I will chime in with my prosal experience as well.
I have been paid on straight salary alone as well as on a prosal model.
The prosal model is more stressful in terms of having to monitor and worry about every single thing that happens. Everything.
Everything the clinic does, its location, its clientele, the discounts, discounted surgeries, payment arrangements (if they do them), working with rescues, the people they employee, every tiny little detail impacts your income. Every single detail. All of it.
First you should be asking how are these things paid out, do you get production for them:
1.Rx food, most places don't include rx food as production, to me it should count, but most don't count it.
2. Rx refills, most places don't count rx refills despite the fact you have to take the time to read the chart, verify the dose, verify no labwork needed, verify the pet still needs said rx, etc. You get to spend time doing all the work and none of the pay for it.
3. Free exams-- a lot of the clinics that pay on prosal are corporate and almost all corporate clinics have some form of a new client discounted or outright free exam-- does that get taken out of hospital funds or your salary. Most likely will be your salary, I fought to fix this a few times, never could convince them that I don't agree to do free exams, that is the bread and butter of your expertise, you deserve to be paid for it. And most of these discounted exams or free exams don't bring in any additional revenue so you get to tank your overall income by quite a bit seeing and doing these. They are stupid annoying and I don't know a single vet that likes them.
4. Promotions-- we had a senior bloodwork discount once-- so much senior labwork for so much less money and I did so much work and pulled in hardly anything on it. Wait until you get the joys of the "your dog's labwork is normal minus this ALP elevation that is likely nothing, but I can't promise it is nothing, so if you want to be sure it isn't we can do 342342 other tests to verify it is nothing, but honestly it is probably nothing" conversation 342332 times a day. Because if you look at an older dog sideways their ALP will instantly go from 20 to 555 in 10 seconds flat.
We had a heartworm discount once-- free HWT if you buy a year of prevention, again, that directly effects your salary if the clinic dumps the discount on your name instead of under the hospital payment code.
Dental month
Spay/neuter packages.
So finding out and being in agreement with how every promotion gets paid out should be considered. The clinic should not be able to decide to have a discount or promotion that will affect your take home salary without your agreement first. If they want a heartworm promotion then the discount needs to come from the hospital when invoiced out, not your payment code. But good luck getting a clinic to agree on this point.
5. Discounts in general-- senior, military, rescue-- rescue discounts are the worst. The place I worked at had agreed to do pyo surgeries if needed for $150-- do you know how much that cuts into your salary. And if you get stuck with the rescue all the damn time, like I often did, you are literally losing money and going into negative accrual (if you have that) every time you see the rescue. All of these discounts impact your income.
This doesn't include the other items-- where is the clinic located? I had an offer from a clinic for prosal based payment in a really horrible part of town. The clinic was $$$$$ and there was no way you would ever pull in enough to get any decent production if any production at all in this area given how pricey the clinic was for the location it was in.
How do hospitalized patients getting invoiced out? Do they change the Dr for each day the pet is there based on the dr doing the work that day? Does it all go under the first Dr who saw and recommended hospitalization?
Speaking of bloodwork-- who gets paid? The vet who recommended it or the vet who is calling with results? The place I worked I was the only full time vet so I was often calling back labwork for the part time vet but she got paid for it since she recommended it, but arguably, I actually did the work involved with the labwork. Recommending it is a tiny part of it, interpreting it and talking to the owner about it is the more difficult part.
How good are the staff at making sure things are put under the correct Dr? Are you going to have to be following up after every single patient to be sure it was invoiced correctly?
How good are your techs and how many do you have? This is a rate limiting factor in how many patients you can see and definitely affects your production as well.
Speaking of number of techs-- how often are you having to stop Dr duties to do tech tasks? Every nail trim, catheter you place, anal gland you express, medication you fill, blood draw you do, etc technically impacts your pay. We were so short on techs I had to do almost every nail trim at one point and told them finally I won't do another nail trim until they put that charge under my name so I can actually get paid for it.
Now lets talk PTO, sick days, vacation. On prosal (without negative accrual) most places just pay your base salary for your time off, which, ok, fine but if you had been hitting a ton of production and had become used to that you are going to feel the financial strain of taking a day off, it will reduce your income. Basically the way I see it, there is no such thing as appropriately paid time off on a prosal model and it is even worse if you have negative accrual because not only are you not making production but it is actually putting you into a hole you might not be able to climb out of when you get back.
Overall, prosal can work, some places it runs well. I am not saying don't do it. If it runs well, you have a good staff, good OM, good upper management, etc not only can it work well, but you can make a decent amount of money with it. But, if it isn't well run it can be a damned nightmare. An absolute damn nightmare.