What this is
The Impact Forecaster is your practice's starting picture — the "before" photo. It captures where things stand today: your case fees, how many starts you do, and how the team is staffed. Turn any dial and you instantly see the effect on production. It's how we agree on a baseline before we plan what's next. (The Schedule Canvas is the "after" — the day-to-day schedule we build from that baseline.)
The number up top
The large figure in the banner is the practice's total production for the year, with the change from where you started right beside it. Underneath, the same number is broken down: production per clinical day, per staff hour, the blended case fee, and how many starts that works out to per year.
Practice & growth target
The top of the left panel names the practice. The Growth Target slider lets you model a bigger practice — each 1% is roughly +$16k and +3 starts a year. Slide it and watch the banner and the right-hand panels respond.
Fee structure
These are the four case fees the practice charges: Traditional braces, Clear aligners, Custom 3D braces, and Phase I (interceptive). The Rate increase slider models a fee adjustment across all of them at once, so you can see what a modest price change does to the year.
Patient days
This is the practice's real chair time. Mark each day Full, Half, or Off, then set the number of clinical weeks. It's what the production-per-day numbers are built on.
Work smarter & work harder
Work Smarter shows how the same team could do more: Virtual Monitoring adoption frees chair time, and the case-mix sliders (aligner / custom / traditional) reflect the kinds of cases you take on. Work Harder flips it — if the growth target asks for more than the team can comfortably carry, this shows the extra starts and exams needed each month to reach it.
Human resources
Who's on the team and what each role costs. These counts and salaries drive the staffing signal on the right.
The right-hand panels
- Staffing Signal — a quick health check: appointments per clinical day, appointments per assistant per day, and staff cost as a share of production. Green means the team is comfortable; yellow or red means the load is getting heavy — a cue to talk staffing before it turns into a crunch.
- Pipeline Health — patients coming in versus finishing (starts vs. debonds per month), plus Phase I starts and how many convert to Phase II, and the observation program as a source of new starts.
- Appointments / Month — the full appointment count by type, with the change from baseline. Use ⬇ Export appointment counts to download it.
The buttons
- ↺ Baseline — return everything to the practice's original numbers, stored with the practice so it matches on every device.
- 🔒 Lock — save the current settings as the agreed growth baseline, shared with the whole practice. That's the sign-off: anyone who opens the tool sees it, and it stays put even if a slider gets nudged later.
- 💾 Save — keep your in-progress edits on this device only, so a refresh doesn't lose your place. It does not sync to other computers.
A note
Nothing here is a grade. The Forecaster just makes visible what the team already feels day to day, so the practice can choose its next step with the full picture in front of it.