Patient checks feel free — but staff time, deposit runs, and posting errors cost $3–$7 each.
Patient checks feel free. They are not. Between staff time, deposit runs, and posting errors, the average derm practice (opens in a new tab) burns far more than $2.50 a check. Here is the math, and a faster way out.
Walk past your front desk on any Friday and you will probably see it. The pile. A growing stack of patient checks waiting for someone to do something about them. Most practices treat this pile as free. It is not.
The check itself is free. Everything around it is not. Run the math on a single patient check at a typical dermatology practice:
At a fully loaded $35 to $55 an hour, you are looking at $3 to $7 per check before a single error or write-off. Multiply that across 80 to 200 patient checks a month and the pile starts to look like a part-time hire you did not approve.
Lemma's Medical Lockbox costs $2.50 per check. Patients send their checks to a dedicated lockbox address (opens in a new tab). We open, image, and post them. You see the funds, the image, and the patient match in your dashboard the same business day.
That is it. No deposit runs. No "did you log this one" pings. No mystery checks at month-end. Your front desk goes back to greeting patients. Your office manager goes back to actual management.
For most dermatology practices, the breakeven sits well under 100 checks a month. Above that, the lockbox is the cheaper option from day one, the same breakeven math laid out in our comparison against a traditional bank lockbox (opens in a new tab).
The math gets sharper when you stack a lockbox on top of how Lemma already handles money. ACH transfers cost $0 and wires are a flat $15, so paying vendors and collecting from payers does not eat the savings. Operating cash earns 1.75% APY while it sits, and your funds are FDIC-insured up to $10M per entity through the IntraFi sweep network. None of that requires a new login or another bank.
If your practice is mostly card-on-file and you only see a handful of checks a month, the lockbox is overkill. If you see 50 or more a month, or you run across multiple locations, the spreadsheet usually closes itself.