Is it possible to reserve a deposit payment for a particular future treatment plan?

Hi ​@BCDC2023, right now when you take a deposit you can click the “explain” button next to the unexplained money and enter a note without selecting an invoice, this will reserve the money and prevent it from being automatically explained to future treatment that gets charged through.

The balance will still include that money, however, so the reception team will need to go and take a look at the account to see if there are unpaid invoices to be sure that there’s nothing for the patient to pay, and then check if there are reserved payments that should be applied to the invoices as the treatment the deposit was taken for has now occurred. We are actually working in this area though, so expect it to be a little easier in the coming few months!

Unfortunately this suggestion does not recognise the fact that it considerable work to explain a payment and then unexplain it at a later date to match off against an invoice that gets charged to the system by the dentist.  We used to this until it consumed too much time as we have some 60-70 patients a day when it’s busy and cannot keep doing that.

Hopefully a solution is in sight as this is not ideal.  There should a “deposit” option which the dentist can then apply an invoice to match off against the deposit at a later date.

Hopefully a solution is in sight as this is not ideal.  There should a “deposit” option which the dentist can then apply an invoice to match off against the deposit at a later date.

Watch this space ​@BCDC2023! Would you be up for having a call with us to see what we have in mind?

Yes, I would that would be great.  Thanks.

I find it better to use two custom treatment items:

1. Non refundable deposit
2. Deposit previously paid

with the second being a negative amount to match the first. The first gets charged on paying/booking, then the second  is charged on completing the treatment. Recording deposits this way has the benefits of including the deposit timings in the treatment plan, clear invoices, and allocation to the treating dentist. Maybe this would work for you too?

​@Al T is there a way of filtering all historical payments / invoices that (prior to the new deposits feature being implemented) show all the “explained” payments.  We now find that many patients over the last 2 years who have payments manually explained, the total payments screen does not match the total invoice screen so I am now having to go through the extremely painful task of unallocating the amount for the explained payment just so that it can match off against an outstanding invoice that shouldnt be outstanding.  

I need to be able to generate a report which shows all these “explained payments” to reverse the decision to explain the payment.  Thanks.

Thanks for your question ​@BCDC2023 (please note I have removed my previous comment as the product team came back to me with further guidance)

I’ve just spoken to them and we would recommend you start a chat with the support team, as they’ll need to look into your specific examples to investigate this and see if they can help.

There isn’t a report that explicitly shows manually explained payments. The ‘Takings’ report only has an 'explained' filter, which allows you to check whether a payment is explained, not how it was explained. I have shared this feedback with the product team so they can take it into consideration.