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Transcribed by Riverside AI, please disregard any misspelled words or grammar errors.
Dayna (00:02.902)
Hey my friends, welcome to, well, close to the end of the year. And this is the time of year when I receive the…
Most of the number one question that I received this time of year is Dayna, what do I need to do for a year end? Okay, so that is the most common question I’m getting this time of year. And my quote, my answer is always whatever you’re doing for month end is exactly what you need to do for year end. And because the process isn’t any different, at least not in your Dentrix software, it’s not any different than running month end.
So I’m going to go through some best practices with you just to make sure that your month-end task scheduler is set up correctly and also I’m going to give you a few recommendations on what reports that you’re going to want to run at the end of the year. Just to give yourself some year-end numbers and you know so you can celebrate for the end of the year. So
So the first thing you want to do is make sure that your month end task scheduler is set up correctly. And many, many times when I am online with a practice, I always look at the task scheduler to see how it’s set up. Is it running? Is the office getting errors? So that’s one of the most important things that you want to do is make sure that the task scheduler is not receiving any errors.
and you have the most critical items set up on an automation, because the task scheduler is designed to run automatically behind the scenes, usually in the middle of the night, that’s when the task scheduler is going to run is in the middle of the night when nobody’s on the system. So if you go into the task scheduler, you’ll notice that you have
Dayna (02:07.675)
It opens up a window and you have information, you have tasks on the left side and you have tasks on the right side. So the tasks on the left side, those are all your available tasks. And then on the right side, you have any tasks that are actually scheduled to be running. And so you want to make sure.
You want to make sure that your tasks that are scheduled are, you know, the, there’s like four really important tasks that should be running at all times, every month, and especially at the end of the year. And I’ll go through those with you right now. So the first one that should be running is what’s called closed transactions. So the closed transactions
is really affects your accounts receivable. So the closed transactions, what it’s going to do is some really important cleanup processes to your accounts receivable. Number one is it’s going to age your accounts. So if you were ever looking at your accounts receivable and all your account balances are in the current column, that probably means that you’re not running one of your tasks.
Closed transactions is going to age your accounts. Move the current to 30, 30 to 60, 60 to 90, and then 90 over. And the other thing that the closed transactions will do is it will lock up your ledger transactions into history. So then nothing can be deleted or edited.
off of the ledger. So it secures and locks down your ledger history. So then you won’t be able to edit or delete anything off of the ledger. So then if you needed to make an edit or you needed to fix a patient ledger, you would have to do a do an adjustment or something like that. The other thing that the closed transactions will do is it moves the ending accounts receivable balance from the
Dayna (04:22.862)
current month into the beginning balance of the next month. That’s really important when you’re looking at like the provider AR totals report or you’re looking at the analysis summary because you always want to make sure that ending accounts receivable balance for that month is always current and it’s always moving that ending balance into the beginning balance of the next month.
CPAs and bookkeepers always like to look at those numbers and make sure that they are in sync with each other and you don’t have any discrepancies. All right, so that’s what the closed transactions does. So you want to make sure that is always running. Some offices will have that run on the first of every month. Some offices will have it run maybe about five days into the month so that it gives you time to
balance all your day sheets to your bank and just gives you a little bit of grace period into the new month so that’s fine if you want to do that. The other task that you want to make sure that is running every single month especially at year end is the reset insurance benefits used. So especially at the end of the year because many insurance plans renew at the beginning of the month.
And so it’s really important that your patient benefits used has been updated. And that when you start to give patient treatment estimates in January, that the amount used has been properly updated. So that’s the reset insurance benefits that should always be running every single month.
Another task in the task scheduler that is very important is the move clinical notes to history. So what that will do of course is lock up your clinical notes into history and so that it secures down all your clinical documentation in the patient chart. That way you can’t delete.
Dayna (06:37.75)
or edit any of your clinical notes. Now if you’re signing your clinical notes after each patient visit then they’re going to be locked into history anyway. So the having it part of your month end task scheduler is just kind of an extra security measure just to make sure all your clinical notes are getting locked into history so then you don’t have any accidental deletions or changes to your clinical documentation.
That also goes for your move perio exams to history. So same thing, it will move your perio charts into history so that nobody can delete or edit a perio exam accidentally, delete a perio chart. So because that is part of your legal documentation, you wanna make sure that that.
Dayna (08:05.13)
Um, you know, uh, accurate and clean. Sometimes we can get what are called totals problem. Um, it’s always been kind of a, um, something that happens behind the scenes. For example, if you ever have a, um, like a power surge, or if you are your office, you have a lightning storm and the lights are flickering. Um, sometimes that can affect your computers.
And for example, let’s say you’re posting a payment at the same time, the lights flicker. Sometimes that could have a power surge in your computer and it could affect your patient balances. And so this is just kind of a, um, a sweep through your patient ledgers, just to make sure that your patient balances are staying accurate. And that’s called recalculate totals that should be running every day. Uh, now there’s some new processes to the task scheduler.
that I think you would also want to ask and add to your daily routine. And that one of those is process due payment agreements. So if you are allowing patients to make payment plans and you have credit cards attached to your payment agreements, now there’s a new process in your task scheduler that you can add that process due payment agreement. So that could be part of your daily routine.
Now, once you get those four really important pieces to the month end process, which is also part of your year end process this time of year, the closed transactions, the move clinical notes to history, the move perio exams to history, and the reset insurance benefits. Once you get those set on your monthly task, then I would always double check the log.
and double check the schedule just to make sure that everything is running on task and you’re not getting any errors. So when you do open your month and task scheduler look in that lower left corner window and you’ll see a view log and you’ll also see the schedule. Just make sure that you click on the view log every once in a while and double check that you’re not getting any errors.
Dayna (10:24.35)
and that your month end processes are going through, the status says completed. So that’s actually the whole process for your month end and your year end, just to make sure that the task scheduler is running on a regular basis. And so then what we can look at is we can start looking at say some reports. So when we come back,
After our quick break, we’re going to talk about the best reports for your year end process.
Dayna (11:12.27)
All right, so some of my favorite year end reports would be the practice advisor. Now I talk about the practice advisor because it actually is a monthly report. It should be part of your monthly reports that you are looking at with your team. It’s a very team facing report. So you can see what processes and what systems are being, are successful.
You can look at the health of your practice and it gives you just a really good way of celebrating with your team and also seeing if there are any systems in your, uh, your workflow that might need to be tweaked. So the practice advisor is one of my favorite reports. Now if you have never looked at this report before, you might need to go through a few setup processes just to make sure that when you’re looking at this report.
that you are looking at accurate data. I know data is one of the most important things that we have in our Gentric software and if we don’t have good data we won’t have good reports. So there are a few setup processes that you’ll want to go through and you know I can’t go through all the details of this report in this in this 15 minute podcast today.
So I’m just going to tell you what this report is good for. And then if you want to reach out to me directly or you want to jump into our membership, we have a course called Understanding Your KPIs that will go through this report in a lot more detail. But I will tell you the top five numbers that you want to be looking at on this report. So the practice advisor.
is a month end report and also will give you year to date totals. So it’s a very good year to date year end report. So it’s going to give you gross production and it’s also going to give you net production. Year to date gross production, year to date net production. It will also give you year to date net production per day, which is I think a much more, uh,
Dayna (13:37.326)
a good indicator of how you are scheduling on a regular basis. Because the total year to date production number could be like you’re like, oh my gosh, that’s such a great number. But then when you drill it down to what did we actually produce per day, did we make our daily goal? That, I think, is more important than the actual year to date ending number. And then the practice advisor will also break it down by.
doctors and by hygienist. So you’ll be able to see your total gross production and net production per doctors and your hygiene department. You’ll also be able to see the percentage of revenue by doctor and by hygienist. So you’ll be able to see how are my hygienists producing because you want your hygiene department to be producing
you know somewhere between 25 and 35 percent of your overall practice production and that’s one thing I really like about this practice advisor report is it gives you that percentage now on the next page of the practice advisor report you’re going to see your collection numbers so the year to date collection should be of course the gold standard is 98 percent uh… collection rate but what i think is some of the more
important numbers here on your collection is you want to see what your accounts receivable ratio is. Like what is my AR ratio? That’ll give you your total collections or total accounts receivable divided by your production number and then that’s going to give you your AR ratio number. I think another really important number is what do you have?
What’s your accounts receivable over 90 days? Okay, we really wanna see that accounts receivable over 90 days at about 10 to 15% of your overall accounts receivable. And then you’ll also be able to see your collections over the counter if you are tracking that. And then you’ll also be able to see all the rest of the aging of your total accounts receivable.
Dayna (15:57.75)
The practice advisor report gives you the number one most accurate accounts receivable number because it is not dictated by running month end. It does look at the true data service and then it starts to age the accounts based on the true data service, not based on your month end. Okay. Then if you flip over to page three of the practice advisor.
this is where you’re going to see your continuing care statistics. This is going to show you things like your patient retention. Of course, we want to see patient retention anywhere above 85%. Okay, so if your patient retention is below 85%, we definitely want to start looking at some of your systems for reaching out to patients.
that are overdue and not scheduled. If your patient retention is over 85%, you need to celebrate. Let’s have some, let’s have a party. Let’s celebrate that really great patient retention number. And then another number on this continuing care will show you the percentage of patients that are pre-scheduling for their next visit. So that’s what I love about the practice advisor report, gives you those really key indicators.
of the health of your practice when it comes to production, collections, and patient retention. Now a couple other year-to-date numbers that you might want to run would be the practice analysis reports. This will give you a breakdown of your production per category. So if you want to see production by category or you want to see production by procedure code,
The practice analysis reports will give you those numbers. You can also see your collections in categories and also your adjustments in the categories. Now, if you want to see adjustments drilled down a little bit farther, you could do an adjustment only day sheet, but that report of course is probably gonna be pretty lengthy, so I wouldn’t want you to print it. And then we have the analysis summary.
Dayna (18:17.902)
could also be a year to date report. But my two favorite year to date reports would definitely be the practice advisor and the practice analysis reports. Alright, I hope that gives you some good steps to follow for your year end process because we are only a couple weeks out from year end. And if you need any assistance with your year end process, please reach out
You definitely could schedule a call with me if you want to talk one-on-one, or if you want to jump into our membership, that’s a really great place to hone in on your skills, give your team some extra added resources for the end of the year, and then check out our Understanding Your KPIs course. That’s also a really good resource.
for you, for the office managers and the doctors. All right, it’s been great, great spending the last 15, 20 minutes with you. I hope you have a great rest of your afternoon and I look forward to watching your journey of becoming a Dentrix superuser.
