Accounts Receivable, rebuilt to be trusted

Open Financial → Accounts Receivable. There are three tabs.

Aging

The first shows aging the way it actually is.

Patient money and insurance money are in separate buckets. Credit balances are separated instead of quietly netting against debt. Canvas also identifies which aging policy the practice’s Open Dental is using so the numbers here match the numbers there.

Most importantly, every tile drills down, and the list underneath always adds back up to the number you clicked.

If a family is counted in a total, that family is in the list.

That sounds obvious. It took real work to make it consistently true, and there are now tests holding it in place.

Every tile adds up to its list. Tuesday morning, ten minutes, oldest first.

Insurance Worklist

The second tab is the insurance worklist.

It shows outstanding claims based on what is actually still owed, not simply the original face value of the claim, with the oldest outstanding money surfaced first.

Patient Balances

The third tab is the front desk’s working list.

Search the entire practice, not one page at a time. Archived guarantors keep their balances and get an archived badge instead of disappearing.

How to use it: Tuesday morning. Ten minutes. Oldest bucket first.

The point is that the list should be trustworthy enough that you can work from it without checking every number somewhere else first.

---

Outreach: the lists that dial

Every practice has lists of people who should be called.

Canvas now turns five of those lists into Call Mode: one screen, one patient at a time, a phone number ready to tap, and a suggested opening line built from that patient’s actual facts.

Nobody has to reconstruct the story while the phone is ringing.

Collections

Only families whose balance is genuinely theirs to pay appear.

If insurance still owes anything, the family stays out of the collection queue.

Calling a patient for money that is still sitting on a carrier’s desk can cost you a patient instead of collecting a payment.

When someone promises to pay, record the amount and date. Canvas watches the balance afterward and determines whether the promise was kept or broken.

Broken promises automatically return to Start Here.

The list becomes a call. The opener is already written.

Recall

Canvas finds patients who are overdue for hygiene, have nothing on the books, and are eligible to contact based on the practice’s Open Dental settings.

It then prioritizes them by how likely they are to rebook.

Instead of spending an hour moving alphabetically through a giant list, spend it on the thirty calls most likely to become appointments.

Fill a Cancellation

A hole opens in tomorrow’s schedule.

Tell Canvas the provider and appointment length.

It ranks the patients who could realistically take it:

• People who asked to come in sooner

• Diagnosed treatment that was never scheduled

• Overdue recall patients

• Patients whose distance from the office makes the opening practical

The phone numbers are directly on the cards.

A hole in the schedule, and everyone who could fill it.

Unscheduled Treatment

This is work the doctor already diagnosed that never made it onto the schedule.

Canvas puts it into a working queue with the dollar value directly on each card.

Every call is remembered

Every outreach queue shows when the patient was last called, who called them, and what happened.

That means two people should never unknowingly call the same patient in the same afternoon.

Start Here greets each team member with the five things most worth doing today and deep-links directly into the appropriate queue.

Day Summary gives the office its close-of-day activity, including calls made, without putting patient names on the printed report.

And Quick Find makes the whole thing navigable from the keyboard.

Press /, type a few letters, and jump directly to a page or queue.

Four keystrokes to anywhere.

---

The Operatory Board

This update is built around one idea:

The people in the back and the people at the front desk should not have to walk down the hallway to talk to each other.

The board itself

Open Operatories.

Every room shows who is in the chair, their provider, where they are in the visit, and how long they have been waiting.

The timer turns amber at 30 minutes and red at 45.

When someone waits too long, the appropriate workstations are told automatically.

Nobody has to watch the board for the board to work.

Summon

At the bottom of every room card is Summon.

Tap it. Pick who you need. Pick why.

Ready for exam.
Needs X-rays.
Op needs cleaning.

The right screen chimes.

The person receiving it can tap On my way or 2 minutes, and the response immediately appears back in the operatory.

One tap on Got it clears the request across every screen, with the name of the person who handled it attached.

Summon, reply, clear. Eleven seconds, no hallway.

Messages

Send a message to everyone, one room, or one person.

Messages to a person follow that person to whichever computer they are currently signed into.

Mark a message private and it arrives locked. The contents appear only when the recipient clicks it.

That matters when a patient is sitting beside the screen.

Red Alerts

For a real office emergency, type the message, select Red Alert, and confirm.

Every Canvas screen in the practice turns red, regardless of its normal mute setting, until someone taps I’m responding.

Every screen, at once, until someone answers.

This is for a medical emergency. Nothing else.

---

The patient tells you what needs attention

Small indicators beside each patient’s name tell the team what may need to happen before that patient leaves.

A crown means new patient.

A recycling mark means hygiene is overdue and there is open hygiene time today. That may be the cheapest recall appointment you ever book because the patient is already standing inside the practice.

A dollar sign flags a family balance.

There are also indicators for premedication, allergies, birthdays, and something as simple as a missing phone number worth collecting at the desk.

A green dot means clear to check out:

Nothing owed.
Nothing unscheduled.
Recall current.

Walk them out.

The team can also add its own indicators with the + button:

Nervous. In pain. Needs interpreter. Call spouse first.

Anything useful to the team, either for this visit or permanently.

Staff-added notes have a dashed ring so nobody mistakes them for facts calculated by Canvas.

Chairside knowledge, shared in two taps.

---

The visit has buttons

The workflow follows the patient:

Check In → Seat → Doctor Check → To Checkout → Dismiss

Doctor Check pages the doctor and starts a visible timer.

The wait for a hygiene exam is one of those small delays that can quietly put an entire day behind. Now it is visible.

Seat, page the doctor, done. The timer keeps everyone honest.

To Checkout

To Checkout opens the routing slip.

It carries what the front needs to finish the visit:

• Procedures completed

• Next visit

• Items to dispense

• A note for the front desk

• A to-do for another team member

• Whether the patient needs a care call

Check Care Call and that patient automatically enters the fifth Call Mode queue.

The promised follow-up is already waiting for the team, and the queue closes it as the call gets completed.

Checkout writes itself, and tomorrow’s call is already on the list.

---

The board remembers

Open Message Board and Canvas shows what happened today.

Who summoned whom. Who answered. What was acknowledged. Who handled it.

If you stepped away for an hour, this is how you catch up.

The board clears overnight.

Everything the board said today, and who answered.

The board also reads the schedule.

When an appointment cancels, Canvas can announce the opening across the office with a button that goes directly to Fill a Cancellation.

When a new appointment is booked, it can announce that too.

Both are optional and can be turned on or off in Settings.

---

Each computer knows where it sits

Open Computers and give each machine a location:

Op 2. Front Desk. Consult Room. TV.

Canvas can then route communication based on where that computer physically sits.

A summon for Op 2 can ring in Op 2, send a quiet copy to the front desk, and show nothing on the lobby TV.

Always Mask keeps patient names hidden on screens patients may be able to see, regardless of who signs in.

Unassigned computers hear everything by default, so nothing breaks while the practice is being configured.

Phones can join by opening the practice’s local Canvas address while connected to office Wi-Fi and adding it to the home screen.

On the practice network, Canvas works. Off the local network, that local connection goes quiet.

---

And now we can measure the day

Once the workflow is captured, Canvas can measure it.

Flow Analytics shows:

• Average wait to seat

• On-time starts

• Room turnover

• Hours when the office consistently runs hot

• Median provider response time after a summon

The board also carries a day pace line.

What has been completed. What is still booked. Where the day is tracking against goal.

And if a cancellation creates a gap, the team is one click away from the people most likely to fill it.

---

Make it yours

Open Settings → Flow Board.

The practice can choose which patient indicators appear, create its own quick messages, customize summon reasons and replies, choose sounds for different types of notifications, and preview them.

Changes propagate to the workstations automatically.

---

A few practical notes

Browsers may refuse to play sounds until someone has interacted with the Canvas page once that day. That is a browser security restriction.

Timers depend on arrivals and workflow events being recorded, either through Open Dental or through the corresponding Canvas workflow buttons.

Internal Canvas workflow data, such as board moves, messages, and routing slips, remains in Canvas. It is not written back into Open Dental.

And Canvas itself runs inside each dental practice’s own environment, on the practice’s own server and local network.

For a typical six-operatory office, initial workstation setup takes about 15 minutes, with most of that time spent assigning each computer to its physical location.

---

Three updates, but really one progression:

The money became trustworthy.
The lists became calls.
And the office stopped shouting down the hallway.