The Ten Questions a Practice Owner Sent Before He Would Take a Demo

Somebody else already wrote this list

A practice owner I have never met sent us ten questions before he would agree to a walkthrough. They arrived through his marketing consultant, numbered, in an email, with four of them already answered from memory and six left blank.

I answered all ten in writing the same night, plainly, including the places where the honest answer was that his team still owns that part.

That list is better than anything I would have written, because I did not write it. Every buyer's guide in this category is published by a company that sells the thing, and every one of them is shaped, gently, around what that company happens to do well. This one was shaped around what a dentist actually needed to know before spending money.

So here it is, with what I think each question is really asking, and what a good answer sounds like from any vendor, including us.

Why the boring questions turn out to be the important ones

The instinct is to spend the demo on capability. Can it do this, can it handle that. Capability is the part that is easiest to show and the least likely to be the reason things fall apart later.

The ADA made a version of this argument to the federal government. In a letter submitted to the Department of Health and Human Services in February 2026, the ADA noted that adoption across dental practices remains uneven, particularly among small and mid-sized practices, and that dentistry's data environment presents distinct barriers to meaningful AI adoption. Dental records vary widely in structure and content, and consistent use of standardized clinical terminology is limited. The letter also urged HHS to strengthen vendor accountability, arguing that dentists and dental teams should be able to rely on technology vendors to deliver secure, compliant systems by default.

That is the profession telling the government that the plumbing and the vendor's obligations are the real obstacles. Not the intelligence of the software.

Which is more or less what this owner's ten questions are about.

1. What does it cost per month?

Start here, and get a number rather than a range that depends on a call.

If pricing is not published anywhere, that usually means it moves depending on who is asking. Worth knowing before you spend an hour in a demo. Our plans are published at airodental.com/laine/plans, and the number on that page is the number.

There is a related version of this question worth asking about anything arriving as part of a package. If a product is included with something else you already pay for, ask what it costs on its own. Paying for a service directly is the most transparent way to buy one: the price is visible, you can judge it against what it actually does, and you can stop paying it when it stops earning. When a cost is folded into a larger invoice, none of that is available to you. It does not mean the product is bad. It means you have been handed a harder thing to evaluate.

2. Are there setup or implementation fees?

The subscription is the part everyone quotes. The setup fee is the part that shows up later in the paperwork.

Ask for the whole first-year figure written down: subscription, setup, training, per-location charges, anything billed once. We do not currently charge a setup, implementation, or onboarding fee, so for us that figure is just the subscription. Not every vendor can say that, and the ones who cannot should still be able to give you the number without being chased for it.

3. Is a BAA included?

He was right to ask, and it is the one people forget until the week they need it.

Any vendor whose software touches patient information should hand you a Business Associate Agreement without a discussion about it. Ours is part of onboarding. If a vendor has to go find out whether they have one, that is your answer.

4. Does it integrate directly with our practice management system?

The word integrate is doing a lot of work in most sales conversations, so make the vendor unpack it.

There is a real difference between reading your schedule, writing into your schedule, and handing your team a request that somebody has to type in again. Ask which one it is. Then ask for the name of a practice on your exact system that is live right now.

We connect directly to Dentrix, Dentrix Ascend, Open Dental, and CareStack, which means reading live availability and placing the appointment into the schedule you already use rather than keeping a separate calendar off to the side.

5. Can it follow our appointment types, deposits, cancellation policies, and insurance workflows?

This is where you find the edges, so push until you find them.

Here are ours, plainly. Appointment types, providers, operatories, durations, booking buffers, new versus existing patient rules, and cancellation and rescheduling rules are all configured around how your office actually runs. Insurance follows your own scripting: it collects and documents the patient's plan information on the call and answers using your language, so your team has what it needs in front of them. Deposits stay where you have them today, with your team.

The point of this question is to find out how much of your office a product can actually take on, and to hear a specific answer rather than an unbroken yes.

6. Does it schedule appointments directly, or only collect requests?

The single most useful question on his list.

A tool that takes a message and hands it to your team has not removed the work. It has moved the work later into the day and added a step to it. If the appointment does not exist in your system when the call ends, somebody at your front desk is still going to do the booking.

Ours books directly. It identifies or creates the patient, collects what it needs, and places the appointment with the right provider in the right operatory.

7. How does it handle emergencies, existing patients, insurance questions, and clinical questions?

Four questions wearing one coat, and the last one is the one to watch.

For pain and emergency calls, ask how the system decides what kind of visit the caller needs, and whether that decision follows your rules or the vendor's defaults. Ours follows yours. For existing patients, ours recognizes who it is talking to and handles the scheduling and rescheduling, which is what the great majority of those calls are.

On insurance, it answers using your own language, explains whether you participate with a plan, and collects the patient's plan information so your team has it.

On clinical questions, the answer you want from any vendor is that the software stays firmly on the practice side of the line. Ours answers approved questions about your practice, guides the caller toward the right kind of visit, and takes a detailed message the moment a person should be involved. Be genuinely careful with any product that treats this one loosely.

8. Will our call tracking and ad attribution still work?

Almost nobody asks this, and every practice spending money on marketing should.

If you run tracking numbers, dynamic number insertion, or ad conversion tracking, find out what happens to all of it. The answer you want is that you keep your published numbers and your existing tracking, and the call reaches the software later in the phone flow rather than replacing the front of it.

That is how ours works, and there is a second half worth asking every vendor for. Your tracking can tell you the phone rang. Can the vendor tell you what the call became? A booked visit, a message, or nothing at all. That is the part marketing reporting has never been able to close on its own.

9. What is the contract term, and how do we cancel?

Ask it cheerfully, in the demo, before you are attached to the idea.

Plenty of dental software still asks for a multi-year commitment, and it is a fair thing to decline. We do not use contracts. It is month to month with no cancellation penalty, because we would rather earn the next month than hold somebody to a signature.

While you are in there, ask what leaving looks like. Can you export your information, in what format, does it cost anything, and does what the product wrote into your practice management system stay when the product goes?

10. Can we try it on our own scripts before we commit?

His last question, and the best one to finish on.

Yes. On your own scripts, with your own team, before a single patient ever hears it.

Here is how that works. Once you are signed up, the system is built around your scripts, your scheduling rules, and your insurance language, because a generic sandbox would not tell you anything useful about your own practice. Then you get your own phone number for it, and that number is not published anywhere. Until you plug it into your phone system, your office is the only place on earth that has it.

So you call it. Your office manager calls it. Pose as a patient with a cracked tooth and no idea what your policies are, push on the parts you are worried about, and listen to exactly what your patients would hear. Do that as many times as you like, for as long as you like. Nothing routes to it until you route it.

What he was really asking was whether he would have to find out in front of his patients. He does not, and neither should you, from any vendor you are considering.

The question he did not ask

If I could add an eleventh, it would be this one.

Who on my team has to change what they do?

If the answer is nobody, be skeptical, because something is always different. Somebody is going to review what the software did, correct it when it is wrong, and handle the cases it could not. Find out who that person is in your office before you buy, then go ask them how they feel about it. A front desk that was not consulted will quietly work around a tool no matter how good it is.

That is the reason most abandoned software gets abandoned. It rarely fails on its own. It fails because nobody asked the person who was going to have to live with it.

Ask us all ten

Every question above has a short, specific answer from us. Published pricing, no onboarding fee, no contract, direct booking into the schedule you already run, and a number only your office knows until you decide otherwise.

We sell this the way I would want to buy it. The price is published, you pay for it directly, and you can stop the month it stops being worth the number. That is the whole arrangement, and it is deliberate, because a cost you can see is a cost you can actually judge.

Ask us all ten. Ask every vendor all ten. You can see how we answer them at airodental.com/demo.