November 2018

Once again...reminders for November

Please mark on your calendars that we will be closed for the USA Thanksgiving holiday November 22-23.  

We will be hoping that the hurricane season will be over and the snow and ice season not begun, but should extreme weather conditions cause us to not open the office, we will be using Verizon's Digital Voice to receive Mainstreet telephone calls on our smart phones.   As long as we have power, we will be able to receive emails and to tune into our network at the office.

Remember to begin updating your 2019 holidays and non-workdays in DQB so that you will be ready to schedule cases into the new year.   If you are planning to update in any way at the start of the new year, it is best to begin in November and not wait until the end-of-year and holiday period.

Giving thanks!

In this month of Thanksgiving, we want to say thanks on behalf of everyone involved to those labs who participate in the user group program, submit new ideas, serve as sounding boards and testers and help keep the DentaLab systems ahead of the pack in offering plenty of choices and capabilities.  It has truly been a community effort that has produced outstanding success!

Looking ahead to December

The winter holidays fall nicely this year to give us four-day holidays to hopefully be relaxing with friends, family and/or favorite things .   For Christmas, we will be closed Monday, December 24 and Tuesday, December 25.  For New Year's, we will be closed Monday, December 31 and Tuesday, January 1. 

For the workdays between the two holidays, we will not be scheduling any major system reconfigurations or updates.  If you wish to have support for these, please schedule time in November or earlier in December.

To answer your questions...

Q: We need guidance on how the finance charges work in QuickBooks.  Can you help us with this?

A: Yes, here are some basic guidelines:

It is in Edit/Preferences for Finance Charges that you establish your rules.  The important ones are:

1. Annual percentage rate - be sure to multiply your monthly rate by 12.
2. Set whether you want to use the invoice date or the date due to determine the age of the invoice.  If using the date due, you can establish in the Customer Profile/Terms List the number of days or a specific date of the month such as the 28th.  
3. Grace period - this is the number of days (age) before the invoice is considered overdue.
4. Account - choose or establish a general ledger account to record the finance charges. 
   
5. It is in the Create Statements screen that you can request to assess the finance charges.
   
6. QuickBooks first determines whether each invoice is overdue.  Then if it is,  it applies the annual rate to the specific number of days the invoice is overdue.
   

Note that in the Create Statements screen, you can request to Assess Finance Charges to test your settings but then Unmark All to cancel if not correct.  You can also create a specific invoice to charge a customer finance or late charges. 

It is recommended that you include text on your invoices to make clear your terms to charge finance or late charges.

Q: Thanks to your tech support, we have discovered that we can automatically create a shipping label for each invoice.  Are there other features to do things automatically?

A: Yes, there are many of these, designed to give you accuracy and save time.   You can review the sections in the Options menu to see the choices.   If you want to choose an automatic, simply check the option on.  Other choices that have proven very successful are automatic scheduling of cases and the assignment of price levels for automatic special pricing when invoicing.  Also check out the Automatic Backup Protocol in the topic below.  

Q: What is the best way to handle group practices that request one monthly statement for all doctors in the group?

A: QuickBooks has had an ideal way for this.   You can set up a customer record for the main or central billing address.  Then under this, you can set up a job for each doctor in the group.   If appropriate, each doctor have their own shipping address. 

Then in DQB for Options/Synchronization, you specify that both customers and jobs are to be synchronized.  Each customer and job is given its own customer record in DQB, which means you can also treat each one as a separate entity for preferences, case plans, communications and alerts.  If you have committed to special pricing for the group, you can create a price level, name it appropriately, and assign it to all the doctors in the group.  For production and sales reporting, you can in Basic Lists, create a customer group to provide both detailed and summary analysis.

Then back to QuickBooks, you can create a statement for the billing customer and specify that the transactions for each job or individual doctor will be listed one by one with a clear identity in the statement.

Definitely worth considering...the Advanced Backup Protocol

Backing up your DentaLab for QuickBooks (DQB) SQL database is a very important component in the security and control of your business.  We are pleased to announce major advances in backup technology that will make it both easier and more secure for you. You will….

• Remain in control of your vital information
• Be able to setup and schedule more automatics
• Choose local, off-site and/or online storage
• Gain advances in technology for verification, compression, speed
• Have options for encryption, additional checks, multiple backups
• Have expert support for setups and specifications
• Know that you can monitor the continued success of your backups
• Be able to request technical support for restoration when needed  

The fee for licensing, coordination and setting up this new protocol will be $200 USD.  If changes to the specifications and schedules are desired after the initial setup or if a restoration is needed, those who have a DQB service agreement may use their non-billable time for this. Those who do not have an up-to-date agreement can purchase a new setup or restoration session.

For further details, you can visit our website www.mainstreetsystem.net.  Go to Products and then Advanced Automatic Backups.

The most popular offerings of 2018

From your feedback and requests, here are the most popular new developments for your software and support this past year:

• Advanced Backup Protocol as described above
• Case Entry tabs highlighted to show activity
• Customer Preferences with a general category applicable to all work centers and items, for the work ticket and tablet workflow app 
  
• DentalRx Direct web portal service for the dental offices is now included in service agreements
• Review of the past five years of DQB releases available as a downloadable PDF document
• Sequenced Batch Processing adding improved organization, speed and workflow to the billing process
  
• SQL Server 2017 update for major advances in database speed, security and performance

If you have been rolling along at the same level for a number of years, it is a good idea to take a few minutes to see how software advances can help you and help your business.  Give us a call if we can be of help.

If you wish to be removed, reply to this email with the subject "unsubscribe".