Thinking of selling your practice sometime soon? Say, within the next few years?

To maximize your negotiating position and smooth the process, I recommend you hire an accounting firm with medical practice experience. (By that I mean… experience with medical practices besides yours.)

Perhaps you haven’t given much thought to your accounting until now. If the bills have been paid and taxes filed, that’s probably just fine. As a small business owner, it’s up to you how much you want to spend on accounting services. (Assuming, of course, that you invest the minimum to keep track of your money and satisfy tax requirements.)

Once you decide to sell, though, your accounting will be thrust into the spotlight. Your financial records will function almost like marketing documents. Clean, understandable, detailed documentation of your business’s expenses and revenues will help you stay in the driver’s seat when negotiating the best price for your business.

Before you go to market, a CPA with medical practice experience can also help your practice administrator categorize revenues and expenses so that you can easily spot trends and make profit improvements. This can be very important in the year (or two or three) before you get serious about selling. You can also work with your CPT to identify practices (like use of personal credit cards) that might be pesky to untangle as you present your practice to buyers.

The right healthcare-literate CPA will organize your financial statements in a manner that puts your practice’s operations in the clearest and best light. The right accountant can help you track things like your loans/lines of credits and government payments so that they’re easily explained to a potential buyer. This can ease the due diligence process, too, once you reach that stage.

Hiring a CPA with clear medical experience may also avoid some pricing pitfalls. A generalist CPA may consider your practice more similar to other small businesses than it is. That can lead to valuation assumptions that differ from typical medical practice sale prices.

Bottom line: even if a CPA with demonstrable medical practice experience costs a bit more, the results could make a big difference in your ability to attract the best price for your practice. (If you need help finding the right CPA for your practice, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!)