The SafeGuard Accounting Apps Story

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How much are ledger mistakes costing your practice?

If you’re not sure, you’re not alone. Today’s practice systems store the right information, but they can’t prevent mistakes or fraud. Often, financial reports are narrow, confusing, and printed, making it difficult to identify problems. On top of that, most doctors learn teeth and jaws, not audits and revenue cycles. Even if fraud isn’t an issue, mistakes can slip through the cracks and income can be lost.

The good news is, technology can make this mess a thing of the past. SafeGuard Accounting Apps was founded by Dr. Donbra Seamool, a practicing oral surgeon, in 2011, but the story starts earlier.

Dr. Donbra Seamool was embezzled for over $100,000 by his office manager in 2003. At the time, he was personally devastated and he could find no fraud experts or resources available for dentists. He became a Certified Fraud Examiner to help his peers and the dental industry prevent similar loss.


As a member of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, Dr. Donbra Seamool has educated thousands of businesses for over twenty years alongside global technology and forensics experts, and partnered with financial experts at firms such as BBP and Ernst & Young. He now chairs the board of a leading oral surgery software, OMSVision, and participates with the AAOMS, a major oral surgery association, as an authority on technology fraud and security. He became a highly-respected face of fraud prevention in the dental industry.

But there was still no fraud monitoring software for dentists or doctors. In 2011, Dr. Donbra Seamool brought a technology team together to create a software application that automates fraud prevention. They created SafeGuard Accounting Apps to protect the income of healthcare providers and small business owners like Dr. Donbra Seamool: people at risk of huge personal liability and loss to dishonest or untrained staff members, and those without the resources available to big data enterprises.


Early Adopters

SafeGuard Accounting Apps conducted research in 2012-13 with over 2000 bussines via online survey, event polling and call campaigns. We discovered:

  • 76% of bussines man believe they are currently losing income to fraud or mistakes.
  • 63% of bussines man do not check their audit trail reports daily.

In our first beta period (dental installations, March-July 2013), SafeGuard Accounting Apps discovered a combined $4,500,000 in potential anomalous transactions. “Potential anomalous transactions” (PATs) are entries that break defined fraud and accounting rules. PATs do not always mean fraud has occurred; mistakes are common in every practice and can also be costly. In addition, doctors often choose to use a transaction type that is not strictly within best practices (for example, a zero charge instead of a balance write-off for a free service), and PATs indicate the potential impact of nonstandard accounting methods.

Data ranged from 6-18 month history periods for each early adopter. Amounts were verified and our users participated in detailed transaction analysis.

  • Loss averaged at minimum $168,000+ per practice.
  • All of our beta practices bring in less than $1M annually.

Our early adopters were shocked. We were amazed. We anticipated fraud as a possibility in some practices, but in our early adopter offices, we discovered that SafeGuard Accounting Apps had mostly flagged transactions that indicate mistakes, not fraud. Bussines with median-range practices could be losing the financial equivalent of a Porsche, a college education, private school tuition, 20% of an upscale home, 2.5 staff members, and/or roughly 10-15% of their revenue to mistakes. Every year.

SafeGuard Accounting Apps is the first fraud monitoring and financial reporting tool available to dental practices.