How Kreate Dental went from 15+ hours of manual reporting to real-time financial clarity with Medfin

About Kreate Dental

Kreate Dental UK was founded in 2018 by Dr Mihir Shah. Seven years on, Kreate is a three-practice group in the Midlands and South London, with almost 55 members of staff and 25 clinicians across the business. Mihir runs the company alongside his brother Neil, who spent years in fintech as one of the earliest employees at Revolut and saw the business through its global expansion.

The combination is unusual in dentistry. Mihir brings twelve years of clinical and operational experience. Neil brings a deep background in scaling tech-enabled businesses. Together, they're building Kreate to be the kind of group that doesn't exist much in UK dentistry: clinician-led on the clinical side, but operationally run like a modern, tech-forward business.

The goal is national scale. And they're clear on what that requires.

"We feel we can be a disruptor in this industry. One of the main things we're so different in is the technology we implement in our background processes. That is what sets us apart." — Dr Mihir Shah, Founder & CEO, Kreate Dental UK

The problem: visibility was costing them real time, real money, and real decisions

Before Medfin, Kreate's operations team was doing what most growing groups do. They were pulling reports out of their PMS, dropping numbers into Google Sheets, and trying to build a coherent view of the business one spreadsheet at a time.

It didn't work.

"I was frustrated as an owner that I had such poor visibility on my business. It would take so many hours to find basic things. Everything is so fragmented. If you want a report on this, you've got to click on this. If you want to extract some data about this, you've got to try and pull up a random report through your practice management software. There's no clarity on whether it's going to be accurate or not."

The team estimated it was taking around 15 to 16 hours per practice, per month to pull, clean and prepare the data they needed. For a three-site group that's close to half a week of one person's time, every month, just to see what had already happened. And there was no guarantee the numbers were even right.

The tools on the market weren't solving it either. Kreate had explored ChatGPT and Google Gemini. They'd looked at dental-specific platforms. They'd considered building a Power BI model internally. They'd even been in advanced talks with an accountancy firm who wanted to build them a bespoke financial analytics model.

None of it fit.

"The AI tools we tried gave us indications, but they weren't the silver bullet. A lot of them need the right prompting, and you're still not confident on the final result. The other dental platforms out there, it's antique, it's old fashioned, it's slow, and it's clunky when it works."

The cost of not having visibility wasn't just hours. It was decisions not being made.

"I remember one of our meetings where myself, my co-partner and our operations team spent almost 15 minutes flicking between one sheet and another. By the time our team found the right sheets, I had to go on another call. My co-founder had to go on another call. That's when we realised this is unsustainable. We can't work this way."

The data was also always backward-looking. By the time reports were built, the month was over. Decisions were being made on numbers that were already stale.

"A lot of the systems before Medfin were based on collecting data at one point in time, usually at the end of the month. You're driving decisions based on past data. You're always reactive, never proactive."

How Kreate found Medfin

Mihir met Daniel, Medfin's co-founder and CEO, at a dentistry show in Birmingham. A few of Mihir's contacts had already mentioned Medfin to him, a new platform being built specifically for UK dental groups. So when Mihir came in for a demo, he already had a sense of what he was walking into.

What he didn't expect was how quickly he'd be convinced.

"I remember the moment after leaving Medfin's offices. I was on the phone to my co-founders and our operations team, a group WhatsApp call, and I said to them: I think we've found it. This is going to completely change the way we work."

This was early in Medfin's development. The product was nowhere near what it is today. But Mihir and the Kreate team saw the direction of travel and backed it.

What changed after onboarding

Medfin now sits at the centre of how Kreate runs the business. Mihir uses it. Neil uses it. The operations team uses it. And critically, the practice managers use it.

Real-time visibility across the group

The fragmented spreadsheet world is gone. Kreate's team sees chairside utilisation, associate production, NHS activity, treatment conversion, revenue and profitability across all three sites, in one place, updated live.

"Medfin always works. It always gives the right data, which allows you to make the right decision."

Proactive decisions, not retrospective reports

Two examples stand out from Kreate's first months using the platform.

NHS contract protection. Mihir spotted, through Medfin, that one of Kreate's practices was substantially underperforming on orthodontic UOA activity. Left unchecked, it would have triggered significant clawback at the end of the financial year. Because the team caught it in-year, they were able to put a strategy in place and recover the position.

"That would never have been spotted quickly enough without Medfin. We'd have been looking at substantial financial clawback. Instead, we were able to analyse the underperformance and come up with a strategy to get back on track."

Associate development, backed by data. Mihir has an enthusiastic young associate whose revenue was plateauing. Instead of a generic "you need to do more", Mihir used Medfin's treatment-level breakdown to look at what the associate was actually producing, and the DNA of it was clear. Mostly simple fillings, basic checks, routine cleans. His clinical repertoire was the bottleneck, not his effort.

Mihir pointed him toward specific postgraduate courses. Three months later, the associate's production had moved meaningfully.

"You couldn't have this conversation before. It would just be: why don't you try this course? Now it's backed by data. Within three months, we've seen his performance go from here to here."

Managers thinking like owners

This is the shift Mihir is most enthusiastic about. The traditional practice manager role in dentistry has been largely administrative: rotas, compliance, people. Kreate wants its managers operating closer to how an owner would.

Medfin bridges the gap, because the data is no longer locked away in sheets owned by the ops team.

"There's a 90-second segment in our weekly meeting now where one of our managers will just spit out Medfin data. Chairside utilisation this week was this. Gross production this week was this. Look-ahead next week is 93%. Week after is 78, so we've got more work to do. That wasn't possible before. That's exactly what you want your managers to do."

Mihir puts it plainly: the gap between what owners know and what managers know has narrowed. Managers are making better-informed decisions, faster, without needing the ops team or the founders to feed them data.

Better conversations with clinicians

One of the knock-on effects has been how Kreate talks to its associates about performance. With the break-even and cost-per-surgery data visible, the conversation isn't a gut-feel challenge on revenue. It's a shared view of the numbers.

"Our clinicians now have a very good understanding of the cost base of our organisation. That transparency is there. So if we're having a difficult conversation, they understand why the conversation is difficult. No one wants to make a loss. The conversation becomes a lot more positive."

Working with the Medfin team

We asked Mihir and Ravi, Kreate's Operations Manager, what it's been like working with Medfin beyond the product itself.

"It's refreshing. The dental industry is run by clinicians first, and things move slowly. What I've really enjoyed working with the Medfin team is that it's run by a group of young, ambitious people who want to move fast and build a product that actually adds value to dental practice owners. There's a lot of back and forth on feedback about new features. They're responsive. Any feedback we've given has been taken on board." — Ravi, Operations Manager, Kreate Dental

"Naturally when you work with any new company there's apprehension. How's the onboarding going to be? How's the support? Will they help bring our team on? One thing I can proudly say is that the onboarding and the process of getting every member of our team comfortable with Medfin has been really easy. The support is amazing, and their communication is second to none."

Where Kreate goes from here

Kreate's plan is national expansion, and the financial architecture to support it is now in place. The group isn't looking at Medfin as a reporting tool. They're looking at it as part of how they scale without having to build the cost base of a middle-management layer and a finance department the way traditional groups have.

"The way I see Medfin working long term is that you achieve operational excellence by having everything on one platform, because the data is so accurate. As an owner of a dental group, you're much closer to the decision-making. You can make solid decisions because the data is there in front of you. You're not relying on managers or finance departments to generate it and advise you."

We asked Mihir what he'd say to another group owner thinking about Medfin.

"Just sign up and do it. It's the best investment you're going to make. We were one of those groups with very fragmented systems. Medfin brings everything into one place. That leads to productivity efficiencies. That leads to cost savings. That leads to driving up your EBITDA far higher than where it is right now."

The bigger picture

The last decade has changed what it takes to run a profitable UK dental group. Staffing costs are up. Material and equipment costs are up. Borrowing is more expensive. Margins that were always tight have got tighter. Groups that five years ago would never have considered closing a site are now making those decisions.

Flying blind isn't a strategy any more. Neither is waiting until the end of the month to find out what happened.

Kreate is the kind of group we built Medfin for. Ambitious. Fast-moving. Clear about where they want to get to and honest about what was holding them back.

If you're running a group and what Mihir described sounds familiar, the spreadsheets, the fragmented reports, the meetings that turn into data hunts, we'd love to show you what a different setup looks like.

Book a call and we'll walk you through it.