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Guides for associate dentists
Your work, your clinical growth, your licences and CE, and the parts of an associate contract nobody explains. Written out plainly. No sign-up, no email, no gate.
Your work
How much should an associate dentist produce per day?
What associate dentists typically produce per day and per visit, where the published figures come from, and why your own number matters more than any benchmark.
How to log your production as an associate dentist
What to write down each day, which fee to use, how long it really takes, and the small habits that make a daily record of your own work worth keeping.
Reading your production: what to look for each month
Production per day versus per visit, your mix by category and by code, weekday patterns and best and slowest days. What each one tells you and what to do about it.
Backtracking: rebuild your past months from office reports and pay stubs
Where to find the numbers for months you never logged, what is enough to be useful, and how a few months of history make pay checks and trends work from day one.
Working at more than one office: how to compare them
Two offices, two contracts, two schedules. How to tell which one is actually worth your day once lab, guarantees, collections timing and the cases you get are counted.
Clinical growth
Clinical development: tracking the procedures you want to do more of
How to follow your own case volume month by month, think in skill ladders from implant crowns to overdentures, and pick the next step and the CE for it.
CE tracking for dentists: hours, cycles and choosing courses
How to keep your continuing education hours straight for your board, what to save from every course, and how to choose CE that actually changes what you do.
Licences and renewals
Pay and contracts
How associate dentist pay actually works
Percentage, basis, daily guarantee, lab split and tiers, explained in plain terms with worked numbers. The parts of the contract that decide your income.
Production vs collections: 30% of what, exactly?
Gross production, adjusted production and collections pay very differently on the same percentage. A worked example with a $5,100 spread in one month.
Is lab taken out before or after your percentage?
Two associates on identical 30% contracts can be paid $21,000 a year apart depending on where lab comes off. How to tell which one you are on.
A guarantee is a floor. A draw is a loan.
Offices use the word guarantee for two different deals. One is a safety net, the other is a loan against future months. How to tell before you sign.
Tiered contracts: crossing the tier, or re-rating the month
A tiered associate contract can pay each band on its own dollars or re-rate the whole month. Same production, $1,000 apart. The wording that decides it.
Your contract says 32%. What actually reached you was 26%.
Write-offs, the collection lag and your lab share all sit between the contract and your bank account. How to calculate what actually reached you.
What to ask before you sign an associate contract
The compensation questions that decide thousands of dollars a year, and none of them are awkward to ask. A checklist for new grads and job changers.
All of this is easier with your own record.
cuspd is the platform for associate dentists: your production, your pay, your clinical growth, your renewals and CE, in one place. 100% free for associates.