Once you’ve seen your last patient of the year and are finishing things up and getting everything ready for the new year, this post will guide you through the steps to finish the year strong and prepare for what’s ahead for your practice in 2026.
Wrapping up 2025: Year-End Reports
Reports can be run anytime for any date range. Typical year-end reports include:
- Production and Income Report
- Procedures by Production Report
- Aging of A/R Report
Getting a Great Start in 2026
Use the Open Dental Help Feature for more instructions on how to complete year-end tasks.
Update Open Dental
If your office is located in the US, be sure to update your Open Dental version to access the latest CDT Codes once you’re ready to add them. You’ll also get all the latest features and bug fixes when updating.
Watch our webinar on How to Update Open Dental to a New Version.
CDT Codes
2026 CDT codes will be available in Open Dental soon. There are several changes and new codes this year. Once we’ve released the changes in a future Open Dental version, we’ll let you know, so keep an eye out on our blog.
Fee Schedules
As the new year begins, you may want to analyze your office fees. If your office needs to update or increase fees for the new year, this can be easily done in Open Dental.
Prefer to watch & learn? Here’s a QuickTip Video on Updating your UCR (Office) Fees.
As a preventative measure, we recommend that you make a backup copy of your current fees before making any changes. Once you’re ready to begin, you can either use the Fee Tools window to increase all fees in your office fee schedule by a percentage or manually adjust individual procedure fees from the Procedure Codes list.
Once procedure fees are changed, your office may want to update fees for treatment-planned procedures. Treatment-planned procedure fees can be updated for all patients from the Fee Tools window, or for an individual patient from the Treatment Plan module.
Provider Schedules
Make sure to set up your provider Schedules so you can utilize the Appointment Search feature to find available appointment slots with providers, and use the Make Recall button to quickly schedule the patient’s next recall appointment. Operatories and Schedules must be set up if you would like to use Web Sched eServices that allow patients to schedule their own appointments online.
Pay Periods
If you are utilizing Time Cards within Open Dental, make sure your pay periods are set up for the next year. To create new pay periods, go to Setup, Manage, Time Cards.
Pay Periods can either be manually added one at a time or you can generate multiple all at once.
Check out our webinar on Time Cards, which includes information on creating Pay Periods.
Insurance Benefits:
Open Dental does these things automatically so you don’t have to!
- For patients with calendar-year insurance benefits, these will automatically reset on January 1st. For patients with service-year benefits, these will reset on the first day of the month assigned to the plan.
- Any adjustments to insurance benefits are cleared out automatically when the new benefit year begins.
If your patient has insurance benefits that roll over into the next year:
You can use the Adjustments to Benefits feature in Open Dental to enter the rollover amount as a negative number. This will tell the system to add this amount to the patient’s available benefits.
Use the Move Subscribers Tool when Plans Change Carriers or are No Longer In-Network
Be sure to create the new insurance plan, and then use the Move Subscribers tool to move subscribers from the existing plan to the new plan.
TECH TIP: Don’t make changes to the existing plan as it will change historical information.
Whether it’s finishing the year on a high note or preparing for a great start to 2026, we’re here for you! If you need help, there are several ways to reach our support team: chat, email, or give us a call.