The end of day sheet says $3,180 in patient payments. The deposit says $2,760. Somewhere in Dentrix a payment was changed or removed after the sheet was printed, and the audit trail is where you look. It will tell you some of what happened. It will not tell you everything.
Where is the audit trail in Dentrix?
Open the Office Manager. On the Reports menu, choose Audit Trail Reports. A dialog asks for the date range, the user or users, and the categories of change to include.
The report goes to the Batch Processor like every other Dentrix report. Preview it there. For a week on a busy office it runs to many pages, so set a narrow date range and one category at a time.
Dentrix also keeps a separate history for appointments. In the Appointment Book, the appointment’s history shows every move, break and edit with a date and time. That history is stored in a table called appthist, and it is the most complete change record Dentrix has.
What does the Dentrix audit trail record?
The Audit Trail Reports can show changes to ledger entries (payments, adjustments, procedures edited or deleted after posting), appointment changes, patient information changes and some setup changes. Each entry has a date, a time, the patient, a description of the change and, where Dentrix captured it, the user who was logged in.
That last clause matters. Dentrix attributes a change to a user only where the program recorded one. If passwords are not enabled, or everyone shares one login, the report shows the same name or no name on every line.
What does it miss?
Here is the honest part. When our team verified the Dentrix database over read-only SQL (a G-series install, September 2026), we found no general audit table. The appointment history table is there with a user column. The row-level payment and adjustment views are there too, but they carry no user column and no change timestamp. A payment can be seen to exist, and later seen to be gone, by comparing two snapshots. Who removed it, and at exactly what time, is not in the data.
So three things are hard to get from Dentrix over SQL.
- Who deleted or edited a payment or adjustment.
- When, to the minute, a ledger change happened, as opposed to the day.
- A before and after for an edited amount, unless the report captured it.
The Audit Trail Reports inside Dentrix may show more than SQL exposes, because the program writes its own report data. That is why you should run them. But build your controls assuming the attribution can be thin.
How do I actually use it?
Pick a short window and one question.
- Run Audit Trail Reports for last week, ledger changes only.
- Print the Day Sheet for each day in the same week (Office Manager, Reports, Management, Day Sheet).
- Read the audit entries against the day sheet. Every deleted or edited payment should match a correction you can explain: a wrong patient, a wrong amount re-entered within minutes, a bounced check.
A worked example. The week shows 14 ledger changes. 11 are procedure edits the same day they were posted (a tooth number fixed, a code swapped). 2 are payments deleted and re-entered within a few minutes for the same amount. 1 is a $420 check payment deleted on Thursday with nothing re-entered. The deposit for Thursday is $420 short. That is the entry to ask about, with the patient name and the date in hand.
Do this every week, on the same day, and write down that you did it.
What Calibic adds
Protect is LIVE for Dentrix, with its limits stated. Calibic reads appthist, the payment and adjustment views, procedures and patient fields over read-only SQL every few minutes and keeps its own time-stamped snapshots. A payment that was there at 2:00 PM and gone at 2:14 PM becomes an alert with both values kept, even though Dentrix did not record who removed it. Appointment changes do carry a user, and those alerts name the person.
Calibic never selects the staff password column that Dentrix exposes, and it never writes to Dentrix. Where Dentrix cannot say who did something, Calibic says so rather than guessing.
See how the evidence is kept on the Protect product page. The sibling guide on the Open Dental security log shows what a complete audit log looks like for comparison, and the Dentrix integration page lists what Calibic reads and the checks that cannot run on Dentrix.