The Quiet Money Leak in Your Practice (and How to Find It This Weekend)

Most practice owners I work with are concerned about the bottom line. Whether it’s something they’re regularly looking at, or just have a sense of. And most don’t have a spending problem in the dramatic sense. They aren’t making reckless decisions, spending frivolously or living beyond their means. They’re responsible, thoughtful people who have built their businesses carefully and watch their numbers as best they can between sessions, team meetings, and the hundred other things that fill a week.

What is happening could be called a drift problem. And drift is harder to spot than overspending, because it doesn’t feel like anything at all.

Drift looks like the room scheduling software you signed up for during a busy stretch two years ago, fully intending to switch over from your old one, and now both are quietly charging you each month. It looks like the professional membership that made sense when you were building your reputation and now feels more like an obligation than an asset. It could also look like the email marketing platform you upgraded to a paid plan on (and the one you haven’t actually logged into in six months!). It looks like three different file storage subscriptions because the team kept adding what they needed without anyone tracking the total.

None of these feel like much on their own. That’s exactly why they survive! They’re too small to notice when you’re looking at the big picture and too embedded to question when you are deep in the day-to-day and scanning your numbers. And then, when you stack them up across a year, the number is almost always bigger than owners expect. I have sat with practice owners who found over a thousand dollars a month in expenses they had honestly forgotten they were paying for.

Here’s the thing I want you to know. Finding that money isn’t about being frugal or cutting corners. It also isn’t about questioning whether your practice deserves to invest in itself. It IS about giving yourself the gift of clarity. When you know exactly where your money is going, you can make conscious choices about it. And conscious choices are what build sustainable businesses.

What a real overhead audit looks like

Here’s a version of an exercise I teach in my coaching work. You can do it in an afternoon, and most owners find it surprisingly satisfying once they get past the first 10 minutes of resistance.

Pull your last three months of bank and credit card statements. Every account you use for the business. List every recurring expense, no matter how small. The $5 app subscription belongs on the list right alongside the rent. Don’t edit as you go or even go off and unsubscribe. Just capture everything.

Once the list is complete, sort each expense into one of three categories.

• Essential, meaning it is genuinely required to run the practice and you would not consider cutting it.

• Worth reviewing, meaning it might be necessary but you haven’t actually evaluated it in a while.

• Worth cutting, meaning you already know it isn’t earning its place.

Then look at your total monthly overhead as a percentage of your gross revenue. This single number will tell you more about the financial health of your practice than almost any other figure. If it feels disproportionate to what your practice is bringing in, that’s information worth sitting with rather than worth panicking about.

What usually shows up

In my experience, every overhead audit turns up at least one expense that genuinely surprises the owner. Sometimes it’s a subscription that was supposed to be cancelled and never was (or requires you to remember a password long ago forgotten and feels too frustrating to follow through on). Sometimes it’s two tools doing the same job because the team transitioned but no one shut down the old one. Sometimes it’s a professional fee that has crept up year over year without anyone really noticing and it’s no longer actually necessary.

One pattern I see often is the higher-tier subscription that started with good intentions. You signed up for a program or a course, and the access required upgrading to the premium plan of a software you were already using, or signing up for a new tool at a level higher than you would’ve otherwise chosen. The program ended. And the subscription kept going in the background. And because the higher tier became your normal monthly charge, it stopped looking like an upgrade and just looked like the cost of doing business. Months or years later, you’re still paying for features you never actually use, on a plan you would not have chosen if you were starting fresh today.

The audits also tend to surface the expenses that are technically essential but are larger than they need to be. The phone plan that hasn’t been reviewed since you signed up. The insurance policy that hasn’t been quoted against the market in three years. The merchant fees that are quietly higher than what is competitive in your industry right now (and worth asking for a reduced rate).

This isn’t about ruthless cost-cutting. It’s about asking, for each of these line items, whether this expense is still serving the practice you’re running today rather than the practice you were running when you signed up for that subscription.

Why this matters more than it sounds

Practice owners often come to me wanting to grow their revenue and find ways to pay themselves fairly. That’s almost always a good conversation to have. But here’s what I have learned after years of doing this work. The owners who feel financially solid are not always the ones bringing in the most money. They’re the ones who know exactly where their money is going. They’ve reviewed their overhead recently. They aren’t afraid to look at the numbers because the numbers no longer hold any unpleasant surprises.

That sense of solid ground is available to you. And it doesn’t require a big revenue breakthrough or a dramatic restructure. It can start with an afternoon, three months of statements, and a willingness to look honestly at what you find.

The deeper work

A subscription audit is the first layer. The fuller picture is what your overhead looks like relative to your direct costs, what your team actually costs you when payroll deductions are factored in, what your owner pay should look like, and what numbers you should be reviewing every single month so this kind of drift won’t happen again.

That deeper work is what we do together inside The Numbers Room, my twelve-month financial mastermind for Canadian practice owners who are ready to stop guessing about their numbers. We work through every part of the financial picture, one month at a time, with the framework, the spreadsheets, and the community to actually do the work rather than just learning about it.

The Numbers Room opens for registration two to three times a year, and the cohorts fill up quickly. If your overhead audit this weekend turns up more than you expected, that is the business waving its hand, asking for your attention. Take a look at The Numbers Room and get on the waitlist so you do not miss the next opening.

You can learn more and join the waitlist by visiting The Numbers Room or send me an email.