Record a visit and take a payment

This is the loop your clinic runs all day, and the one worth practising once before you rely on it with a patient in the chair.

Notes and money are kept apart on purpose

A progress note records what you did and what you plan. A payment records money arriving. They’re linked, but they’re not the same act, and they’re often not done by the same person or at the same moment — the dentist writes the note, the front desk takes the payment twenty minutes later.

Keeping them separate is what lets both be true without either waiting on the other.

Recording the visit

1. Open the patient.
2. Add a visit, dated when the treatment actually happened — not when you’re typing it.
3. Add the procedures you did. Each pulls its fee from your price list, and you can change the fee on the visit for a discount or a package rate.
4. Write the note. If there’s a next visit, its date can book the follow-up appointment without you retyping anything.

Completing a procedure updates the dental chart. You don’t chart it separately.

Taking the payment

1. Record a payment against the patient.
2. Choose which account it lands in — the drawer, GCash, the bank.
3. Enter the amount. It doesn’t have to be the full balance. Part-payments and installments are normal, and the ledger simply carries the remainder.

A balance you can always trace

The balance you see is added up from the entries every time you look, rather than kept as a number someone has to correct. That means it can’t drift out of step with the payments behind it — if the balance says ₱1,250, there are entries that add up to ₱1,250, and you can open them.

An overpayment becomes patient credit rather than an error. It sits on the record and comes off the next visit.

Fixing a mistake

You void an entry rather than delete it, and the app always asks why — a void with no reason isn’t a thing you can record. Voiding can’t be undone from the ledger, so it’s worth being sure.

What happens next is the part worth understanding. The entry comes off the ledger — the patient’s balance goes back up, and the running total stops counting it, which is what you wanted. But it is not gone. It’s kept, and it surfaces in Reports → Adjustments: every payment voided, lowered, or moved between accounts, with who did it, when, and the reason they gave.

That’s the difference between a clinic’s books and a notebook. The ledger stays clean enough to read, and the correction still leaves a mark somebody can find — which is exactly what you’d want if it were your money.

Next: what you can see about the money.