Why UK Dental Practices Spend 4 Hours a Week on Procurement (And How to Get That Time Back)

Four Hours a Week, Every Week

Speak to any UK dental practice manager and the story is the same: procurement takes far too long. Checking stock levels, logging into multiple supplier websites, searching for products, comparing prices (if they compare at all), placing separate orders, and then reconciling multiple invoices at the end of the month.

Four hours per week is conservative. For practices with multiple surgeries, it's often more.

That's 200 hours per year. Five working weeks. Spent on a task that, with the right tools, should take 20 to 30 minutes.

Why It Takes So Long

The problem isn't that practice managers are slow. It's that the process is genuinely fragmented.

Multiple supplier logins. Each supplier has its own website, its own search interface, its own account portal. A practice with four supplier accounts logs in and out four times per order cycle.

Manual stock checking. Most practices check physical stock by walking around the storage room or asking the dental nurses. There's no digital record of what's running low until someone notices.

No price memory. Supplier websites don't tell you whether the price today is higher or lower than last month. There's no easy way to know if you're getting a good price without actively comparing.

Separate checkout for each supplier. Adding items from Henry Schein and Kent Express to the same order isn't possible on their individual platforms. You place two separate orders, get two separate confirmations, two separate deliveries, and two separate invoices.

Invoice reconciliation. Matching supplier invoices to orders placed, checking for discrepancies, and coding expenses for the accountant — this administrative tail adds time at the end of every month.

What Efficient Practices Do Differently

The practices that manage procurement in under 30 minutes per week have typically done three things:

1. They have a standardised product list. Rather than allowing the clinical team to order anything from any supplier, they've agreed on a preferred product for each category. This eliminates the decision-making overhead of choosing between five types of composite every order.

2. They have set reorder points. Rather than ordering on a schedule, they order when stock hits a minimum level. This means procurement only happens when it needs to, not on a fixed day whether or not it's needed.

3. They use a comparison tool. Practices that use a single interface to compare prices across all their suppliers and place all their orders at once save the most time. The search, the comparison, and the checkout all happen in one place.

The Software Gap in Dental

Most industries have moved to digital procurement platforms. Hospitality, construction, healthcare — buying from multiple suppliers through a single interface is standard.

Dental has been slow to catch up. Practice management software (Dentally, Software of Excellence, Exact) handles clinical records and scheduling, but not supply procurement. The two worlds have stayed separate, which means procurement has remained manual.

This is changing. Dentago connects to your existing supplier accounts — Henry Schein, Kent Express, Dental Sky, and others — and brings their catalogues together into a single search. You search once, see every supplier's real-time price, add everything to one cart, and place all orders simultaneously.

The time saving is significant. A task that takes four hours becomes 20 minutes. A task that requires logging into five different websites requires logging into one.

What You Get Back

Four hours per week returned to a practice manager means:

• More time for patient experience and practice administration
• More attention to the clinical team's day-to-day needs
• More capacity to focus on the parts of the job that require human judgement

It also typically means better procurement decisions — because when comparison is easy, you actually compare, and when you compare, you spend less.

Dentago is free for UK dental practices. No subscription, no hidden fees, no contracts. You connect the supplier accounts you already have, and the platform handles the rest.