I’m wondering if it is possible to generate a colour specific to when patients go from one provider to the next, with a 10 chair day it is very hard to see the crossover, if it was a different colour/description it would be easy for everyone from reception to provider to DA to pick this up
Answer
cross over appointment
+2- Enthusiast
Best answer by Saymon
Hi
Thanks for clarifying! I think you can get almost the same effect in a few steps:
-
Create a dedicated appointment reason
Go to Settings → Diary → Appointment Reasons → New, call it something like “Crossover (Hyg → Dentist)” and give it a bold, unused colour (bright purple works well).
-
Switch the diary to colour by appointment reason
Click the little paint-brush icon on the calendar toolbar and tick Appointment Reason. From now on Dentally will show every slot in the colour you chose, not the practitioner’s default shade.
If you need to edit appointments that are already in the calendar:
-
Open the existing 10:00 hygiene slot for example and change the Reason drop-down to Crossover (Hyg → Dentist) and hit Save.
-
Do exactly the same for the matching 10:40 dentist slot.
Dentally repaints both appointments the moment you save so no re-booking, and your notes and item codes stay untouched. To update a whole list you can use Bulk Editing → Change appointment reason to flip multiple slots in one go.
That should give everyone, from reception to DA, a clear visual cue, even for appointments booked months ago. I’ve also added your request for an automatic crossover-colour feature to our product board so the Product team can look at it! Give it a try and let me know how you get on or if there’s anything else we can tweak! 😊
+14- Community Manager
Hi
At the moment, Dentally doesn’t offer a specific feature to automatically colour-code appointments where patients switch from one provider to another. But there are a few workarounds that I thought might help you make these transitions easier to spot:
🔍 Audit Trail: this logs all updates, including provider changes. Look for blue (Updated) entries in the Audit Trail to track when a patient has been moved to a different practitioner. Clicking on these entries shows a side-by-side view of the change, including who the provider was before and after.
🪑 Waiting Room: this groups patients by provider and uses colour coding based on arrival time (green, orange, red). While not specific to provider switches, this can help highlight when a patient appears under a different practitioner than expected.
📝 Custom Fields: If this is something your practice tracks regularly, you could create a custom patient field for ‘Crossover’ or similar. Adding a quick note when a patient moves between providers can help flag this manually for the team.
I’ve logged this feedback internally and passed it along to our Product team for future consideration 😊. It’s a great suggestion that could really improve visibility across the appointment book, and I appreciate you sharing it in the Community!
+2- Enthusiast
Thanks Saymon
I think I have worded what I was asking poorly, sorry for this.
I’m a hyg and for eg. I have a pt in my book at 10am and then at 10.40 they are going to the dentist for tx. I was hoping we could colour code this in the same colour in each book so it is obvious to the providers but also reception. An example of this is I had white space in my book so they moved the pt forward but were not able to easily see they were going to the dentist after seeing me. currently we use an emoji but they are difficult to see and also disappear when you put item codes in etc
+14- Community Manager
- Answer
Hi
Thanks for clarifying! I think you can get almost the same effect in a few steps:
-
Create a dedicated appointment reason
Go to Settings → Diary → Appointment Reasons → New, call it something like “Crossover (Hyg → Dentist)” and give it a bold, unused colour (bright purple works well).
-
Switch the diary to colour by appointment reason
Click the little paint-brush icon on the calendar toolbar and tick Appointment Reason. From now on Dentally will show every slot in the colour you chose, not the practitioner’s default shade.
If you need to edit appointments that are already in the calendar:
-
Open the existing 10:00 hygiene slot for example and change the Reason drop-down to Crossover (Hyg → Dentist) and hit Save.
-
Do exactly the same for the matching 10:40 dentist slot.
Dentally repaints both appointments the moment you save so no re-booking, and your notes and item codes stay untouched. To update a whole list you can use Bulk Editing → Change appointment reason to flip multiple slots in one go.
That should give everyone, from reception to DA, a clear visual cue, even for appointments booked months ago. I’ve also added your request for an automatic crossover-colour feature to our product board so the Product team can look at it! Give it a try and let me know how you get on or if there’s anything else we can tweak! 😊
+5- Savvy Contributor
I cannot get the link to work for 2 apts, how do we do this, sorry tried but unable.
Eamonn
+14- Community Manager
Hi
I’ve double checked our docs and it seems there’s been some confusion with the appointment linking. At the moment, the “link” (chain-icon) feature only does one job: it links one appointment to a treatment plan so it shows up in the plan and on reports. Sorry about the confusion!
Our teams are currently developing some enhancements related to appointments, links for appointments deposits and so on; I’ll reach out to the PM and see if there’s anything else in the works.
In the meantime, I’ve added this request for true “pair-linking” of back-to-back appointments to our product board and will update this thread if it moves forward. 😊
Hope that clarifies why the link button wasn’t behaving the way we all expected.
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