Balance transfer between patients' accounts

Hi ​@Ola 👋,

Thanks for sharing I believe this has been raised in the past by another customer.

The usual workaround is to delete the payment from the incorrect patient account and re-record it against the correct one. (unless the patients are part of the same family and you can set up a family account which lets you manage balances across multiple family members and apply payments to different family members' invoices in a single workflow)

That said, it would be really useful to understand where this falls short for you, for example, does this happen after reconciliation, or in situations where deleting and re-adding isn’t practical? If you can share a bit more context, I’m happy to log this with the product team with the right detail. 😊

Deleting and re-adding a payment isn’t really a practical solution, except perhaps in very limited cases where the mistake is spotted on the same day and before any reconciliation has happened. In most real-life situations, these errors are picked up later, once payments have already been settled or included in reports.

At that point, deleting historic payments causes more problems than it solves, particularly from an audit and governance perspective, and it increases the risk of discrepancies between Dentally and card or cash totals. What’s really needed is a proper way to transfer a payment or balance between patient accounts while keeping a clear audit trail of what was moved, by whom, and when.

This was possible in EXACT, so not having it in Dentally feels like a step backwards in terms of financial controls. In a busy reception environment, occasional errors are inevitable, and the system should support correcting them cleanly and safely rather than relying on deleting valid financial records.

Thanks for sharing additional details ​@Ola! That makes complete sense.

I’m going to share this with the product team together with our previous report, including the comparison with EXACT and the need for a controlled way to move payments or balances between patients while keeping a clear audit trail of what changed, when, and by who.

I can’t promise timelines, but rest assured this will be captured with the right context. Really appreciate you taking the time to spell out the real-world impact, it helps a lot. I’ll keep this thread updated. In the mean time, if any other practice feels the same way, feel free to add a comment below so we can surface this request in the homepage.