In this tips & tricks post, we’ll discuss how to quickly reallocate a credit balance within a family, closing out a day or month in Open Dental, and how to know if your primary claim payment information is sent with your secondary claim.

Reallocate a Credit Within a Family with Income Transfer

If you’ve ended up with a family member who has a credit, and another family member who has a balance due, the Income Transfer tool is your friend. Go into one of the family member accounts, then click the drop-down arrow next to Payment, like this:

Once you select Income Transfer, you’ll see a window that shows the current balances and credits on the right:

Simply click the Transfer button at the bottom, and the system will create a transfer to reallocate funds:

The account of the family member who had a credit will show a Txfr Payment (showing the credit was transferred to the other family member) :
The other family member will show a Txfr Payment (showing they “received” the credit transfer):

If you’d rather create manual paysplits to reallocate balances, you can follow the steps here.
For details on how the Income Transfer Manager works, see Income Transfer Manager in our manual.

Closing Out a Day or a Month

Actually, there’s no need to do this in Open Dental – you can run reports anytime. However, you may want to prevent the editing of old items and backdating of new items. Global Lock Dates are here for you! Set this up in Setup > Security. In the upper left, click Global Security Settings and look for the Global Lock section at the bottom.

When you click Change, you’ll see the window below, which allows you to select a specific date (like 12/31/2019, for example, to “close out” the previous year), or a number of days (to only allow changes within a set amount of days from the original entry date). See the full list of Permissions to identify those affected by global lock dates.

Tech Tip: Global lock dates are the only way to prevent the backdating of newly created items.

If you’d like to read more about typical end-of-period reports used by our customers, check out our post, Reports: End of Day – Month – Anytime!

Is Primary Insurance Payment Information Sent With My Secondary Claim?

Yes, if you are using a clearinghouse (like DentalXChange) that uses the 5010 Format. You won’t see this information in the claim window – it is sent in the background, as part of the code that is transmitted when sending a secondary claim electronically.
No, if you are using a clearinghouse that uses the 4010 Format or a unique format. You’ll need to scan the primary EOB and send it along with your secondary claim.

For our Canadian users, how secondary claims are handled is determined by the Carrier. For details, see the Secondary Claims section on our Canada Claims manual page.

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