Invoicing is the most undervalued lever in a dental laboratory. Lab owners obsess over CAD design speed and printer throughput, then spend the last two days of the month fighting Excel files to produce invoices that should already exist.
A digital lab does not bill. It releases invoices that the system already wrote. This article walks through what that looks like in practice and how to get there.
You know it. On the 28th of the month, somebody pulls a list of cases per clinic from the production system. Cross-checks them against an Excel sheet of agreed prices. Manually enters each line into the accounting program. Generates PDFs. Emails them one by one. Two days, sometimes three.
Then the second wave starts: the calls about line items the clinic does not recognise, the corrections, the re-issued invoices. Another half day gone. By the time the cash arrives, the lab has lost a full week of administrative time on a process that should be automatic.
Each case has a price. The price comes from the per-clinic rate sheet defined when the clinic was onboarded. When the case closes, the line is locked in.
On day 1 of the next month, the platform groups all closed cases of the previous month per clinic and creates a draft invoice. The lab reviews the drafts in one screen, releases them all with a single action and the system:
The lab moved from two days of work to fifteen minutes of review.
Prices live on a rate sheet, not in a spreadsheet. The rate sheet is per clinic. The platform applies it automatically when the case is created. The technician never types a price.
Invoices are generated per clinic per month, with one line per case. Clinics that want a per-case invoice get that as a config flag. The platform should not force a single billing model.
Tax authorities want unbroken sequences. The platform enforces it. No gaps, no manual edits to the number.
Spain has Verifactu and Facturae, Italy has SDI, France has Chorus Pro, Germany has XRechnung. The platform must produce the legally required format for the lab country. If it does not, you keep paying an external accounting service to do it for you.
In Europe, SEPA direct debit eliminates dunning. The clinic signs the mandate once. The platform generates the SEPA XML file every month, the bank pulls the money, the lab confirms in a few clicks.
For clinics that prefer card payment, Stripe Connect on the platform lets them pay invoices online. Cash arrives the next day. The lab pays a small fee and saves a week of cash flow.
Three days before the due date, the platform sends a reminder. Five days after, a stronger one. Fifteen days after, a final notice with the legal language for the country. The lab owner only sees the cases that need a phone call.
DoYourLab generates invoices from your closed cases, sends them to clinics with a payment link, produces SEPA XML and integrates with Stripe Connect so cash arrives faster. See plans
Stripe Connect is the right pattern for a multi-tenant lab platform: each lab has its own connected Stripe account, the platform charges a small application fee, and the funds settle directly to the lab. Clinics pay invoices online by card or bank debit, the lab gets the money in 1 to 2 days.
The setup is a one-time onboarding inside the platform. After that, every invoice carries a payment link. No manual reconciliation. The platform marks the invoice as paid the moment the webhook fires.
A lab with 200 cases a month and 30 active clinics typically spends 16 hours per month on billing under the manual flow. At a real cost of 25 EUR per hour, that is 400 EUR a month, plus the cost of the late payments that follow because cash arrives slower.
Moving to a platform that costs in the same range and removes 90% of that work pays for itself the first month. The second-order effect, faster cash, frees working capital that can be spent on materials, staff or marketing instead of on a credit line.
Invoicing is the last mile of the digital workflow, but it has to be wired in from the start. If the catalog and the rate sheets are not clean, the invoices will not be either. We cover the catalog setup in the dental lab software guide and the full rollout in the step-by-step plan to digitize a lab.
Get the catalog right, link rate sheets per clinic, close cases properly. Invoicing then takes care of itself.