Most clinic owners answer that question approximately. Cash in the drawer, card receipts, notes in the administrator's book — add it all together and you get "roughly this much."

The problem is that you cannot make decisions on an approximate number. Should you buy another chair? Can you afford to raise a dentist's salary? Which service is profitable and which one loses money? Every one of those questions demands an exact figure.

Why a cash book isn't enough

Cash is not revenue. The money in the drawer is what was paid today. But the clinic may have delivered 5,000,000 UZS of treatment and collected only 3,000,000 of it. Which of those is "income"? A cash book doesn't show the difference.

Payment methods get mixed up. Cash, card, transfer, installment — each gets recorded somewhere different. Consolidating them at month end is a separate job.

Nobody knows who took the money. If the drawer comes up short, there's no way to establish who accepted which payment from which patient, and when. It becomes a question of trust rather than accounting.

Unpaid treatment is invisible. Treatment delivered, payment deferred — this appears in no report at all. The clinic ends up rich on paper and poor at the register.

The solution: every som has a route

In Dental ERP, finance isn't a pile of scattered notes. It moves along a defined chain.

Service → invoice → payment. When a dentist completes treatment, the system generates the invoice automatically. Each service appears as its own line: name, price, which tooth it applies to, which dentist performed it. Nothing gets "forgotten," because the invoice is built from the treatment record itself.

Invoices carry a status. Every invoice sits at a defined stage: draft → sent → partially paid → paid. That status isn't changed by hand — the system updates it the moment a payment is recorded. So "we forgot to mark it paid" simply cannot happen.

Every payment method in one place. Cash, card, bank transfer, installment — each recorded with its own type. Seeing how much came in through each channel takes no month-end consolidation; it's a standing report.

Every payment records who accepted it. Which staff member took the money, and when, is captured. This isn't an accusation — it's order. When something is disputed, there's a record instead of an argument.

Financial records are never deleted. Payments land in an immutable ledger. A mistake is corrected with an adjusting entry, not by erasing the original. That's the foundational rule of accounting, and it's built into the system.

Reports: numbers instead of guesses

The reporting section answers five core questions for the owner:

• Billed revenue — how much treatment was delivered in the period, regardless of collection
• Collected cash — how much of that actually arrived
• Breakdown by payment method — the cash / card / transfer mix
• Daily trend — which days are strong and which are empty
• Overdue balances — how much money is running late

On top of that sits a services report: how many times each service was performed and how much revenue it produced. From that point on, the owner prices from data rather than instinct.

The result

"How much did we earn last month?" now has a two-number answer: billed and collected. And the gap between them is precisely the money worth working on.