Blue Book 

Open Dental has some capability to automatically track allowed Fee Schedules.  In other software, this is also known as "coverage tables" or "payment tables".

This automation is turned on in Module Setup, Family module by checking the box for "Use Blue Book".   This will automatically generate many fee schedules, each named by carrier.  Each allowed fee is then tracked in an allowed fee schedule attached to the plan. The allowed amounts are entered when insurance payments come in at the top of the Claim Proc window. This allowed fee will then be used for all calculations instead of the regular Fee.  

The automation works, but there are a few problems with it.  First of all, it generates a lot of clutter in the fee schedules section, and makes the fee schedules hard to manage.  More importantly, since the names are by carrier, we have had complaints that this is not fine-grained enough.  Users would rather organize the allowed fee schedules at the plan level.  Our plan is to no longer show Blue Book fee schedules in the Fee Schedules window.  We will instead be building a new interface, accessible directly from the Insurance Plan window.  The tool should let users see historical trends for each code and fine-tune what the future estimates should be for each code. This is Feature Request #2099.

Until the improvements are made, the Blue Book feature should be used sparingly.  The automatic generation of fee schedules can be turned off by unchecking the "Use Blue Book" checkbox.  The allowed fees will then continue to update automatically, but you will manage the fee schedules manually.