location under one login. It costs $50 a month plus $10 per person paid that month, with every federal, state, and local tax filed automatically.
The U.S. has about 135,000 dental practices employing more than a million people, and most are small offices where the person running payroll also runs the front desk (US Census; BLS). That office manager reconciles associate and hygienist production against clock hours, watches a shoebox of credentials, and, more and more often, does it across two or three locations at once.
Your associate is on 30% of collections, the hygienist is base hourly plus a production bonus, and the numbers come off the practice-management report into a spreadsheet, then get re-typed into payroll. Change a percentage, add a new hygienist, or close the month, and the whole calculation is rebuilt by hand, with a rounding error nobody catches until the doctor asks.
A hygienist paid mostly on production has a light week, cancellations, a holiday, a slow schedule, and the production dollars don’t clear minimum wage for the hours actually worked. The practice owes the difference, and the person running payroll is supposed to catch it by eye, every period, for every production-paid clinician.
The dental license, the DEA registration, the radiology permit, the hygienist’s local-anesthesia cert, and everyone’s CPR card all renew on different dates. Today that lives on a sticky note or a shared calendar, and a lapsed license worked is a board-reportable problem, not a paperwork one, discovered the week the renewal was already due.
Dentistry is consolidating: private-practice ownership has fallen from about 85% of dentists in 2005 to roughly 73% today, and DSO-affiliated practice has more than doubled over the past decade to about 16% (ADA Health Policy Institute). The second location gets its own entity and EIN, a doctor works both, and now you run two payrolls, two sets of filings, and a Social Security wage base counted twice.
The practice-management system is locked down and the team signs HIPAA training every year, but staff Social Security numbers, direct-deposit details, and pay live in a spreadsheet and an email thread. The vendor question on every demo, do you handle our data the way we have to handle a patient’s, rarely has a clean answer.
Each of these gets a real product screen below, shown with sample dental data.
WageTime pays production as configuration, not spreadsheet math. Custom earning codes support flat-amount, per-unit, and tiered commission pay, so an associate’s percentage of collections and a hygienist’s base-plus-production are set up once and run inside payroll every period. Minimum-wage processing at the federal, state, and local level measures a light production week against the wage floor for the hours actually worked, and weighted-average overtime computes automatically when someone mixes a production rate and an hourly rate in the same week. The front-desk spreadsheet, and the rounding error in it, retires.
| Provider | Basis | Production/hours | Pay |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dr. A. Nguyen associate | 30% of collections | $41,200 collected | $12,360.00 |
| R. Ortiz, RDH | Base $42/hr + 10% prod | 72.0 hrs | $3,914.00 |
| T. Boyd, RDH | 8% production | 64.0 hrs | $1,760.00 |
| M. Ellis, EFDA | $28/hr + expanded fn | 78.0 hrs | $2,184.00 |
Replaces the production spreadsheet, and the minimum-wage check done by eye.
WageTime tracks every credential on the employee record with recurring 30, 60, and 90-day expiration alerts, so a license or permit is renewed before it lapses instead of after. Dental licenses, DEA registrations, radiology and radiography certifications, local-anesthesia permits, and CPR or BLS cards each sit on the clinician’s record with the document stored and its own renewal date. The office manager sees what expires this quarter across the whole team in one place, not by opening five folders. Credential categories are configured to the practice, and the same record carries onboarding documents and the I-9.
| Employee | Credential | Expires | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dr. A. Nguyen | DEA registration | Sep 12 | 57 days |
| Dr. S. Patel | State dental license | Mar 31 | Current |
| R. Ortiz, RDH | Radiography cert | Aug 04 | 18 days |
| T. Boyd, RDH | CPR/BLS card | Dec 01 | Current |
| M. Ellis, EFDA | Local-anesthesia permit | Jan 15 | Current |
Replaces the sticky note, and the license that lapsed before anyone noticed.
WageTime runs a multi-location group under one login, with each practice under its own EIN and its own filings, reported per location or combined. Pay frequency is configuration, so one entity can run the hourly team biweekly while another runs the doctors semi-monthly, each with its own calendar, overtime period, and accrual logic. Finished payroll posts to QuickBooks mapped by location, and reporting rolls up across the group or drills into a single office. A doctor who works across related entities that qualify can run under a common-paymaster arrangement, one W-2 and one FICA wage base, though whether a group qualifies is a question for its CPA.
| Location | Headcount | Gross pay | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Riverside Dental EIN 1 | 11 | $58,400.00 | Filed |
| Lakeside Ortho EIN 2 | 8 | $47,900.00 | Filed |
| Summit Oral Surgery EIN 3 | 6 | $52,150.00 | Filed |
| Dr. Nguyen works 2 sites | common paymaster | one W-2 | Reviewed |
Replaces the second payroll login, and the wage base counted twice.
WageTime configures evening, weekend, and holiday shift differentials as pay codes inside payroll, so the Saturday hygiene shift and the late Thursday operatory pay their premium automatically instead of by hand. Scheduling is built in too: publish the clinic schedule with conflict safeguards, double-booking checks, rest-period flags, and overnight validation, so a floating hygienist covering two offices isn’t booked in both at once. Approved hours flow from the clock into the run, and the differential rides the same weighted-overtime math as every other rate. The premium is a rule you set once, not a manual adjustment every payday.
| Employee | Shift | Hours | Differential |
|---|---|---|---|
| R. Ortiz, RDH | Saturday hygiene | 8.0 | +$6.00/hr |
| T. Boyd, RDH | Thursday evening | 10.0 | +$4.00/hr |
| M. Ellis, EFDA | Saturday assist | 8.0 | +$3.00/hr |
| K. Diaz front desk | Weekday | 40.0 | None |
Replaces the manual weekend premium, and the hygienist booked in two chairs at once.
WageTime syncs benefits elections to payroll deductions every cycle and reconciles enrollment against carrier data, so a mid-year change on the dental, medical, or vision plan lands on the right check without a re-key. The 401(k) administration enforces the annual IRS limits, elective deferrals stop automatically at the Section 402(g) cap, and the employer match applies per the plan’s terms. A new hire’s elections take effect on the next run, and a coverage change flows to the deduction without a spreadsheet in between. The result is a benefits and retirement setup that keeps pace with a team that grows an associate or a hygienist mid-year.
| Employee | Deduction | Per pay | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dr. S. Patel | 401(k) elective | $1,375.00 | Capped at limit |
| R. Ortiz, RDH | Medical + dental | $184.50 | Synced |
| T. Boyd, RDH | 401(k) 6% + match | $198.00 | Synced |
| M. Ellis, EFDA | Vision + FSA | $62.00 | Synced |
Replaces the deduction re-key, and the deferral that ran past the IRS cap.
Set the production rule once as an earning code, a percentage of collections for an associate, a base hourly rate plus a production percentage for a hygienist, and WageTime runs it every period. Flat-amount, per-unit, and tiered commission types are all supported, so different splits for different providers live side by side. The production dollars land on the same check as hourly hours, taxes, and deductions, with no separate spreadsheet.
WageTime runs minimum-wage processing at the federal, state, and local level, measuring production pay against the wage floor for the hours actually worked. When a slow week leaves a production-paid clinician short, the run flags it and applies the difference rather than leaving the office manager to catch it by eye. How the wage-and-hour rules apply to your practice is a question for you and your advisor; WageTime provides the mechanism, not legal advice.
Every credential sits on the employee record with its own renewal date and the document stored: state dental and hygiene licenses, DEA registrations, radiology and radiography certifications, local-anesthesia permits, and CPR or BLS cards. Recurring alerts fire at 30, 60, and 90 days before each one expires, and the office manager sees everything renewing this quarter across the team in one view. Categories are configured to your practice.
Yes. Run each location under its own EIN with its own filings, all from one login, and report per location or consolidated across the group. Pay frequency is configured per entity, so different offices can run different calendars. A doctor who works across related entities that qualify can be handled under a common-paymaster arrangement, one W-2 and one FICA wage base; whether your group qualifies is a question for your CPA. Tell us your entity structure on the demo and we’ll confirm the exact setup.
Pay frequency is configuration, weekly, biweekly, semi-monthly, or monthly, and each entity in a group can run its own calendar with its own overtime period and accruals. Practices commonly run the hourly team biweekly and the doctors semi-monthly. Bring your entity structure and how you want to split the doctors from the hourly team to the demo, and we’ll confirm the exact setup for your practice.
The platform behind WageTime is SOC 2 Type II audited and ISO 27001/27018 certified, with safeguards built for handling HIPAA-covered data, and business and employee data is protected end to end with bank-level encryption. Dental practices routinely ask about business associate agreements on the demo, so bring the question and we’ll walk through how your data is handled. WageTime describes its security posture and does not represent any specific compliance outcome for your practice.
$50 a month for the practice plus $10 per person actually paid that month, with unlimited payroll runs. Off-cycle runs, bonuses, and corrections cost nothing extra, every federal, state, and local tax is filed automatically, and year-end W-2s and 1099s are included. There are no long-term contracts and you can cancel anytime. A practice that adds an associate or a second location pays for who was paid, not a flat per-seat block.
One associate or hygienist paid on production, your credential list, and your entity structure. Twenty minutes with a payroll specialist on a live demo practice: you’ll watch a production split run with minimum-wage processing, see the credential tracker flag a renewal, and see two locations file under one login.
Book a 20-minute demo