It’s tax season and your patients have now started receiving their W-2s from their employers and 1099s from their clients. You have probably started receiving phone calls from your patients asking you for a printout of what they paid last year for dentistry. The first thing you would think to print out would be the patient ledger, however it just doesn’t give you the clean, easy to read information that your patients would expect from you. Also, the ledger does not allow you to select a date range.
Depending on exactly what patients need for tax reporting will depend on what printout works best. Do they need a printout with ADA codes? Do they just need a list of payments? Here are a couple of options for you, depending on what your patient needs.
The first option is if the patient does not need the year-end statement to have ADA codes. This will give you a nice clean list of just the payments the family has made in the date range you choose. Open the Ledger, click File and Search Payments. This will open a new window where you will select the parameters for your search (date range, guarantor name, payment types, etc.), then select Print. Super easy!
The second option is if you need a payment history that includes ADA codes (most HSA plans want the ADA codes included). First, go to the Office Manager > Maintenance > Practice Setup > Preferences and make sure the “use ADA codes in description” is checked. Next, from the Office Manager > Reports > Billing, we are going to create a customized billing statement as a year-end printout.
- Change the Beginning Balance Forward date to the beginning of the year reported and the Statement Date to the end of the report year.
- Select the Guarantor family
- Set the Minimum Balance to Bill to 0
- Uncheck all other options
- Clear out the Statement Message
- Uncheck Save as Default
With both of these reports you have the option of printing it to paper or printing it to the Dentrix Document Center. If you print to the Dentrix Document Center then you have the option of emailing it to the patient from the Document Center.
Hope this helps. Let us know if you or your team would benefit from any online or in-office Dentrix Optimization and Systems Implementation.
