You opened your PT clinic to do PT. Not to be a treasury analyst. So your operating account sits at the same regional bank where you opened your first business checking, earning 0.05% APY. The reconciliation is fine. The cash flow is fine. But every dollar of operating reserve is quietly underperforming, and on a $300K to $1M balance, that adds up faster than most solo practices realize.

The Math on a Solo PT Operating Reserve

The numbers are straightforward.

A solo PT clinic typically holds $300K to $1M in operating cash to cover payroll, lease, and the gap between insurance billing and reimbursement. At a typical big-bank business checking rate of 0.05% APY, that earns $150 to $500 a year. At Lemma's 1.75% APY, that same balance earns $5,250 to $17,500 a year. The gap is $5,000 to $17,000 of pure recovered yield.

No new patients. No new fee schedule. No restructure. The cash sits where it sat. It just earns at modern rates instead of zero. For a clinic doing $1M in collections, that is roughly 0.5% to 1.7% of top-line, captured without changing anything operational.

The Setup Is Faster Than the Switch You Made for Your EHR

Account opening at Lemma is 5 minutes. No branch visit, no in-person notarization, no relationship banker call. ACH is $0 in both directions, so paying vendors (your EHR, your billing service, your CPA) and collecting from payers (Medicare, commercial, workers comp) does not eat into the yield. Wires are a flat $15 for the rare vendor that requires one.

FDIC coverage runs up to $10M per entity through the IntraFi sweep network, which matters if you have a large reserve, a buy-in coming up, or a property purchase you are saving for.

You do not have to close your existing bank. Most solo PT owners run parallel for a quarter, watch the yield show up on the new account, then close the old one when they are confident.

When This Doesn't Make Sense

If you keep less than $50K in operating cash, the yield difference is small enough that the switch is not urgent. If your reserve is $200K or more, especially if you also write checks to vendors or wire occasionally, the math closes itself in the first month. If you are growing into a multi-clinician group with associate doctors or a second location, this is the right moment to set up a structure that scales.