Open Dental Forum

What is the easiest way to update my fees ?

I'm not looking to do an across-the-board percentage, but rather set each dollar amount individually.

Thanks,

Mike

I would guess that if you are not interested in doing an "across the board" percentage fee increase, you will have to manually update each fee. You would go to Lists, Procedure Codes and then click on each procedure to edit the fee. If you decide that you want to do a percentage increase, you again go to Lists, Procedure Codes, Fee Tools and there you have the ability to do a percentage increase.

Hope this helps.

Jeff

Thanks, Jeff. That's what I've been doing.

Does it automatically change the fees for appointments already scheduled and treatment plans already entered ? I sure hope so !

Does it give me the option of NOT updating treatment plans that were entered within the past 3 or 6 months ?

Thanks,

Mike

Mike,

I believe your fee update will only take effect on what is treatment planned or scheduled going forward. Those procedures that are already treatment planned or scheduled previously will have the old fee. There is a tool that you can use to update all the existing scheduled or treatment planned procedures to the new fees. Go to List, Procedure Codes, Fee Tools, Update (Global). Be careful -- don't think it would be a reversible if you choose to update the fees globally.

The biggest issue is that if you update the fees globally and you have quoted a fee to a patient on an existing treatment plan, it is going to change the fees on the active tx plan. If you saved a copy of the treatment plan at the time it was presented, I would think the saved copy would have the old fees. You might want to confirm this with Open Dental Tech Support.

Jeff

Open Dental has some great tools for updating fee schedules. I would not manually change each fee - that would be a very tedious process. Here's what I'd do:
1) First make a backup of your fee schedule as follows: Add a new fee schedule (Fee Sched button->Add). Select that new fee schedule from the "View Fee Sched" list. Copy your current fee schedule to this new fee schedule by clicking the Fee tools button, selecting your current fee schedule and clicking Copy.
2) Using the Fee Tools button again, Export your fee schedule to a text file.
3) Open the text file in Excel and update your fees there (much faster!), saving your changes as a text file.
4) When it's time to update your fees, have that fee schedule selected, go to Fee Tools and Import your modified text file. If anything goes wrong you always have your backup you can copy from to restore your old fee schedule.