The owner's second job

The owner of a dental practice holds two jobs under one name. The first is clinical, and the appointment book accounts for it hour by hour.

The second is running the practice: being the employer and the person whose signature the paperwork waits for. It has no column in the appointment book, and that makes it easy to underestimate.

A week in hours

Germany has a published record of how that week divides. The KZBV's Jahrbuch 2025 reports data from the Zahnärzte-Praxis-Panel of the Zi institute: a survey of dental practices run in 2024 on the working years 2022 and 2023, with about 1,800 submissions, weighted by type of practice, turnover and region.

For 2023, practice owners in that German panel reported an average working week of 44.0 hours: 32.5 in treatment, 8.5 in practice administration and 3.0 in other professional activities. Administration made up 19.3% of the week, almost a fifth. The number of owners who answered the question on working hours is not reported separately.

The treatment hours are what the practice exists for. The administrative hours keep it able to do that work, which is why they cannot simply be wished away.

What the hours contain

The figure is a self-estimate of all practice administration, including tasks that have to be done, so it is not a measure of waste. It covers the owner alone, not the rest of the team. And it cannot say which of those hours could be done differently, or by whom.

It also describes owners in Germany, working under German rules. An owner in another country may divide the week quite differently, and nothing in these figures says how.

What it does show is proportion. In the German panel's figures for 2023, close to a fifth of an owner's working week went on administering the practice. Those hours came from the same person, in the same week, as the clinical work; they are not a second person's time.

Two surveys, two questions

There is a tempting piece of arithmetic here, and it is wrong. A separate KZBV online survey, run in autumn 2022, collected 2,347 completed questionnaires and found German practices reporting an average of 24.5 staff hours a week on bureaucracy across the whole team. It is natural to want to add the owner's hours to that total, or to subtract them from it.

The two figures cannot be combined. One asked, in 2022, about bureaucracy across an entire practice; the other asked owners alone, in 2024, about their practice administration during 2023, in a different survey, with a different sample and different definitions. Adding them would produce a number that neither study measured. Each figure is useful on its own terms; combined, they would only look more precise than they are.

What reaches the owner

For an owner, the useful question is not how to make administration disappear. Much of it is the job. It is how much of that work reaches the owner already prepared, and how much arrives as raw material that has to be assembled before a decision can be made.

A decision about a rota or a supplier's terms is quick when the facts are already gathered and checked. It is slow when the owner has to gather them first, and that gathering is administration too.

SoliumOS is built around that distinction. It runs in the practice's own cloud and prepares the administrative work around care, so that the owner and the team receive it ready to review. Every step waits for their approval, and the decisions remain theirs.

Sources

• KZBV. Jahrbuch 2025. Data from the Zi Zahnärzte-Praxis-Panel; survey conducted in 2024 on the working years 2022 and 2023.
• KZBV. Gemeinsam Bürokratie abbauen! Auswertung der Online-Umfrage zur Bürokratiebelastung in Zahnarztpraxen. Online survey, 29 September to 14 October 2022.