In-house financing vs. third-party: what it really costs your clinic

A patient says yes to a $5,000 treatment plan. They want to spread the cost. From here, most clinics take one of two roads — and to the patient, both feel about the same. To the clinic, they could hardly be more different.

Let's walk both.

Road one: hand it to a third-party financer

The patient applies, a financing company approves them, and the treatment gets scheduled. Clean and familiar. But look at what actually changed hands.

The financer paid you — minus their fee. On a $5,000 case, an illustrative financing fee in the range clinics commonly see takes a real slice off the top, every plan, every year. That fee isn't a shared margin; it's a direct cost that comes straight off your EBITDA.

There's a second cost that's harder to put a number on: the patient relationship. The financer now sits between you and the person you spent chairside time earning trust with. There are credit checks, and some patients get declined — which can quietly cost you the case acceptance you already worked for. And when there's a billing question, it's often not you they call.

Road two: run the plan yourself

Keep the revenue, keep the relationship. This is the right instinct — but most clinics run it on infrastructure that was never built for it: a spreadsheet, manual card entry at the POS, and a staff member responsible for remembering who owes what.

That's where the cost hides. Building and tracking a plan, re-entering cards, following up on missed payments — it adds up to a meaningful chunk of staff time per plan.

At just five plans a month, that's hundreds of hours a year of front-desk time that could have gone to booking recalls and supporting patients.

And every card number sitting in a spreadsheet or PMS note is PCI-DSS exposure most owners don't know they're carrying.

You keep the percentage. You pay for it in hours and risk instead.

The side-by-side

Neither road is free. One costs you a percentage of revenue and the patient relationship. The other costs you staff time and quietly creates compliance risk.

The third road

Automated in-house financing is what happens when you keep everything good about running the plan yourself — 100% of treatment revenue, the patient staying with your clinic start to finish, no credit checks, no hand-offs — and remove the parts that cost you. Plans, collections, retries, and receipts run automatically instead of on someone's calendar.

That's what Credi8 does. It's a software subscription — like any other practice management tool — not a lender.

Under the hood, payments run on Global Payments' tokenization and e-commerce gateway, so card data is tokenized and processed through bank-grade infrastructure from day one, and raw card numbers are never stored at the clinic.

Clinics that also want in-person card terminals can add Global Payments' POS hardware on top; those that don't, don't have to.

If you're still deciding between giving away a percentage of every treatment or managing everything manually, there's another option.

Credi8 lets you keep the revenue, keep the patient relationship, eliminate manual administration, and reduce compliance risk — all without changing how your team already works.