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 the growth targets you settle on here.)

Where your numbers come from

The baseline — what you see when the tool opens, or after you press ↺ Baseline — is not a guess. It is built from three sources:

• Your practice's own data. Kept appointment counts by type, your active-patient total, and your prior-year results (production, collections, and starts) come directly from your practice-management and reporting system.
• Your case fees. The per-case fees in the Fee Structure card are your actual fees by modality.
• Model Ortho benchmarks. Standard orthodontic relationships — chair time per appointment type, visits per case by modality, and the exam-to-start conversion rate — connect those numbers, calibrated to your practice.

Monthly and yearly figures are your year-to-date results projected over a full year, so the baseline reflects your current run rate rather than any single month.

How the page is laid out

The blue-bordered cards are your settings: case fees, patient days, treatment mix, and your team. The purple-bordered cards are the results those choices produce: staffing signal, pipeline health, and appointment counts. Across the page, color shows where things stand — green, yellow, or red — marking growth, shrinkage, or capacity.

The number up top

The large figure at the left of the banner is the practice's total production for the year, with the change from baseline shown directly beneath it. Across the center of the banner, that same production is broken down: production per clinical day, per staff hour, the average fee per start, and how many starts that works out to per year.

Growth target

The Growth Target slider sits in the upper-right corner of the banner. Each 1% increase shows how many starts per year it takes to achieve that goal. Growth adds new starts — and everything a start brings with it (exams, bond-ups, records, and debonds) — so the pipeline and the appointment table move together.

Fee structure

These are the four case fees the practice charges: Traditional braces, Clear aligners, Custom braces, and Phase I. Phase II folds into the Comprehensive start count rather than carrying its own fee. 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. Set the Full day and Half day hours (start, end, lunch), then the number of each you work in a year. The forecaster turns that into clinical days and clinic minutes — the basis for production-per-day and every per-day count.

Treatment modalities & virtual monitoring

Treatment Modalities models how the practice delivers care. The Aligner and Custom braces sliders set the share of comprehensive cases in each modality (Traditional braces fills the remainder). Virtual Monitoring sets how much aligner follow-up happens remotely instead of in the chair.

These levers move the appointment table in both directions. The codes that lose visits turn red (freed); the codes that gain them turn green (added). For example: more aligners frees traditional adjustments and bonds, and adds aligner checks and refinement scans. Turning virtual monitoring down brings those remote aligner checks back into the office as added appointments.

Human resources

Who's on the team and what each role costs. These counts and salaries drive the Staffing Signal panel.

Reading the Appointments table

Each row is an appointment type. The columns are:

• Current — the baseline monthly count (where you are today).
• Change — how much that appointment type moves when you adjust a lever. Green +N means added, red −N means freed.
• Growth — the new projected total per month (Current + Change).
• Appts/day and Min/day — that new total spread across your clinical days, and the chair time it requires.

The Total row shows the net effect across every appointment type.

The panels

• Staffing Signal: each role's capacity based on how many minutes they are available to be patient facing.
• Pipeline Health — patients coming in versus finishing (starts vs. debonds per month), plus the three-tier start mix (Phase I, Comprehensive, Phase II).
• 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 starting point.
• ↺ Growth — return to the growth targets we settled on during your consultation.
• 💾 Save — save your current adjustments so they stick until the next time you save.

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.