Your accounts FAQs

At Dentally we understand that knowing how to manage your financial accounts within Dentally is important to keep your practice running smoothly. 

Managing your accounts with Dentally is simple, informative and always up to date. Keeping on top of invoices, refunds deposits and other important finances means you know that your businesses finances are always in order.

We are often asked questions about accounts, and so we have put together just a few frequently asked questions with answers to provide you with a useful guide. Remember; we also have a wide variety of support documents here but let’s look at a few of the most questions our Support team receive about accounts.

Question: How do I refund a patient? 

There are usually 2 reasons, you may want to refund a patient.

1. Either the patient has paid an amount of money that you no longer wish to use and that patient is in credit, or
2. you have charged the patient for some work and you wish to lower their charge.

With that in mind, the process to perform the refund for either reason is simple. 

To refund an unused payment:

• Simply Take a payment with a minus figure value to the amount you are refunding
• Click on the orange question mark by the refunded amount and manually type in an explanation, stating the payment number that the entry is refunding
• Click on the orange question mark by the payment that you have refunded and manually type in an explanation stating that it has been refunded

To refund a patient using credit if you have charged the patient for some work and you wish to lower their charge

• From the Account tab, create a new invoice
• Add a line item
• In the Item description, type the reason for the credit/ lowering the charge
• In the Price field, type the amount with a minus sign in front of it, so if it was a refund or credit of £34.00 you type -£34.00
• Save the Invoice.
• You will see that the refund/credit now appears on the Total column.

Question: How do I take a deposit payment from a patient?

In the account tab in the patient’s record, click on Take Payment and enter the payment details.

As there will be no invoice to explain this payment against, you can just enter a note in the payment screen and the payment will show as explained and the note will be displayed where the explanation would usually be. The patient’s balance will be credited accordingly.

Once the work has been carried out and the invoice raised, you can delete the payment explanation and point the payment to the invoice instead.

Question: How do I link invoices to payments?

The need to ensure that your patients' accounts are up to date means you will have to know how to link invoices and payments as well as the correct practitioner to allocate the invoices to. You need the invoice number to match the payment summary. 

As a default setting, Dentally will automatically explain new payments against invoices or explain existing payments to newly created invoices when the treatments are charged. If the option to automatically explain payments is disabled you will need to manually explain these payments to ensure that invoices are marked as paid. 

To manually match a payment to an unpaid invoice,

• First, take the payment.
• Complete the fields
• Save the payment

There is a full selection of support documents dedicated to helping you with accounts in Dentally. Find them here.