The referral field has been filled in for years. Nobody has ever totalled it.

Many practices ask new patients how they heard about the practice and record the answer. Over years, that field fills with thousands of responses.

It is self-reported, so it has the usual weaknesses: patients misremember, front desks pick the first option on a list, and the most recent thing a patient saw is not always what brought them.

Read against collected revenue, it is still one of the most useful fields a practice has, because it is the only record of the channels no tracking can see — the neighbour, the school newsletter, the other patient.

The report keeps the recorded referral beside any tracked source rather than merging them, so where the two agree there is evidence, and where they disagree there is a question worth asking.

Practices that do this for the first time usually find one referral answer carrying a far larger share of collections than anybody had assumed.

For endodontists, orthodontists, oral surgeons and periodontists, a large share of new patients arrives because a general dentist sent them.

Those referring practices are not an advertising line, and they are rarely ranked, yet they are frequently the specialist's most valuable source by a wide margin.

Where the referral source names the referring practice, the report ranks referring practices on what their patients collected, which is the list a specialist's relationship-building should follow.

It also shows referrers whose volume has quietly fallen, which is the half nobody notices because nothing arrives to be noticed.

Dental groups share a database across locations and often share marketing. Their local markets differ, and a channel that fills one clinic's diary can do little for another.

Where the export carries the clinic, the report splits every figure by location, which turns a group-wide number into decisions each clinic can act on.

It also stops one busy clinic's results flattering a channel that the other clinics are paying for and getting little from.

For groups that are growing by adding locations, the per-clinic view is also the earliest signal of which new locations are finding patients.

Production is what was scheduled or completed at the practice's fee. Collections are what arrived after insurance adjustments and patient payments.

The two differ by payer mix and write-offs, and those differ by source, so ranking on production flatters the channels whose patients carry the largest adjustments.

Grouping collections by each patient's first visit, rather than by payment date, attributes a patient to the channel that produced them rather than to whatever ran in the month they paid.

It also makes the report stable month to month, because a patient's source does not change when their insurer pays late.