Open Dental Forum

Can OD offer payment plans other than 'lending' money?
What I mean is instead of the money over say 2 years being invoiced in advance and appearing as production on the day treatment begins to invoice every month so it appears as production every month.
If not is this a feature request or how much development work would it take to enable the feature and a cost for it. Thanks

The payment plan feature is poor and lets the program down massively I think after playing with it unless Im missing something.
Il give some examples.
Say I start ortho treatment today and demand say 2600 for treatment over 2 years and 1 month and what I want is 200 down and 24 monthly payments of 100 giving 2600 total. For tax reasons and financial planning I dont want to bill the entire treatment today as I have only completed 200s worth so want the 200 down amount. I want only the 200 to appear on the patient owing amount as that is what is owed according the payment schedule. Instead I have a negative balance of 2600 that appears on unsent bills which is very confusing even if negative balances are excluded from billing probably due to the fact that even though nothing is due on a date, the overall figure that remains is due ie the 2400. The only way to cancel the negative balance seems to be to produce the procedure which results in a tax and financial disaster.
Is this correct or am I missing something? Other dental software Ive used has the invoice monthly so there is no confusion at all on billing.Thanks for any help.

I must have been missing something apologies, moving the tx completed amount to the paid amount, creates a negative balance, which is cancelled by producing the procedure. Sorry about that. Could do with automatic invoicing to the agreed payment plan though but not the end of the world

We hadn't really considered automatic invoicing based on the payment plan. But there is a repeating charge feature that you could turn on to create automatic monthly charges on accounts. It's completely separate from payment plans.

Any chance of creating a request for that? The problem is I think the figure in the work completed box needs to be manually moved forward each month to keep pace with the say monthly invoicing. Otherwise the balance on the proper accounts is never right with the payment plan(even with the repeating charge). I think the payment plan is designed as more of a loan rather than doing the treatment over a period of time and billing over a period of time also.
Otherwise income taxes have to be paid even the treatment could take another 2 years and the cashflow hasnt been received. Thanks

Right. Payment plans aren't nearly as useful when you keep adding charges to the patient's account each month. They are most useful when you charge up front and then pay off over time. Why do you need to use a payment plan at all? Just use the repeating charge feature and avoid payment plans entirely.

Yes, you can make any request. In the request window, do a search for "pay plan" to see related requests. It looks like your request would be a new one.

What is the best way to enter, apply payments, and track ortho payment plans. The problem we are running into is when a payment plan report is run there is no way to decipher between what is owed by patients and what is owed by Insurance. I am guessing this topic has been posted somewhere else. Any leads would be great!