The Equipment-Versus-Retirement Worksheet: Seven Numbers to Run Before You Sign

Most equipment decisions get made on one number, the price at the bottom of the quote.

This piece gives you the other six. The worksheet below (free, in Excel, with the formulas showing) takes about ten minutes and tells you whether a new operatory adds to your retirement or costs it, using your own visits, your own staffing, your own loan and your own retirement age. It pulls together the pieces from the first four articles in this series, so you don't have to hold them in your head. Download the free worksheet here.

By Pete Volk, CEAS. Pete has spent 25 years inside the equipment business with Pelton & Crane, DentalEZ, Benco, and DCI Edge.

Why a worksheet

By now you've seen the pieces. The first article showed that staffing decides a room's fate far more than the chair does. The second covered the tax side, the third showed what a buyer pays for at sale, and the fourth showed how your age changes what a purchase does to you. Knowing all that is one thing. Running it on your own office is another, and most of us never get past the first step.

I built the worksheet so nobody has to. You type in seven things. The sheet shows a break-even, a cash flow, a payoff, and one number at the bottom: what the room is worth to your retirement, after tax and after replacing the equipment.

The seven numbers

Every one of them sits in a yellow cell with a note beside it saying where the default came from. Change them and everything recalculates. Nothing is hidden in a macro.

A filled-in example

Take Mike from the last article, 52 years old, thinking about a fifth room. I'll run him three ways with the worksheet's defaults.

Read the last row carefully, because the worksheet is blunt and I built it that way. It assumes the room keeps running at two visits a week until Mike retires, which nobody would do. A negative number is a warning, not a forecast. It says: if this is your utilization, this is a room you must fix, fill, or close, and the review date is the thing that protects you. The last article shows the bounded version, where you cut your losses at year three.

The first two rows carry a different lesson. Same room, same visits, and Mike's retirement date changes the answer by about $135,000. If your plan only works at 69, you've made a bet on your own stamina.

How to read the bottom line

One number at the bottom answers one question. If the room does what you told the sheet it would do, does it leave you with more or less than not buying it?

A positive result says the room clears the bar under your assumptions, and those assumptions are yours to defend. Ask yourself how many of the added visits you can name today. Ask what happens to that number if your best assistant leaves, and how long it takes to hire another. Then change the visits to one fewer than you believe and look at the result again.

When the result is negative, something has to change before you sign: the number of visits, the staffing plan, the loan term, or the date you're aiming to retire. Try this on Mike's two-visit room. Set the assistant hours to zero, which is what it looks like when the doctor works a third chair with the assistant already on payroll, and the room flips from about –$150,000 to about +$379,000. Of course that only holds if your current team has real slack. If they don't, you've just moved the cost somewhere the sheet can't see. The point is that the sheet shows you which lever matters in about thirty seconds.

What the worksheet leaves out

I'd be a hypocrite if I built a projection and didn't list what it skips. Wages and prices are flat. The equipment has no resale value. Taxes are a single flat rate on positive cash flow, and depreciation, Section 179, recapture at sale, state tax and your entity type are all left out. Those are covered in The Deduction Trap, and they can move the answer a lot.

That's why the workbook has a second tab of questions for your CPA. Bring the printout and the questions to the same meeting. Nobody should be deciding an equipment purchase in December and a retirement contribution in April, in two different rooms, with two different sets of numbers.

Run it this week

Download the worksheet, put in the numbers for the room you're actually considering, and run it at two retirement ages: the one you believe and the one four years later. If it works at both, you have a decision. If it only works at one, you have a question, and it's a much better question than "which chair has the nicest upholstery."

Want to check whether your schedule can supply those added visits at all? The free Profit Leak Diagnostic takes about ten minutes. Weighing repair against replacement on equipment you already own? The Repair or Replace calculator at DentalAssetIQ runs it with real numbers. And The AI-First Dental Office Design walks through room count and technology in the order they should be decided.

More from DSI on this topic: Repair vs. Replace: The Dental Equipment Decision Framework · How Long Does Dental Equipment Actually Last? · What Is a Good Production Per Operatory Number?

Sources

• ADA News, Is it time to sell your dental practice? (ADA Health Policy Institute: average dentist retirement age of 69 in 2023). https://adanews.ada.org/ada-news/2024/december/is-it-time-to-sell-your-dental-practice/
• ADA Health Policy Institute, Trends in Dentists' Income, Revenue and Hours Worked (revenue per GP dentist). https://www.ada.org/resources/research/health-policy-institute/dental-practice-research/trends-in-dentist-income
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook: Dental Assistants (median pay $23.11/hr, May 2025). https://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/dental-assistants.htm
• DentiMax, Dental Office Overhead Percentages: 2026 Report (supplies and lab as a share of collections). https://dentimax.com/dental-office-overhead-percentages/
• Dental Practice Insider, Dental Equipment Financing (2026) (6–9% conventional equipment loan rates). https://dentalpracticeinsider.org/dental-equipment-financing/
• DCI Edge, 2026 Equipment Order Guide (suggested retail pricing for the $22,700 Series 4 package).
• The Retirement Ledger, Articles 1 through 4 (assumptions, tax rules, and IRS sources are cited there).

Mike and the other doctors in this series are composites, with names and details changed. The worksheet and all figures on this page are illustrative DSI calculations, not forecasts. Defaults: $260 revenue per added visit, 15% supplies and lab, 50 working weeks, a part-time assistant at 16 hours a week and $23.11 an hour plus a 20% load, a $22,700 package financed at 7.5% over five years, replacement every ten years at 3% inflation, a 30% tax rate on positive cash flow, and a 7% investment return. Wages and prices held flat; no resale value for equipment; utilization held constant until retirement. This is educational content, not tax, legal, or investment advice. Dental Strategy Institute and its authors are not financial advisors or tax professionals. Consult a qualified CPA or fee-only financial advisor before making purchase or retirement decisions.