InHouse Dental
About
InHouse Dental was built inside a real practice — to give practices more control, clearer costs, and a calmer way to run membership plans.
Built by a practice owner • UK-first • Direct Debit via GoCardless
What practices actually care about
Control: Your policies, your pricing, your decisions.
Cashflow: Predictable collections and visibility.
Savings: Remove per-patient admin layers.
Trust: Direct Debit shows the practice name.

Why I built InHouse Dental

The Problem That Triggered InHouse Dental

My husband is a dentist, practice owner, and until covid hit, I had nothing to do with any of it, I had my own career. My background is data analysis and reports development. Just before covid, we had decided to shift our work life balance and agreed I would work for the practice, taking on everything he cannot do (financial, staff, marketing, hr...many hats!) because he's busy in surgery all day. This gave us both more time at home and with the family.

Fast foward to 6 mid 2025, I turned my attention to membership plans. These just sit there, ticking along and working. Every 12-18 months we increase plan fees, but never took any notice or gave any thought to what we were paying our plan provider. That's when I noticed we were paying our provider £2.01 per patient per month.

With around 650 plan patients, the annual cost was over £15,000. I remember staring at it thinking: how did we accept this as normal? How and why does any dental practice accept this as normal? I had to do something and change this, at least for our own practice. I had a plan (pardon the pun!)

The Obvious Question
Is there anything stopping a practice from running its own plans - safely - without paying a significant per-patient admin fee to a third party?

I dug into it properly. The answer (in plain English) is: a practice can operate an in-house plan model, as long as it doesn't position itself as providing insurance/worldwide emergency cover, and it doesn't try to handle Direct Debits “itself”.

In 20 years, we'd had three uses of worldwide emergency cover — so dropping it wasn't an issue for us. As for Direct Debits, that's where a provider like GoCardless comes in. They handle the payment processing and the banking rails; the practice runs the plan.

So I built It

After that, it was just knuckle down and develop it. Four to five months on, we have a product that does exactly what we need - and we're started adding things we didn't have before.

For example, we built the ability to take a first-month payment in practice and record it in the system — so you can avoid awkward double charging when switching to Direct Debit.

What's Better (in practice)

The first thing everyone asks is: “Is it more admin than when you use one of the big providers?” The honest answer is no. It's designed to be boring and predictable for staff.

The benefits are both commercial and patient-facing. We still pay Direct Debit processing fees — but they're transparent and materially lower than a per-patient admin charge.

For our practice, this changed everything:
We replaced £2.01 per patient per month with GoCardless fees that often work out at roughly ~45p per plan payment (depending on amount).
We can now offer teen and junior plans — something we never did before because the admin fee made it uneconomical.
The Direct Debit in the patient's bank shows our practice name, not a third party.
We choose payout timing. Patients pay on the 8th; we've set funds to arrive on the 12th — improving cashflow versus our previous setup when we weren't getting money until 10-12 days after direct debits were taken.
We don't charge a patient sign-up fee. InHouse Dental isn't a scheme your patients join — it's software your practice uses.

What InHouse Dental Is (and what it isn't)

InHouse Dental is a platform. It helps practices run membership plans in-house with clarity and predictable processes.

It is not a plan provider that makes decisions for you. If a payment fails three times, we don't automatically cancel Direct Debits and send you an email. We surface what's happening clearly — and the practice decides what happens next.

If you're considering moving away from a traditional provider model — or you're planning to bring plans in-house — we're happy to talk it through.