Dental billing automation on a flat monthly fee.
Claims filed from the chart.Insurance posted and matched to your deposit.Patient balances collected.The month closed to the cent.
Ownstead is the billing department for dental practices and groups. It runs on the practice management system you already have, so nothing is migrated and nothing is installed. Every other vendor in this category takes a percentage of what it collects for you. We charge a flat monthly fee.
You keep your practice management system.
Nothing is migrated. Nothing is installed on your server. Your team carries on working where they already work.
Shown with sample data for a single-location general practice. The flat fee, the $25 guarantee threshold and the unbound rule are contract terms, not forecasts.
“Major restorative services are covered at 50% after the annual deductible has been met.”Example PPO · Schedule B p.14 · effective 01 Jan 2026
“Bitewing radiographs are limited to one series in any twelve month period.”Last series 14 Mar 2026 · next eligible 14 Mar 2027
No clause governs frequency after a course of treatment delivered by another provider.Not quoted to the patient. Not billed.
Illustrative. Not a patient’s record.
A percentage fee gets bigger every year you do well.
Most dental billing automation is priced as a share of what it collects for you. Two things follow from that, and neither one is in your favour.
A vendor paid on collections makes more from a practice with a mess in accounts receivable than from a clean one. The thing you are hiring them to fix is the thing that shrinks their invoice.
Add a chair, bring on an associate, have a good year. The percentage takes the same cut of a bigger number while the work on their side has not changed. You end up paying rent on your own growth.
0%
Of your collections
What we take as a share of the money we collect for you. The fee does not move when your production does.
Contract term9–15%
Of production goes uncollected
Claims never reworked, balances never chased, collectable money written off.
Industry estimate, not our dataThe number you quote and the number you bank should be the same number.
Everything in between is where practices lose money. A clause nobody read. A downgrade nobody appealed. A balance nobody chased. Ownstead runs the whole span and reconciles both ends.
Quoted
Priced against the patient's own contract, clause by clause, before the treatment is booked.
Filed
The claim is built from the treatment and goes out the same day, without anyone retyping a code.
Posted
EOBs read, payment matched to the deposit, write-off and patient responsibility posted to the ledger.
Closed
Ledger, bank and books agree. Anything that does not agree has a name and a date against it.
Quoted in the chair. Paid six weeks later. Never compared.
Three things go wrong between those two moments, and not one of them looks urgent on any particular Tuesday.
The estimate nobody will stand behind
It comes off a benefits summary that was accurate last quarter. The patient hears a number, books the crown, and opens a statement eight weeks later that says something else. Now somebody has to telephone them about money everyone thought was settled.
The shortfall nobody catches
The payment arrives light and gets posted anyway, because there are fourteen other things to do before lunch. Nobody checks it against the contracted rate and nobody checks it against the quote, so the same clause is misread again in October.
Where the money goesThe pile by the printer
Insurance cheques, EOBs and a statement run, keyed in one line at a time. The deposit never quite matches the paperwork, so the month closes on a number nobody entirely trusts.
One platform for both halves of what you are owed.
Insurance owes you on claims. Patients owe you on balances. Running the two in separate systems is the reason neither of them reconciles.
01Insurance billingFrom the treatment to the general ledger
- Claims assembled from the chart and filed, 837D
- EOBs in by upload, managed PO box, clearinghouse or payer portal
- Payment, write-off and patient responsibility posted to the ledger
- Cheques, EFTs and virtual cards matched to the deposit, card fees tracked
- Denials queued, appeals written with the clause already quoted
- Ledger, bank and books reconciled, with named exceptions
02Patient balancesCollected without anyone making the awkward call
- Statements and a text link they can pay from in thirty seconds
- Payment plans, with the schedule posted back to the ledger
- Reminders that stop the moment the balance clears
- A payment page in the practice's name, not ours
- Family balances merged across locations
03ReportingThe same number, defined once
- Every location in one view, updated overnight
- Per payer and per plan, so you can see where the money actually goes
- Drift from a location's own baseline, flagged before the quarter
- The morning page, in the inbox before the first patient
04The assistantAsk about the books in plain English
- What is sitting over ninety days, and with which payer
- Emails the accounts receivable report on a schedule
- Ranks who to chase today, and drafts the message
- It never posts money. A person approves anything that moves a dollar.
Ownstead runs on the practice management system you already have. Open Dental and Dentrix first, then Eaglesoft, Curve and CareStack. If yours is not on that list, tell us and we will say honestly how long it would take.
Built for whoever has to make it work.
The same platform, described for the person reading. Pick yours.
You sign the invoice, and you are the one who hears about it when a patient is surprised by a bill. Both of those are billing problems.
You find out in the morning, not at month end
One page before the first patient: what came in overnight, what came up short, what is waiting on your signature, and which treatment plans are still sitting unquoted.
The fee does not move when production does
Flat monthly, banded by volume and agreed before you sign. Add a chair or have a strong quarter and the invoice is the same. The upside is yours.
The number you promised is the number you defend
Every quote carries the clause that governs it. When a patient disputes a bill, the answer is a document with a date on it rather than an argument at the front desk.
The pile by the printer is yours. So is the phone call when the deposit does not match it.
EOBs stop being data entry
Upload them, post them to us, or let us pull them from the payer portal. They come back posted to the ledger with the payment matched to the deposit, and only the exceptions come to you.
Appeals arrive already written
An underpayment comes back with the contracted rate, the clause that proves it and the letter. You read it and you sign it. You do not start from a blank page at half past four.
The deposit matches the paperwork
Cheques, EFTs and virtual cards tied to the remittance they belong to, with card fees tracked. What will not match is listed by name instead of left in the pile for next month.
You need the same answer from every location on the same day, and right now getting it takes a week and three spreadsheets.
Every metric defined once
Collection rate means the same thing at every site. Comparing locations takes a second rather than a week of reconciling how each office counts.
Central standard, local exceptions
Set the rules once for the group and let an individual site override only what it genuinely needs to. The override is visible rather than informal.
Drift surfaces before the quarter does
A site moving away from its own baseline is flagged when it starts, not when it turns up in a quarterly review three months later.
Flat monthly fee. No percentage, no contingency.
Set once we both know your volume, and it stays there. The first claim review costs nothing, because you should see the work before you buy it.
What we charge
Flat monthly
One fee for the practice, banded by volume and agreed before you sign.
- First claim review is free. No card, no commitment after it.
- Ninety days, then month to month, on thirty days notice.
- No share of collections, no contingency, ever.
- No per-seat and no per-provider pricing.
What the category charges
% of collections
The prevailing model across dental billing automation.
- The worse your accounts receivable, the more the vendor earns.
- The fee scales with your production, not with their work.
- Quoted per group and rarely published, so it is hard to compare.
Questions a sceptic should ask.
What is Ownstead?
Dental billing automation. It files your claims, reads the EOBs that come back, posts the payments to the patient ledger, matches them to what landed in the bank, chases the balances patients owe, and closes the month. It runs on top of the practice management system you already use rather than replacing it. The difference from everyone else in the category is the invoice: a flat monthly fee for the practice instead of a percentage of what it collects.
What is actually built today?
Running now: pre-treatment pricing with the governing clause cited, the unbound rule, exact decimal arithmetic, eligibility and benefit parsing, 837D claim assembly, 835 reconciliation with a variance queue, and a bitemporal audit of every belief the system has held. In build: EOB document reading, the other three intake paths, payment matching, general ledger posting, patient balance collection and the multi-location view. We would rather you knew the difference before the call than after it.
Do I have to leave my practice management system?
No, and that is the point. Ownstead runs on top of what you already use. Nothing is migrated, nothing is installed on your server, and your team keeps working where they work. A separate product that replaces the practice management system is something we intend to build later. It is not this.
Do you have customers?
Not yet. Every figure on this page is a contract term, a service commitment or a clearly labelled industry estimate, and none of them are customer outcomes. When we have results worth citing we will publish them with the denominator attached.
Are you SOC 2 certified?
No. Tenancy, audit and encryption were settled before any feature work, patient data never reaches a log, and a BAA is signed before a single record moves. But we do not hold the certificate. If SOC 2 is a hard requirement for you today, we are not your vendor yet, and we would rather say so here than on the third call.
How is the guarantee actually enforced?
It is a term in the agreement rather than a line in an advertisement. If adjudicated patient responsibility lands more than $25 above the figure we bound, and the cause was our misreading of a clause, the difference is credited against your fee. Caps per quote and per month are written into the contract. The exclusions are listed, not implied.
What happens to a line you cannot price?
It prints unbound. That means no clause in the contract governs it, so we will not put a number against it and the guarantee does not cover it. It is never quoted to the patient as though it were settled. A confident wrong number costs a practice more than an honest gap.
The number is guaranteed before the patient leaves the chair.
Every other estimate in dentistry carries the word approximately. Ours is a figure with money behind it, and the line we cannot cite is marked rather than guessed.
Bound Quote
Guaranteed patient portion
$541.00
If the payer disagrees by more than $25 because we misread a clause, we pay you the difference.
1 line excluded as unbound, and never billedIllustrative. Not a patient’s record.
See it on your own remittances.
Send ninety days, in whatever your system exports. We sign the BAA first and come back inside five working days with every line the payer got wrong, the clause that proves it, and an appeal you only have to sign. No charge and no card.
One field. A person replies, not a sequence. Or call (888) 210-8750.