Practice Management

HiIt’s frustrating that Dentally phone support does not offer extended opening hours for the convenience of dentists or practice staff that work outside of 9-5pm hours or especially at weekends (note: Carestream R4 still have Saturday support staff working until 2pm).  The situation is now made worse by the fact that Dentally now appear to have switched off the ability for clients to be able to send offline support requests via Ellie / chat bot outside of regular hours (when the question is more technical and cannot be answered by Ellie ai).   This is really a step backwards and a total disregard for clients - why would Dentally do that?  Aside from increasing the monthly fees from this month, how is this in any way client centric, is Dentally tryin to avoid a pile of new support requests from appearing at 9am on Monday morning from the weekend?Sorry for the rant but if I am correct in stating that chats requests (as per the below image) cannot now entail we send a support request outs

Just like we are not able to pay off all family invoices by selecting the family members in the accounts tab, could we please introduce a feature so that we can see all the family and children appointments in one of the family member’s tab please.  It makes it so much easier to have one screen to see all family appointments. Thanks.

 ​@Hebe Lowen HiCan I pls make some suggestions for improvement to the Dentally email screen - is it best listed here or on a fresh thread? Can we have the ability to pin emails please which are important and need to be worked on otherwise they fall down the list as new emails come in and get forgotten  Can we have the ability to assign emails as tasks to team members to action? Please introduce spell check and grammar check options into emails before we send them Let’s have the ability to have a list of emails without showing the one line content on the screen, and have a view like Gmail or Outlook where you can preview the message in the lower pane of the screen and toggle on the upper part of the screen with the keyboard up and down arrow to reach emails. Can we have the ability to view or filter messages which were manually sent by a staff member to a patient for important matters compared with hundreds of automatic emails sent out.  It makes it extremely difficult if not impossibl

Hi Can I request that the clinical chart (odontogram) is included in any export pdf when the clinical records are exported. The lack of the ability to easily export the dental chart, which after all is the heart of clinical records, is a major failing. Thx

We tend not to delete the unbooked appointments and just leave them in the diary.  Is this a bad move?When your staff try to use MPC or dentally reports to find all those unbooked treatments to then try and book them in and patients say they’re not interested or not ready, at what point in the client workflow / sales cycle do you delete those unbooked appointments to stop them reappearing later?  I sometime wonder if its best to leave it so it acts as a kind of visible repository of information that at some point a patient was e.g. interested in an implant consultation or high value treatment.  Once you delete it you lose all that context.On the opposite note, if you dont delete them, those same patients keep reappearing and you are at risk of recalling the same patients again and again much to their frustration or your staff. So what is best practice here and what tips do you all suggest?

For NHS Scotland practices, and anyone whose exam intervals depend on a treatment item.A001 (item 1-(a)) is the extensive clinical examination and A002 (item 1-(b)) a review in between. SDR Determination I says "Item 1-(a) cannot be claimed again by the same dentist within 11 complete calendar months of a previous item 1-(a) claim". Practitioner Services (PSD) discount the rest of the acceptance month, so an A001 accepted on 13 March 2026 is next claimable from 1 March 2027. Since 11 December 2025, PSD return time-barred A001 claims with error E000853.The problem todayA routine exam can be booked, by reception or online, from 8 months after the last A001 until the next is claimable. That visit can't be an A001, and completing it moves the recall to that date plus the interval, pushing the next A001 past 12 months. Online booking can't tie an appointment type to the recall date or treatment items, and its lapsed-patient rule counts an A002 as an exam.What would helpPer appointment type:

I think this has been requested before. Im looking for a report that pulls diary utilisation for a month in arrears. That only displays hours available. A great report snapshot in SOE to reference to is monthly analysis 👌 where I could see FTAs, Diary % Utilisation & hourly rate per clinician in one report. Currently in dentally I cant pull some of these figures or im having to run reports individually per clinician, very time consuming. Happy to be contacted if more context is needed. Thanks, Laura 

Hi Dentally, I’m reaching out to ask whether you offer any support or guidance for tracking bookings related to Google Ads campaigns. It is essential for our marketing to have accurate data on the effectiveness of our ads and patient booking numbers through our Dentally booking system. Without this data, it’s challenging to optimise our campaigns effectively and ensure a strong return on investment. Google Ads tracking is normally set up through Google Tag Manager and GA4, however, it doesn’t look like you currently have those available as integrations. Is this something you are going to be offering soon? In the meantime, is there an alternative method for setting up Google Ads conversion tracking that you could provide a step-by-step guide for, or help us implement? Lastly, I can see that we have a Tag Manager added to our Dentally booking system. Please could you let me know how that’s possible, given that Tag Manager is not currently available as an integration? Thank you,TwentyOneD

NHS regulations is Wales say an active patient is one seen in the last 3 years. It would be useful to have a feature to submit a bulk archive request for patients who haven’t been seen for a set period. 

It would be extremely useful to know the length of time a patient has been registered at a practice up until the point they have been either archived or blocked from making any further appointments.Just like the patient’s age and date of birth is listed at the top of the patient’s page, can we please also add a line with the length of time they have been a patient.The rationale for this is that it is useful when having to make sensitive decisions about deregistering a patient due to a number of cancelled appointments / failed to attends or bad behaviour.Whilst we can calculate this ourselves, it’s far quicker and nicer to see this information presented to us for every patient at the top.  It also acts as a nice talking point when they come in and recognise loyalty.This is such an easy and quick feature to implement as it not difficult to calculate this from the time they either first were setup or if that information is not available (because a practice migrated to dentally from anothe

Hi team, We have the Dashboard where we can see a forecast of our practitioner utilisation (commonly referred to as CTU or chair time utilisation), which is really helpful for practice management.However, to my knowledge, there is nothing to review historical CTU which is a major gap for practice management. Or if I am missing where it is already there, please point it out to me on Dentally as it would be really helpful.One of the key metrics for any business is productivity of resources, and CTU is a key element of practice productivity. I have heard that your add-on software lets you access this, however I think its a huge gap that Dentally does not let you report on historical CTU as a very basic metric for practice performance. Also not to mention, I am aware from some peers that several competitor software platforms do offer this in the standard offering. It should be a standard metric given in the software - The data is already available through the calendar (available hours), an

Hi Dentally team/community,I’d like to suggest a feature to link a treatment code to a default Appointment Reason.Implementation Ideally, each treatment code could have an optional Default Appointment Reason setting. When an appointment is created from that treatment, the reason would be pre-populated but could still be changed when appropriate.For exampleCrown preparation → “Prosthodontics” appointment reason Extraction → “Surgical Treatment” appointment reason Root canal treatment → “Endodontics” appointment reason Scale and polish / periodontal treatment → “Hygiene” appointment reason Fixed appliance bonding → “Orthodontics” appointment reasonThe idea would be that, when an appointment is created from a planned treatment, Dentally automatically selects or suggests the most appropriate Appointment Reason. Handling appointments with multiple treatmentsOne consideration would be appointments containing several planned treatments. I think this could remain simple:If all treatments in th

Tasks are difficult to manage in Dentally, the team can change due dates without it being clear on the audit. it would be nice if a due date was changed a reason was added in so we have transparency as to why due dates are being changed. Also Task reporting - can I see how many were created, closed on time, overdue - longest wait time etc. at the moment a task is as useful as a note when it comes to performance management which means we use it but trying to manage the team on these tasks is near impossible! 

Hi,Zoning the diary seems to be a freeform kind of thing to do - what i mean is that we can write whatever title and select any colour...which is fine...but i’m thinking how do we maintain diary integrity. Not that it happens often but if someone books in the ‘wrong’ type of appointment in a zone - how can i see this without manually hoovering over the diary?(actually scrolling through the diaries to do stuff is a regular thing but maybe another post) It’s something we push hard on is A using the zones, B putting in the right appointments in the right zones, it would be useful if we could see a list of incorrect appointments to then help coach folks or understand the causes.Having some more defined zone categories perhaps might help with future features ie online booking for treatment :) 

Hi team,We use the deposit feature regularly to discourage patients from cancelling on short notice/FTA and it is really helpful in keeping our utilisation up.There are a couple of things that would really help with making this feature more effective:1)A way for reception to follow up on unpaid deposit links sent out. There is currently no way to check which deposit links remain unpaid. The “send payment link” option has a generic message. We would like to update this with a template with additional text (to avoid manually typing it each time). However, if we try to set up an SMS template, the “ [payment_request_link]” for that deposit amount is not a tag available, ie we can’t link in that specific deposit amount, just the patient’s whole account (which wouldn’t work anyway as deposits are not listed as an invoice)… Could you look into making these enhancements to make taking and following up deposits more efficient?

We need end of day banking sheets for each clinician rather than a banking sheet that have everyone on. 

Has anyone experienced a low recall sending rate? We are set up for automated recalls, as we were with Exact, but have been told our recalls are not sending unless our patients have checked the marketing consent box!Recalls are not marketing!!!!! They are reminders agreed with the patients. They wish to have recalls but may opt out of other non- appointment related contacts.Seriously considering opting out of Dentally after one month in,  if this not resolved. Serious risk of loss of income due to increase in white spaces we never had before!!Any solutions out there? 

I’m trying to create a separate waiting list in Dentally for patients who have failed to attend, as I do not want them mixed in with our regular short-notice list.The aim is to keep these patients on a separate list so they can only be offered appointments that become available at short notice, while keeping our main short-notice list for patients with a good attendance record.Is there a way to create a custom waiting list for this purpose in Dentally? If so, could someone point me towards the correct setup or permissions required?

We went live with our online booking some 6 weeks ago.On average we’re getting only 3-4 online bookings a week despite having the portal link in all our recall emails and reminder emails and mainly from existing NHS patients.  More importantly, we’re seeing a large number of these patients making multiple bookings and failing to turn up for any of the appointments.  Why does the portal allow users to book more than one of the same appointment without warning them to either cancel or rescedule an appointment? There is no feature to switch off online booking for persisten offenders, only an option to prevent further appointments in general (in the patient’s details tab) which is not the same thing as I might be happy for them to call and my staff book them inWhat is the solution here because I can see this becoming an issue as not only are we seeing wasted appointment slots but multiple text msgs which just add up?

Hi guys,  I’ve been told theres a feature to add the reason why a patient has refused their treatment plan, e.g cost, finance failed etc.  Does anyone know how I go about setting this up? If not is it a feature that could be added it would help with KPI  Thanks

We recently migrated to Dentally and although there is many features that are fantastic 😁. There are some things I am missing from SOE 😶The biggest example is an invoice generated for Zero fee treatments. As there is no option to charge £0 on treatment plans, we cannot create an invoice. Why?We have capitation plans and pay our Clinicians a set fee for Examinations. We also pay our hygienists a set fee for patients seen under capitation plans. If these automatically generate an invoice even with a 0 balance they can then be found on the Income breakdown as a lovely total of that treatment code seen. In a format I can print/save. I am aware I can run a practioner activity report and add lots of filters but this gives me pages of information - since it shows every individual patient, when all I need is a sum figure of the code we use for these capitation exams. So if there is any other suggestions or can add this feature in it would be fantastic 😁    

I would be great if there was an option to send short notice lists via email rather than sms, also options to select what days/times appointment the pt would like to be notified for!

When corresponding with patient’s, it would be nice to be able to refer to them not just by name but with (he or she). The option of which pronoun they prefer could be included within the medical history or elsewhere within the program.Kindly let us know if this has or will be addressed.

Hi all, just wondering if you have a practice plan and how you pay your associates in regard to this? We are having to create a penny payment and then charge an invoice through as a penny - very confusing. Thank you :)

Am i missing a trick with zoning? for example our hygiene clinics are every 30 mins, is there an easier way of zoning this than having to create separate 30 mins zones? is there an option to set up a zone and make the slots occur every 30 mins between a set of times easily?