automatic discounts

[babysilvertooth]

I cant' find in the user manual: senior citizen, I want to automatically attach 5% discount, so that when TP or walkout, the adjustment is automatic.

Thanks

[jordansparks]

Unfortunately, that's still a feature request.

[atd]

Here's a workaround that we use in our office for automatic discounts. We have 4 different discounts we give based on patient income, so we really needed a good way to automate this.

1) Add a fee schedule at the 5% reduced rate. This is easy to do with the fee schedule tools in Open Dental.
2) Setup an insurance plan as follows
- Name it Senior Discount, or whatever you like.
- PPO Percentage type
- Fee Schedule (choose your 5% discounted schedule)
- Set all your benefit percentages to 0%.
3) Create the claim and then immediately post a zero payment so the discount is calculated and the claim doesn't end up in your list to send.

This will automatically calculate writeoffs on treatment plans as well. The only downside is that it looks like the patient has insurance when they don't. To help with that we added a custom patient field where we can specify with an abbreviation (we use AP for "Affordable Plan") and have it show as a custom field on the appointment screen.