The month closed yesterday. The doctor wants to know what the practice produced, and the first number you give will be the one that gets repeated. Open Dental has one report for this, and it is worth knowing exactly what each column on it means before you read it out loud.
Which report shows production in Open Dental?
The report is called Production and Income. It lives under the Reports menu, in the Monthly section, even though it has a daily option.
It has four options at the top: Daily, Monthly, Annual and Provider. Each one runs the same arithmetic over a different grouping.
- Daily gives one line per procedure for a single day. Good for reconciling the day sheet.
- Monthly gives one line per day for the month. This is the one to run on the first of the month.
- Annual gives one line per month.
- Provider gives one line per provider for any date range.
Set the date range, pick the providers (or leave all ticked), choose the clinic if you have more than one, and click OK. The report opens in a preview window you can print or export.
What do the columns mean?
| Column | What it is |
|---|---|
| Production | The fee of every procedure set complete in the period, at the practice fee |
| Sched | Production from procedures attached to scheduled appointments (future, not yet complete) |
| Adjust | Positive and negative adjustments posted in the period, such as courtesy discounts |
| Writeoff | Insurance write-offs, the difference between the practice fee and the PPO allowed amount |
| Tot Prod | Production plus adjustments minus write-offs: your net production |
| Pt Income | Patient payments posted in the period |
| Ins Income | Insurance payments posted in the period |
| Total Income | Patient plus insurance income |
The number most practices mean by “production” is Tot Prod. Production on its own is gross production at the full fee, which overstates what a PPO practice can ever collect.
One trap: write-offs in Open Dental are usually posted when the claim is received, not when the procedure is completed. So a month with a big insurance backlog can show inflated net production for a few weeks, then a dip when the write-offs land.
All of this comes from procedurelog (ProcFee and ProcDate on completed procedures), adjustment and claimproc (the WriteOff column). If you ever need to check a figure, those are the three tables.
A worked example
A practice runs the Provider option for September.
| Provider | Production | Adjust | Writeoff | Tot Prod |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dr. A | $98,400 | $1,200 (minus) | $21,300 | $75,900 |
| Hygienist 1 | $31,200 | $0 | $6,100 | $25,100 |
| Hygienist 2 | $27,800 | $150 (minus) | $5,400 | $22,250 |
Dr. A worked 16 days in September at 7.5 scheduled hours a day, so 120 hours. Production per hour is net production divided by scheduled hours: $75,900 divided by 120, which is $632 an hour.
Hygienist 1 worked 18 days at 7 hours, so 126 hours. $25,100 divided by 126 is $199 an hour.
These are the two numbers to carry into the next conversation about scheduling. A hygienist at $199 an hour with an open hour on Wednesday is $199 of production that did not happen.
How often should I run it?
Run the Daily option every day as part of the end of day. Run the Monthly and Provider options on the first working day of the month, before anyone has had a chance to backdate anything. Keep the PDF. If a figure changes later, you will want to know what it said on the first.
What Calibic adds
Dashboards and Reports are LIVE for Open Dental. Calibic reads procedurelog, adjustment, claimproc and appointment read-only and shows net production by day, provider and procedure category with no report to run. Production per hour is calculated against actual scheduled hours from the schedule, not a number typed into a spreadsheet. Every tile shows the time it was last synced, and every figure can be opened to show which procedures it came from.
Calibic never writes a procedure, an adjustment or a write-off. The report you run in Open Dental stays the system of record.
If production per hour is the number you want to watch, start with the Dashboards product page. The sibling guide on the Open Dental security log explains how to see who changed a completed procedure after the fact, and the Open Dental integration page lists everything Calibic reads.