There's nothing that offices officially have to do to close out a month in Open Dental. All financials roll over when the calendar changes, and so does Open Dental. There is also no close out process at the New Year.

Below are some tasks offices may wish to do at the end of each month, but they are not necessary.

The following reports can be run anytime, but they should be run at least once a month:

• Aging of Accounts Receivable (A/R) Report (although, this can be run as of any date)
• Production and Income Reports

The following reports should be run frequently (at minimum once a month) to ensure claims are getting created, sent, and paid. These reports are key to keeping insurance revenue coming in.

• Claims Not Sent Report: List of claims that were generated in Open Dental, but not submitted to insurance.
• Outstanding Insurance Claims Report: Claims that have been submitted to insurance, but have not been paid.
• Procedures Not Billed to Insurance Report: Procedures that have been completed, but no claim has been created for.

Once reports have been run for a month (or another period), setting a global lock date will prevent users from editing previous entries (e.g., procedures, patient payments, insurance payments, and adjustments) or backdating new items. See Security Lock Dates for additional information and instructions for enabling global lock dates.

The Billing List should be run at least once a month to generate statements for patients with outstanding balances.

Before running the Billing List, offices may want to run the Billing/Finance Charges Tool to post any billing or finance charges to accounts prior to generating statements. The Billing/Finance Charge Tool should be run once a month.

The Billing List is designed to default to exclude patients who have been billed within the last month (See Billing Include anyone not billed since). If the default date is not changed, offices can run the Billing List multiple times in the same month (e.g., daily) and the same patient will not get multiple statements.

The Recall List should also be run at least once a month.

The Recall List is designed to allow offices to prevent patients from receiving multiple reminders in a short period of time. If a patient has just received a reminder, they can be excluded from the Recall List by default. This allows staff to run the recall list multiple times a month (e.g., daily) without sending multiple reminders to the same patient. See Setup Recall Also show in list if # of days since settings for additional information.