Level Up Your Ledger: Essential Tips for Managing Adjustments in Dentrix

I've had several questions come up recently about how to properly handle adjustments in Dentrix. The way you handle adjustments in your dental practice is very important because adjustments affect not only patient balances but also cashflow and accounts receivable. Check out my top tips for handling adjustments in your office.

 1. Limit the number of team members who have access to add and edit adjustments to patient accounts. There are team members in your office who don't post payments and have no need to make adjustments. Limiting the number of team members who can make adjustments, can help reduce the number of errors potentially made when adding adjustments to a patient’s account. It also creates accountability for those team members who are adding adjustments, so if the doctor or practice owner has a question about why a particular adjustment was made, they’ll know which team member to ask. Password permissions can be adjusted for each team member in the password setup in the Dentrix Office Manager.

2. Create descriptive adjustment types to use for the common adjustments you use in your office. Many offices will use a generic adjustment type like “miscellaneous credit adjustment” or “miscellaneous debit adjustment.” While that's sometimes appropriate, when used too often, it can make it difficult to generate reports that evaluate the types of adjustments your office uses most frequently. Dentrix Office Manager allows you to create custom adjustment types. For example, if your office writes off dental work for a particular charity, by creating an adjustment type for those adjustments, you can generate an end-of-year report to show the amount was adjusted off patient’s accounts throughout the year for that particular adjustment type.

Practices should also consider having team members make a detailed note when adding an adjustment to the patient’s ledger. This way, everyone in the office can quickly and easily see why a particular adjustment was made. Dentrix provides a note field when adding an adjustment to a patient's Ledger.

3. Be aware of how adjustments affect your practice numbers. Adjustments will affect either production or collections, and it’s important to know this so you understand how Dentrix calculates net production and collections. Whether an adjustment type affects production or collections can be adjusted in the Practice Advisor Setup in the Office Manager. 

Offsetting adjustments in Dentrix are created when adjustments are made within a family account amongst family members or providers to correct internal imbalances.  When a payment that was not originally posted to the correct patient or provider of service, these types of adjustments -- called allocations -- will need to be made within the patient account to correct the patient or provider imbalance. Dentrix will differentiate offsetting adjustments on reports so that you’re able to view those adjustments separately from the other adjustment types.

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How adjustments are handled in Dentrix is very important because adjustments affect not only the patient accounts in your office, but your practice’s cashflow and accounts receivable. Try these tips to streamline your practice’s workflow when adding and editing adjustments.