The Challenge
On a Friday afternoon, FayTao Periodontics lost its front desk employee.
That single departure was the visible part of the problem. The rest had been building for months. A long-tenured practice manager had relocated out of state. Staff turnover had churned through the front office more than once. And the practice was still receiving the majority of its insurance payments as paper checks — physically opening envelopes, keying in EOBs, and reconciling by hand.
By Monday, one person was covering everything:
Predeterminations
Insurance verification and benefit explanations to patients
Claim submission
Payment posting and bank reconciliation
The front desk
She was staying late to get through it. She was also the only person in the building who understood the practice's predetermination workflow — which in a periodontal practice sits directly in front of production, since surgical and grafting cases routinely need preauthorization before they can be scheduled.
The practice's first instinct was the obvious one: post the job, hire a replacement, get back to normal. That's the status quo option, and it is the one most practices take by default.
What the status quo was actually costing
Before evaluating any vendor, FayTao ran the numbers on doing nothing but backfilling the role.
Cost of staying put | Basis | Monthly |
|---|---|---|
Replacement front desk hire | $22/hr base, loaded ~1.25× for payroll tax, benefits, workers' comp | ~$4,800 |
Overtime / after-hours on remaining coordinator | ~8 hrs/week at time-and-a-half while the seat is empty | ~$1,200 |
Recruiting, onboarding, ramp to productivity | ~$4,000 one-time, amortized over 12 months | ~$330 |
Aged AR leakage | 3% of collections lost to claims that age past appeal or timely-filing windows when nobody is working the report | ~$1,800 |
Modeled total | ~$8,130/mo |
Assumptions are the practice's own inputs and industry-standard loading factors, not measured results. Any practice can substitute its own wage and write-off figures.
Three costs did not appear on that table, because they don't show up on a P&L:
Cash sitting in envelopes. Roughly 80% of payments were arriving as paper checks. Paper pays about four times slower than EFT. On $60K a month, that's tens of thousands of dollars perpetually in transit rather than in the account.
Single-point-of-failure risk. One burned-out coordinator was carrying institutional knowledge for two locations. If she left, the practice wouldn't be down one employee — it would be down its entire billing function, with no documentation and no successor.
The owner's chair time. Every hour the doctor spends adjudicating an insurance question is an hour not spent producing.
The uncomfortable finding: the "free" option — hiring a body and carrying on — modeled out to roughly $8,100 a month, and it still left the practice with one person, one point of failure, and paper checks.
The Solution
FayTao evaluated two paths. One was an automation-only platform that posted payments and nothing else. The other was Teero.
The distinction that decided it was scope. Payment posting was not the bottleneck — it was one of six things a single overwhelmed person was doing. Automating one of six tasks leaves five behind.
Teero deployed a full billing function across both locations:
Claims submission. Clean claims with attachments, submitted with full PMS access — the equivalent of an added employee, not a plug-in. Daily recap delivered by 5–6 PM.
Payment posting and EFT conversion. Approximately 80% of paper checks converted to EFT, with read-only bank access for reconciliation and all payments posted within 24 hours. Some payers approve EFT enrollment within a week; claims, billing, and AR work begin immediately rather than waiting on the conversion.
Aging and AR management. Accounts from 30 days out to two years, contacted every 14–21 days until paid, with appeals and resubmissions handled automatically.
Insurance verification. 48-hour standard turnaround, same-day expedited available, up to 20 custom codes at no charge, with full breakdowns written directly into the PMS.
Patient billing. Electronic statements, letters, calls, and texts, working accounts up to six months.
Two locations, one structure. Both locations operate under a single tax ID and share a bank account. Teero maintains separate reconciliation records per location while pricing on total volume — not per site.
Two details mattered to how the practice made the decision:
Training scope was defined up front. Teero trains the team on how to work with Teero. It does not train staff to do billing themselves, and the practice retains its own baseline predetermination knowledge in-house.
The exit is unlocked. No contract. Cancel any time with 30 days' courtesy notice. The practice owns its data outright, and a shared dashboard with a two-way ticket board keeps every claim, payment, and flagged issue visible in real time.
The two columns, side by side
Status quo (backfill the role) | Teero | |
|---|---|---|
Monthly cost | ~$8,130 modeled | $2,400 |
Onboarding | $4,000 in recruiting and ramp | $0 (waived, $2,000 value) |
Time to productive | 60–90 days | 1–2 weeks |
Coverage | One person, business hours | 24/7 team + dedicated account manager |
If that person leaves | Function stops | Function continues |
Exit cost | Severance, rehire, repeat | 30 days' notice |
The Results
This engagement began in February 2026. The figures below are the 90-day scorecard Teero commits to and will be measured against, not retrospective results. Actual performance data will replace this section at the 90-day review.
Committed 90-day targets
Metric | Baseline | 90-day target |
|---|---|---|
Payments arriving as EFT | ~20% | ~80% |
Payment posting turnaround | Days, batched | Within 24 hours |
Aged AR touch frequency | Ad hoc | Every 14–21 days |
Verification turnaround | Handled between other duties | 48 hours standard |
Staff hours returned to the practice | — | 40–80 hrs/month |
Comparable proof point: In a separate Teero engagement, one office cleared its entire 90+ day patient AR balance within 30 days of onboarding.
Expected working-capital effect: Converting ~80% of $60K in monthly collections from paper to EFT pulls roughly two to three weeks of receivables forward — a one-time cash release in the range of $24,000–$36,000, plus permanently faster collection thereafter.
Teero recommends judging the engagement on a 3–4 month window, long enough for EFT enrollment to complete across payers and for aged AR work to convert into deposits.
