Managing a dental patient’s account can get complicated. Between insurance claims, insurance payments, supplemental insurance payments, patient payments, patient refunds, income transfers, adjustments, and everything else under the sun, it’s easy to see how keeping up can become difficult.

In this post, we’ll discuss advanced features to help with more complex patient accounts.

By default, the Account Module will use line-item accounting. Basically, every payment and adjustment is allocated to a procedure so that you know exactly what money is going where.

From the Main tab, you can easily switch between family members, without leaving the Account Module, by clicking their names from the list. You can also click Entire Family to see an intermingled account history for all family members.

Especially helpful for those long-term patients, you can filter the account history date range by going to the Show tab. If you change the date range in the Show tab, it will reset once you close out of Open Dental.

Service Date View

The Service Date View is a great tool to quickly see which procedures have been paid and when.

This view groups all charges for a day and shows all the credits that have been applied to those charges, rather than displaying everything in chronological order like the Patient Account grid. You can easily see when payments were applied to procedures without needing to click through each procedure for a service or appointment date.

Export as CSV

Have you ever needed to export an account history to a spreadsheet for one reason or another? You can easily do that with the Export as CSV option in the Statement window.

When this option is enabled, once you save a statement, it is automatically saved as a CSV file (spreadsheet) to the designated Image Category set up in Definitions: Image Categories.

Additional Resources

Here are some resources that cover specific account-related features in detail:

Account Module basics, including understanding patient balances and the ledger.
All About Claims: Creating claims, tracking follow-ups, and handling insurance payments.
Adjustments and Account Procs Quick Adds
Repeating & Recurring Charges and Payment Plans
Check out these playlists on YouTube:
Account Module Playlist
Lessons for the Office Manager or Billing Specialist Playlist

If you ever have questions or need any help with these or other features in Open Dental, Support is here to help!