How to Manage Treatments in DentalManager

A treatment plan is where dental revenue is decided and then, quietly, lost. The diagnosis happens in the chair, the patient agrees verbally on the way out, and three weeks later nobody can say which of the forty recommendations from last month are still sitting untreated — because they were written on a sheet, quoted from memory and never linked to anything.

This guide covers how to manage treatments in DentalManager: what a treatment record contains, how to create one correctly in under a minute, how status and installments turn a list of recommendations into a follow-up list, and who is allowed to change what. For the other half of the financial picture — registering payments, working the overdue list and the four numbers to check weekly — see how to track payments in DentalManager. If the patient file itself is new to you, start with how to manage patient records in DentalManager; if there is no patient yet, our guide on how to create a patient in DentalManager covers registration first.

1. What a Treatment Record Contains

Every treatment is a per-procedure record. It is not a list of things to do and not a running total — it is one clinical act with its own value, its own payment history and its own state.

The design principle behind this structure is simple: the clinical and the financial must not be allowed to drift apart. If the value lives in one place and the payments in another, one of them is eventually wrong. For the wider argument on why this matters, see dental software with treatment management and how dental billing software works.

2. How to Create a Treatment

Everything happens in the browser, on the patient file. There is no separate module to open and no import step.

Step 1 — Open the patient

Search by surname, mobile number or date of birth and open the file. A treatment can only exist attached to a patient, which is the point: the record has one home.

Step 2 — Start the treatment

In the treatments area of the file, start a new treatment and set the date and the teeth involved. Selecting the teeth here is what marks them on the odontogram, so the clinical chart and the invoice never disagree about what was treated.

Step 3 — Write the title and description

The title should be readable by someone who was not in the room — the procedure name, not an abbreviation only the practice uses. The description carries the detail: what was done, materials, anything the next dentist needs to know before touching the same tooth.

Step 4 — Enter the value and the payment terms

Type the total value. If the patient is paying in installments, switch the treatment to financed and record the first payment. The amount paid and the balance to pay then follow from those two numbers rather than from a separate calculation you did in your head.

Step 5 — Set the status and save

An unpaid treatment is PENDENTE. Once the balance reaches zero, it becomes OK. If it passes the agreed date without being settled, it is ATRASADO. Saving closes the entry; there is no separate submit step.

3. Session, Odontogram and Treatment: When to Use Which

These three objects are often confused, and mixing them up is the most common data-quality problem in dental software. They answer different questions.

The practical rule: a session is dated and descriptive, a treatment is valued and billable. If an entry has no value and no balance, it is a session. If it has a value and a balance, it is a treatment. Writing a treatment as a session leaves the money out of the system; writing a session as a treatment puts a price on something that was never billed.

Sessions and payments also carry their author. In a clinic with several dentists treating the same patient, only the professional who created the entry can edit or delete it — a data-security rule that protects one dentist's clinical notes from another's correction.

4. Status: How Treatments Become a Follow-Up List

Three statuses, and each one implies a different action. This is the field that makes a treatment list useful rather than decorative.

Because the list ranks overdue above pending, the practice is never choosing between two balances on a bad day. The oldest money comes first by default. This is the mechanism behind dental software with payment tracking, and it is what makes what billing software should include a checklist question rather than a preference.

5. Recording Payments and Installment Plans

Most treatment value in a general practice arrives as a deposit followed by a balance, occasionally spread over months. DentalManager stores that on the treatment itself.

1. Open the treatment from the patient file.
2. Mark it as financed if it is being paid over time rather than in one go.
3. Register each payment as it arrives — deposits and instalments alike — against that specific treatment.
4. Let the balance recompute. Amount paid accumulates and the balance to pay falls; there is no second place to update.
5. Watch the status. Reaching zero moves the treatment to OK; missing the agreed date moves it to ATRASADO.

Two rules keep this clean. First, never adjust a balance by hand to make it disappear — register the payment or record the reason, because a silent correction is how a real debt gets lost. Second, record the deposit on the day it is taken, not when the patient says they will pay. A treatment with no payment registered is indistinguishable from a treatment nobody has paid, and you cannot chase what you cannot see.

6. Who Can Manage Treatments

Treatments and payments are the most sensitive entries in the system, so DentalManager restricts them deliberately.

This split is worth understanding rather than fighting. The front desk can see exactly what a patient owes — which is what makes a confident conversation at checkout possible — without being able to alter a clinical entry or delete a payment. And where several dentists treat the same patient, each professional edits and deletes the sessions and payments they created, and nobody else's. That is a data-security rule, not a limitation.

7. Following Up Treatments That Were Presented but Not Accepted

A treatment that was never entered cannot be followed up. That single fact explains most of the leak in most practices, so it comes before any sales technique.

• Enter what you recommended, not only what you performed. The whole value of the list is the difference between those two columns.
• Filter by status monthly. Anything sitting in PENDENTE for weeks is a conversation you are not having.
• Separate the financial blocker from the doubt. In a large patient survey run with the Boston Consulting Group, 54% of patients did not follow through on treatments they were seriously considering, and 26% said it was a combination of insufficient knowledge and anxiety — not price alone. Those need different answers.
• Offer installments rather than a discount. A financed treatment keeps the full value and removes the single most common reason for delay.
• Book the next appointment before the patient leaves. A patient who says yes and cannot get a slot has expressed intent, not acceptance.

Benchmarks are useful here only as a prompt. Recent industry surveys place average case acceptance around 45% with the top-performing group near 75%, and average case completion near 42%. Whatever your number is, the treatment list is where you find out whether it is a communication problem or an administrative one — and the two have completely different fixes. Dental recall systems cover the other half of the job: bringing patients back in at all.

8. Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Quick Reference: Managing Treatments the Right Way

Frequently Asked Questions: Managing Treatments in DentalManager