If you are reading this on a laptop with Dentally open in another tab, you are exactly who this is for.
Most UK dental practices we talk to have the same setup. Dentally manages the schedule, the clinical notes, the treatment plans, the claims. It is the first thing opened every morning, and the last thing closed at night. It is good at what it does, and nobody is looking to replace it.
Ask the same practice owner one specific question, though, and the confidence tends to drop. What did associate pay cost last month, down to the UDA? Which patients with outstanding treatment have not been seen in six months? Is Tuesday afternoon quietly losing you money?
Dentally can tell you what happened. It was never built to tell you what it means.
That is not a criticism. It is just not what a practice management system is for. And it is exactly the gap Clever Practice was built to fill.
Two different jobs, not two competing tools
Dentally is a practice management system. It runs the clinical and operational side of a dental practice: booking patients in, recording what was done, planning what’s next, billing for it, and submitting the claims that follow.
Clever Practice is something else entirely. It’s a financial and clinic intelligence layer that sits on top of the practice management system a clinic already runs, reading the data Dentally produces and turning it into the things a PMS was never designed to do: automated associate pay, performance reporting, and patient growth tools.
Put simply: Dentally runs the clinic. Clever Practice runs the business. Most practices only have the first one, and do not realise what they are missing until they are back in a spreadsheet doing associate pay by hand at eleven at night.
Where each one earns its place
| Dentally handles | Clever Practice handles |
| Appointment scheduling | Associate pay, private and NHS UDA |
| Clinical charting and treatment planning | Practice and clinician performance reporting |
| Patient records | Patient recall for lapsed and outstanding treatment |
| Billing and insurance claims | Chair time utilisation and empty slot matching |
| Patient communication and reminders | Branded, automated pay statements |
Nothing on the right replaces anything on the left. Nothing on the left does what is on the right. That is the whole point. This is not a case for switching anything. It is a case for adding the piece that is missing.
The two are not separate, they are connected
The clearest way to see this is not a list, it is a flow. Dentally holds the appointment and treatment data. Clever Practice reads that data, alongside your accounting platform, and turns it into three things a PMS alone cannot give you: an automated pay run, a performance dashboard, and a prioritised recall list of exactly which patients to call and why.
That connection is the whole argument. Clever Practice is not guessing at your numbers or asking you to enter anything twice. It is reading what Dentally already knows and doing something with it that Dentally was never asked to do.
One task, two ways
Take associate pay. It is a monthly task every practice has to do, and it looks very different depending on whether Clever Practice is in the mix.
Without it: export the month’s production from Dentally, work out each associate’s split by hand, calculate NHS UDA payments separately if the practice has an NHS contract, cross check lab bills and card fees against Xero, build a payslip in a spreadsheet or a Word document, and hope everything reconciles before the associate asks why their pay looks different this month.
With Clever Practice connected: the same data flows through automatically. Private splits, NHS UDA calculations, and deductions are all worked out from the numbers Dentally and Xero already hold. A branded, itemised pay statement is generated and ready to send in a couple of clicks. What used to take an evening takes minutes.
That is not a hypothetical. It is the same task, done twice, and it is the difference that changes someone’s month.
“But doesn’t Dentally already have reporting?”
Fair question, and worth answering honestly rather than dodging it. Dentally’s reporting tells you what happened operationally: appointments booked, treatments completed, production by day. It is genuinely useful for running the clinic day to day.
What it does not do is turn that data into a pay calculation, a profit and loss view, an EBITDA breakdown, or a ranked list of which lapsed patients are worth calling first, and why. That is a different kind of question, and it needs a different kind of tool to answer it. Dentally was never trying to be that tool, and it should not have to be.
Not just Dentally
Everything above holds regardless of which practice management system a clinic runs. Clever Practice already connects to Exact SOE as well as Dentally, and the same logic applies either way. A PMS runs the clinic, Clever Practice runs the business, and the two were built to sit side by side rather than compete for the same job.
If you are already on Dentally
None of this asks a practice to change what it is doing. Dentally stays exactly where it is, doing exactly what it does well. The only question worth asking is whether the other half of the practice, the pay, the performance, the patients who have gone quiet, is being managed somewhere, or just being handled eventually, in a spreadsheet, at the end of a long day.
If you are already running Dentally, that is the gap Clever Practice was built to close.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to replace Dentally to use Clever Practice?
No. Clever Practice connects to Dentally, it does not replace it. Dentally continues to run scheduling, clinical records, and claims exactly as it does now. Clever Practice sits alongside it and works with the data Dentally already holds.
Does Clever Practice only work with Dentally?
No. Clever Practice also connects to Exact SOE, so the same complementary setup applies whichever of those two systems a practice runs.
What does Clever Practice calculate that Dentally does not?
Associate pay, including NHS UDA calculations, practice and clinician performance reporting, patient recall lists for lapsed or outstanding treatment, and chair time utilisation. These sit outside what a practice management system is built to do.
Do I need Xero as well as Dentally?
Clever Practice’s financial reporting, including net profit and associate pay, draws on your accounting platform alongside Dentally. Xero is the accounting platform Clever Practice connects to for this.
Will I need to enter the same data twice?
No. Clever Practice reads appointment and treatment data directly from Dentally rather than requiring separate data entry.
See it against your own numbers
If you are already running Dentally, the fastest way to see the difference is to look at your own practice’s associate pay or performance data inside Clever Practice. Get in touch with the Clever Practice team to arrange a walkthrough.