Who Keystone Is Wrong For

Keystone doesn’t do books. We don’t categorize transactions, we don’t chase receipts, we don’t reconcile your accounts, and we don’t file anything. Keystone reads what your books and your practice software already produce and tells you what it means for each clinician and for you.

If your books aren’t current, nothing here fixes that — a bookkeeper does, and it’s worth paying for.

Still useful to you today: the free calculators. They ask you for a handful of numbers you already know and don’t need your books to be closed.

Keystone is owner-fed. You bring your numbers when you want a reading — a monthly close, a quarter end, the week before a comp conversation. It doesn’t watch a live feed of your accounting system on your behalf.

A continuous, connected version exists — we run it ourselves, and we offer it to very few practices at a much higher price, because a live pipe into someone’s books is a real thing to operate and it costs real money to keep honest. It is not what the one-time Snapshot is, and it is not what the ongoing plan is.

So if what you want is “connect it once, never think about it again,” we are the wrong shape for you today. That’s a fair thing to want. It just isn’t what you’d be buying.

This is the honest one, and it is not about our software.

Keystone’s whole point is per-clinician truth: which clinicians make the practice money, after their real costs. That calculation needs one thing from your systems — a record of who actually delivered each session, with the payer, the date, and the units.

In a lot of insurance and associate-model practices, that record is lost before anyone gets to it. Claims go out under the clinician for some payers and under the supervising provider for others. The revenue reports key on whoever billed, so the mapping back to the person who did the work disappears. And because payers pay different rates, you can’t back it out of payroll either. The result is that the supervisor looks enormously profitable and the associates look like a rounding error — and none of it is true.

If that’s your practice, a per-clinician read built on those reports would be confidently wrong, which is worse than not having one. We’re not going to sell you that.

What’s still honestly useful to you:

• The free calculators. The ones that don’t depend on attribution work fine for you: what your overhead actually costs per hour, what you can pay yourself, what to set aside for quarterly taxes, what cancellations and no-shows cost you.
• The export references at /formats. They explain, file by file, what the columns in a practice-software export mean — including whether yours carries a rendering or delivering provider column. That one column is usually the difference between “recoverable” and “not.” It costs you nothing to go look.
• A maybe, said as a maybe. The practices in this position we’ve worked with are usually best served by someone who already knows their billing — their biller, their bookkeeper, an advisor. We may end up serving your band that way later. That is a maybe, not a plan, and you shouldn’t hold a seat waiting for it.

The one-time Snapshot works exactly that way — you run it, you buy it, it’s yours, done.

The ongoing plan doesn’t. It starts as a conversation: three questions, then we write you a proposal off your own numbers — what it would watch, what it would cost for your size, what the first standing order would be — and a person reads it before it’s sent to you. You pay for a term up front. There’s no auto-renew quietly charging you next year.

We do it this way on purpose, and we know it’s slower than a checkout button. If that friction is a dealbreaker, that’s a legitimate reason to pass.

And if you’re solo: we don’t sell you a recurring plan at all. The free tools and the one-time read are the whole offer for a solo practice. That’s deliberate, and it isn’t going to change into a monthly bill later.

It isn’t, so this one may not disqualify you at all.

The free calculators and the free Snapshot are free forever. They don’t degrade, they don’t expire, and we don’t take them away later to make a paid tier look better. The free read gives you the numbers: the per-clinician picture, the problems worth attention, and where the upside is. What you pay for is the saved, shareable record of it plus the ranked moves — what to actually do.

If the paid tier isn’t worth it to you, take the free version and don’t buy anything. That’s a real outcome and we’d rather have it than a refund.

There’s no onboarding call, no implementation service, no setup fee, and no account manager. Support is email, answered by people who built it, usually quickly — but it is email, not a standing hour on someone’s calendar.

If what your practice needs is a person who sits with you every month and works the numbers with you, that is a genuinely good thing to buy — a fractional CFO, a practice consultant, a bookkeeper who does advisory work. It’s just not us. We built an instrument, not a service.

If a lender, a buyer, or a court needs a verified figure they can rely on, Keystone is not that and never will be. Everything it produces is your own decision instrument — your numbers, our math, shown so you can check it. It carries no attestation, no professional opinion, and nobody’s license behind it.

For that, you want a CPA or a valuation professional who signs their work.

Owner-operators of small practices — roughly two to fifteen clinicians — who already carry the money questions themselves and want a straight answer about which clinicians are actually working out, what they can pay themselves, and what a comp change would really do. People who’d rather see the math than be handed a verdict.

If that’s you, start with the free read on your own numbers. If it isn’t, thanks for reading this far — genuinely. The free calculators are yours either way.