Your practice has patients with large, outstanding balances owed, and you’ve informed them that a monthly finance charge will be posted until their balances are paid. However, these finance charges will not occur automatically each month unless you set them up to do so. With the Task Scheduler, you have many options to manage the finance charges you create for your patients. And once they’re created, you can add them to a queue to ensure that they are applied every month.
Watch the following video to learn how to manage finance charges. (Duration 1:39)
Additional Tips
- To avoid double-charging your patients by adding another “Apply Finance Charges” task, search for it in the Scheduled Tasks column. If it’s already there, simply double-click the task, edit its settings, and click OK.
- If you discover a mistake with the finance charges that were applied on a certain day, you can manually delete those charges (and then recharge them later, as needed). To delete the charges, open the Office Manager and click Maintenance > Delete Finance Charges. Enter a date and click OK.
- You can also run finances charges in your queue at any time. To do so, open the Task Scheduler (Month End), right-click the Apply Finance Charges task, and click Run Now.
- To verify that finance charges were correctly posted, you can generate a report that lists all the finance charges for a given date (or range of dates). To generate the report, read Finance Charge Report in Dentrix Help.
- To learn more about applying finance charges, read Applying Finance Charges, Entering Finance Charges Manually, and Deleting Finance Charges in Dentrix Help.
Check Your Knowledge
If you have access to Dentrix, check your knowledge with this exercise.
- Switch to the Dentrix demo database.
(Skip this step if you are using the Dentrix Learning Edition software.) - Use the following information to create an “Apply Finance Charges” queue and have it run on a monthly basis:
- Minimum Balance to Charge: $100.00
- Minimum Finance Charge: $5.00
- Minimum Days Past Due: Over 30
- Finance Charge Percent: 10, Yearly
- Primary Providers: DDS1 and DDS2
- Billing Types: 1: Standard Billing – finance charges; and 8: Bad Debt – at risk