3 Ways to Print Patient Totals for End-of-Year Accounting

As we are approaching the end of the year, many of your patients may need information regarding payments they’ve made to your office over the course of the year to use for their health savings accounts or for their taxes. There are several different ways you can print a patient's account information in Dentrix, depending on what type of information they need.

Billing Statements

You can generate a billing statement for the patient. If they want detailed account information for the entire year, you can change the Balance Forward Date to 01/01/2021, which would then print all procedures and payments for the entire year. Many health savings plans require procedure codes to be included on billing information and receipts. In the Office Manager, click Maintenance > Practice Setup > Preferences and click the Print Options tab. Under Print Display Options, select Use ADA Codes in Descriptions to include the American Dental Association procedure codes on billing statements.

One thing to keep in mind is that when you generate billing statements, they will include all family members on the account who have had a procedure or payment posted during the selected time period, but the patient may or may not want all family members to be included.

Patient or Family Ledger

Many offices prefer to print a Patient Ledger, but previous versions of Dentrix did not have the option to include procedure codes on the printed ledger. In Dentrix G7.5, when you select the option to Use ADA Codes in Descriptions in the Office Manager as I described earlier, the ADA codes will also be included on the printed Ledger. This is a great improvement because many offices prefer to print the Ledger. In the Office Manager, under Reports, click Ledger, and then either Patient’s Ledger or Family Ledger. Change the First Transaction Date to 01/01/2021. If you are printing the Patient Ledger for the patient to provide to their health savings account, I would suggest selecting the options to Include Guarantor Payments/Adjustments and List Individual Patient Balances for Family. You would want to include the payments so that the health savings account processor can see that the payment was made towards a dental procedure. By selecting the option to list individual patient balances, it’s clear if the individual patient (and not another family member) owes any remaining balance.

Search Payments

If the patient doesn’t need specific procedures and/or procedure codes included on their printouts but simply wants a printed account of any payments they made throughout the year, you can use the Search Payment feature in the Dentrix Ledger. You can search by the guarantor for the account you want to print, by date range and/or by payment type. If you want to include all patient payments, be sure to include all patient payment types. For example, select the options for Check Payment, Cash Payment and the various Credit Card payment types. 

This would be a great report for the patient to provide to their accountant for tax purposes since they would only need the total dollar amount of the patient payments and not the procedure information. 

There are several ways to print information for patients regarding payments they’ve made to your office throughout the year. When your patients request them, you can decide the best option based on the information the patient needs. If you have questions about how to print patient account information, or which option would be best for your patients, email me at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com. 

Charlotte Skaggs, Certified Dentrix Trainer

Charlotte Skaggs is the founder of Vector Dental Consulting LLC, a practice management firm focused on taking offices to the next level. Charlotte co-owned and managed a successful dental practice with her husband for 17 years. She has a unique approach to consulting based on the perspective of a practice owner. Charlotte has been using Dentrix for almost 20 years and is a certified Dentrix trainer. Contact Charlotte at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.  

Customizing Procedure Codes to Fit Your Office Workflow

There are many ways to customize Dentrix in order to make it work more efficiently for your office. In today’s post, we’ll talk about some ways you can edit the way procedure codes are set up so they work best with your office workflow. 

You’ll find the Procedure Code Setup in the Office Manager.  From the Maintenance menu, point to Practice Setup, and then click Procedure Code Setup. Select the procedure code category and individual procedure you want to customize, and the click Edit.

Patient Friendly Treatment Descriptions

You can customize a procedure’s Patient Friendly Description to reflect the verbiage that you use in your office. For example, instead of having a procedure code description of “Crown - porcelain/ceramic” for procedure code D2740, you could use a patient friendly description of “Tooth colored porcelain crown.” These patient friendly descriptions can be used on the patient’s printed treatment case so it’s easier for the patient to understand. 

Treatment Flags - Difficult Procedure

You can mark a procedure as difficult, which will flag that procedure for patients on the Day Sheet. This is a good tool to use if your doctor wants to call patients that had a difficult procedure performed that day to check on them. Adding the Difficult Procedure treatment flag makes it easy for the doctor to glance at the Day Sheet to know which patients had those procedures completed and may need a follow-up phone call. 

Treatment Flags - Show In Chart

If there are procedures that your office doesn’t ever complete, you can clear the Show in Chart treatment flag so those procedures don’t show in the Patient Chart. This reduces the risk of a team member accidentally selecting an incorrect procedure code from the Patient Chart and can also help streamline your treatment planning processes. 

Paint Type

The Paint Type is how a procedure appears when posted in the patient’s graphic chart. Many offices say that bridges don’t look like bridges in the Patient Chart. If that’s the case in your office, double-check the Paint Type assigned to the procedure in the Procedure Code Setup. You can also use Paint Type to document conditions. For example, some offices use the Circled Tooth paint type to indicate they are watching a tooth; others use the Watch Tooth paint type, which puts a W at the bottom of the tooth. The paint types you use for different procedures are based on the needs and preferences of your office. 

Do Not Update Patient Visit Dates

A patient’s first and last visit dates affect your new patient and active patient numbers and reports. If there are procedures that shouldn’t count towards a patient’s last visit date when set complete in the Patient Ledger, you can set up those procedure codes with the option of Do Not Update Patient Visit Dates. For example, if you have set up a procedure code for a missed appointment or for products, you can set these as Do Not Update Patient Visit Dates and still post them to the Ledger. 

Edit Note

You can attach automatic notes to procedure codes and then select whether you want them to copy to the procedure note or clinical note. This can save time when writing clinical notes. For example, if you always fabricate porcelain crowns in your office on a milling machine, you could edit the note for the porcelain crown procedure code and then mark it as Copy to Clinical Note to automatically attach the note stating that the crown was milled in-house. 

The Procedure Code Setup in the Office Manager helps you to customize and edit procedure codes to work more efficiently in your office. If you have questions, email me at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com. 

Charlotte Skaggs, Certified Dentrix Trainer

Charlotte Skaggs is the founder of Vector Dental Consulting LLC, a practice management firm focused on taking offices to the next level. Charlotte co-owned and managed a successful dental practice with her husband for 17 years. She has a unique approach to consulting based on the perspective of a practice owner. Charlotte has been using Dentrix for almost 20 years and is a certified Dentrix trainer. Contact Charlotte at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.  

3 Tools to Help Manage Accounts Receivable

Dentrix has several reports to help you manage your accounts receivable. The Aging Report, Insurance Aging Report, and the Collections Manager are all great tools to use to manage patient accounts within your practice.

Aging Report

The Aging Report provides you with information about all accounts with an outstanding balance in your office. The balances are a combination of both insurance and guarantor portions. The last page of the report breaks down total accounts receivable by age and shows whether the balance is current, over 30 days, over 60 days, or over 90 days past due. A good rule is to keep accounts over 90 days to less than 12 percent of your total accounts receivable. When you generate the Aging Report, it’s important to note that account credits are included in the totals unless you include a minimum balance to print when setting the filters for the report. If you include a minimum balance of $0.01, you’ll ensure that all outstanding balances are included in the report. You also have an option to include guarantor notes on the report, so if you’re entering account notes, you can easily see those notes right on the Aging Report.

Insurance Aging Report

The Insurance Aging report provides the account aging information for outstanding claims in your office, which can be used to follow up on the status of outstanding insurance claims. A good goal is to avoid any claims becoming over sixty days past due. One way to achieve this is to consistently follow up on insurance claims to check the status. You can do this on a weekly basis so you can ensure that if any claims require additional information, or need to be resent, you can do so right away and avoid claims becoming past due. In Dentrix G7.5 you can choose to include partially paid claims so you can continue to track them. If you’re using claim status notes, you can also include them on the report.

Collections Manager

The Collections Manager is a great tool to use to manage all accounts in your practice. My favorite things about the Collections Manager are:

• It’s an interactive module where you can access other areas of the patient’s information like the Guarantor Notes, Office Journal, and Payment Agreement without leaving the Collections Manager. This is especially helpful when you are working with this report.
• The Collections Manager view is customizable, so you can filter the information on the report to find only the accounts you want to see. For example, you may only want to view accounts over 60 days past due or if you want to exclude patients with a payment agreement, because you’ll be using the Payment Agreement Manager to manage those accounts. You can also choose what information you want to view by showing or hiding columns. This will also help you to view all the necessary information from one screen without having to open several different modules to work an account. 

Managing collections and accounts receivable is an important task in your office. You can use the Dentrix Aging Report, Insurance Aging Report, and Collections Manager to help you to keep accounts current and paid in a timely manner. If you have question about managing accounts receivable in your office, email me at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com. 

Charlotte Skaggs, Certified Dentrix Trainer

Charlotte Skaggs is the founder of Vector Dental Consulting LLC, a practice management firm focused on taking offices to the next level. Charlotte co-owned and managed a successful dental practice with her husband for 17 years. She has a unique approach to consulting based on the perspective of a practice owner. Charlotte has been using Dentrix for almost 20 years and is a certified Dentrix trainer. Contact Charlotte at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.  

Getting Ready for the End of the Year

 As we begin the last quarter of 2021, it’s time to start thinking about things to do before the end of the year. Here are some suggestions to help you finish strong in 2021 and start with your best foot forward in 2022.

The first thing I would suggest you do to finish strong in 2021 is to use the Treatment Manager to find patients with outstanding treatment plans who also have remaining insurance benefits for this calendar year. The Treatment Manager is a great tool for finding these patients because you can filter by patients who have outstanding treatment within a specific date range or treatment plans that contain specific procedure codes. You can also filter by treatment plan total. This is a great feature because it allows you to find patients that may have large treatment plans, and you can schedule some treatment in 2021 and complete the remainder of the patient's treatment plan in 2022 to help them make the most of their insurance benefits. You can also filter by remaining insurance benefits to ensure you are only contacting patients who have enough insurance benefits left to pay some benefits towards their treatment plans.

Once you have found the patients with remaining insurance benefits, you can contact them by phone, by mail, or by email using Patient Engage. Be sure to make notes in the Office Journal of the communication you send and any correspondence you have with patients. 

The next thing I would suggest is that you evaluate your fees, both office fees and insurance contracted fees. For your office fees, meet with your doctor or practice owner and evaluate if you want to increase your office fees for the next calendar year. You can meet with your Henry Schein Field Sales Consultant, and they can create a practice analysis to compare your office fees to the averages in your area. Then you can request fee increases from the insurance plans your office is contracted with. The end of the calendar year is a good time to do this so that it’s done annually and gets you on track for the following year.

Another thing to think about at the end of the calendar year is what your office schedule will be like for the upcoming year. It’s a good time to set up the holidays and other days the office will be closed and get them set up in the Dentrix Appointment Book. I always like to get this set up for the beginning of the year so that the team is aware and can adjust their schedules accordingly. This also helps avoid having to reschedule patients that get scheduled on days you plan to close. 

The end of the year is also a great time to think about your practice goals for next year. You can evaluate the production for 2021 and use that information as you consider projected goals for 2022. You can set up production goals in the Practice Analysis in the Office Manager. I’m always a big proponent of setting production goals and helping your team stay focused on achieving them.

Let’s recap on the things you can do to before the end of the year:

• Contact patients with outstanding insurance benefits and outstanding treatment to get them scheduled. This will help patients to maximize their insurance benefits and also create more production for the office.
• Evaluate both your office fees and insurance contract fees to see if there is potential to increase those fees for 2022.
• Look at the 2022 calendar, set up days the office will be closed, and make changes to your schedule as needed.
• Set up your production goals for the upcoming year. 

If you have questions about some of these end of year procedures, email me at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com. 

Charlotte Skaggs, Certified Dentrix Trainer

Charlotte Skaggs is the founder of Vector Dental Consulting LLC, a practice management firm focused on taking offices to the next level. Charlotte co-owned and managed a successful dental practice with her husband for 17 years. She has a unique approach to consulting based on the perspective of a practice owner. Charlotte has been using Dentrix for almost 20 years and is a certified Dentrix trainer. Contact Charlotte at vectordentalconsulting@gmail.com.