setting up reports

[bonbon123]

We are looking into making the leap from PracticeWorks to Open Dental, but we are worried about the reporting features. I have downloaded the trial, which I, personally, am having a little trouble negotiating, but haven't been able to play with reporting. How difficult are reports to generate (end of day, end of month, AR, etc)? Any helpful hints for a newbie?

[jordansparks]

Here are the reports:
http://www.opendental.com/manual/reports.html
It's very straightforward to generate them one at a time. What you might be missing is the automation that you are used to. You can't specify a list of reports ahead of time and expect them all to come out of the printer with a single click. We haven't caught up to PW in that area yet.

[Smilesbypayet]

Jordan, is that something on the list? It "seems" like it shouldn't be too hard.

[jordansparks]

Sure, it's on the list, along with the other 2000 requests that aren't too hard either. But this one is a favorite of mine, and I have a feeling it will float to the top soon. Reporting frameworks are notoriously complex. We have about 6 different reporting frameworks currently in use, and we seem to add another one about once a year. No, the users are not generally aware of this. Users probably only notice two frameworks: the built-in reports and the queries. But my point is that we are constantly making major changes to reporting, and at some point, batched reports are bound to be included.

[JDs]

PW has an amazing feature that gives the user the ability to create custom reports that generates a spreadsheet on demand. It's quite powerful and has allowed us to slice and dice the database and extract lots of useful information organized as we see fit. I can appreciate why a PW user would be asking about reports. Unfortunately, being a former programmer myself, I can also appreciate the world of product development in which you have multiple requests that need to be juggled with priorities. Best of luck!

[jordansparks]

What do you mean, "generate a spreadsheet on demand"? Is this a spreadsheet running inside PW or is it an Excel spreadsheet? If it's running inside PW, what makes it different from a table/grid? Did you really mean "spreadsheet", or was that your word for a read-only table/grid?

[bonbon123]

Thanks for the tip, Jordan. We are still playing around with the program. The doctor is out next week, so we are going to get into it a little more. And thanks, too, to everyone for the quick responses!

[sbgcd]

Jordan,
We are also evaluating the product and one feature in report are we are missing is DaySheet - which gives you overall idea of given days' charges (production / write off / insurance write off ) + insurance payments + daily deposits... Now in this tool we have multiple reports to look though it... Is there anywhere I can find daysheet kind of feature in OpenDental? Please advise.. Thank you.

[Hersheydmd]

Jordan,
We are also evaluating the product and one feature in report are we are missing is DaySheet - which gives you overall idea of given days' charges (production / write off / insurance write off ) + insurance payments + daily deposits... Now in this tool we have multiple reports to look though it... Is there anywhere I can find daysheet kind of feature in OpenDental? Please advise.. Thank you.

Doesn't the PRODUCTION AND INCOME - TODAY report give you what you want? What is missing from it?