Payments 

This is the payment editing window. The payment could be either a new payment, entered by pressing the payment button, or an existing payment, accessed by double clicking on the item in the Account module.

Sometimes you will need to split a payment between different patients, families, providers, dates, or procedures. If you do not need to split the payment, a split will be automatically created when you click OK, and you won't have to worry about it.

The payment date at the very top is the date that the payment is received and will be used on the Deposit Slip. Each payment has a list of Pay Splits. There might just be one split, as in the example above, or multiple splits. The date showing for the split is known as the procedure date.  Typically you just ignore the split feature, but if you have a very complex family situation with multiple insurances and the patient wants to see which payments went towards which procedures, you can reassign the splits, even attaching them to various procedures. The dates on the splits may all be different. Changing the split dates to the dates of the procedures will cause them to show grouped with the procedures.  Changing the split dates also affects the patient aging.

If the amount of the total payment excedes the patient's balance owed, then Open Dental attempts to create a series of paysplits to apply to other family members with balances owed. This all happens automatically, but you can always go back and edit each split if you don't like the way the payment was split.

Payment types are in a list at the upper right. This list may be edited from the Definitions window.

The X-Charge button lets you process credit cards directly from this window.

The box at the bottom lets you attach a payment to a Payment Plan.  The payment will then show inside the Payment Plan amortization schedule rather than in the main Account module grid.

Tracking Income by Provider

Tracking income by provider is difficult.  It is possible, but requires attention to how patient payments are split.  For offices which track income by provider, there is a grid at the right of the payment window for viewing family balances and making income transfers. Most offices can ignore this grid. See the section at the bottom of Production and Income for a discussion of the important difference between production and income.

This window also comes up automatically after entering an Insurance Payment. This can be disabled in the Module Setup window. But for offices that track income by provider, this allows them to fine tune the provider balances.  When transferring income between providers, the splits will have dollar values, but the overall payment will be zero.

All production entries (Procedures and Adjustments) already have a provider attached to them. For procedures, the Provider is simply the one who did the work. This could be a dentist or a hygienist. Initial assignment of the provider takes place automatically when the Appointment is marked complete.

Because all production entries already have a provider, it is easy for Open Dental to assign the correct provider when entering insurance payments. Using the EOB, the payment can be easily split by procedure with very little additional effort. However, there is no automation for Patient Payments. It's much harder for the software to know how to split a patient payment. The reason that the window above is displayed after an insurance payment is not really to make alterations to the insurance payment. We already know that is accurate. It's really to compensate for the original patient payments which probably weren't split properly. After the insurance payment has been entered, it will be much easier to see how the patient payment must be split to cover the remainder. But it would be difficult to alter the original payment accurately. It is simpler to leave the original patient payments untouched, and make the transfer entries as shown above. The goal of these transfer entries is to make sure that no provider gets a negative balance. So use the transfers to move negative entries to the balances of other providers.

You may need a report at the end of the month to catch providers that have been overpaid.  See
Query Examples, query #101.