January 2024

If you experience a January lull

For many businesses there is a post-holiday lull in January.   If you experience this, we recommend you take the time to review your computer information system and consider whether any adjustments are needed, whether any advances in technology or new convenience features would be of benefit to you, your staff, and your business.   For DentalRx, DQB and its supplements, you can review our newsletters and the release documents to see what is new, what has changed.  

Within the systems, you can review the Options and Settings to see if any of the automatic features would save time, assure things get done, and/or provide enhancements for your customer service.  You can easily browse through your customers and your items to see if there should be any changes or additions.  For some, it may be appropriate to mark the record as inactive.  Another list worth reviewing would be your standard procedures toward the goals of greater efficiency and smooth workflow.   Consider also some of the inexpensive features and supplements that have proven to be very worthwhile for many labs such as:

• Advanced Backup Protocol for automatic backups with your choice of encryption levels, locations and schedules 
  
• DQB Images/Digital Files supplement to provide for recording digital files and documents as part of the case record, easily6 finding and accessing these whenever needed, adding them to your backups
  
• DQBT Tablet Workflow App to provide convenient  information and tracking for your technicians and their managers
• Lab Lookup to provide a web portal to your customers to lookup the status and history of their cases, send messages to you  
• VPN Virtual Private Network to provide private secured internet transactions
  

Let us know if you have questions or need guidance for anything that comes up in your review.

Some important reminders

If you would like to have technical support, be sure to leave a voicemail and/or an email describing your issue and the best way(s) to reach you.   Should ice and snow or flooded roads prevent us from coming to the office, we will be available via Verizon Digital Voice and our sales and support emails.   Note that sending an error message to Mainstreet will record the technical details in our weblog to help us diagnose the issue but you must also call or email if you wish to request technical support.  

We continue to receive a lot of calls that are meant for Stanley products.   Their 800 number is 251-4535, ours is 257-4535 but their website and advertisements have a notch on the 1 that their customers mistake for a 7 and many of their calls come to us.  If we do not pick up, be sure to leave a voicemail requesting a callback.

Remembering what is unique for each of your customers

This is a very important part of your customer service. To help you remember what is unique for each of your customers, DQB provides a number of ways you can record these.  Here are some of them: 

1. Basic Lists-Customers:  If there is a specific field already available in Basic Lists-Customers enter the information in it.  Some examples would be when their office is closed, their contact preferences, and their standard days to ship.   If it is basic demographic profile information such as name, address, telephone, email, contact person, enter this first in QuickBooks and it will be synchronized for use in both QB and DQB. 
2. Customer Preferences:  If your customer has standing instructions to guide the production of their cases, store this in Preferences.   With these, you have a choice of general preferences, preferences by work center and preferences by item.  These will be available during case entry and design, on the work tickets and in the tablet workflow app.  
3. Customer Alerts and Case Communications:   Alerts can be shown during case entry and/or invoicing and/or pickup requests to capture the attention of the entry person.  Typically they should be short and to the point.  You can set the expiration date for each alert.  Also keep in mind that in the Case Communication tab of Case Entry, you can also enter an alert specific to the case.
4. Customer Center:  In the standard DQB version, the Customer Center gathers together many of options for each customer that can guide your responses to their individual requests and needs.  You can view histories for their cases, emails and communications, a variety of reports, their profiles.   
   

To answer your questions....

Q:  I am sure one of our good customers sent in two payments this month but they are not showing up in their QuickBooks statement.  What could cause this? 

A:  Almost every month we receive requests along this same line, sometimes involving sales, sometimes payments.   We recommend that you first go to the Customer Center record for the customer, check their transaction list to to make sure the transaction has been recorded and applied.  Next make sure the transaction is dated in the same date range as your statements.

If it is not there, you can next go to Reports for the transaction details and here you can use the filters, first by date range to see if the transaction may have been posted to the wrong customer.   You can compare the payment transaction list to your bank deposit list.    You can also try the report for Deleted Transactions to see if it may have been accidentally deleted and needs to be reactivated.  

If you find any errors, correct the record and re-run the statement.  If it cannot be found, simply enter the information and re-run the statement.  

Q:  When search in the Case List, we sometimes encounter an error that says there was a network timeout.  What could cause this? 

A: This means that the search was not completed in the maximum time allowed on your network to receive a response to a request.   The first remedy you can try is to limit the search by one or more of the criteria at the bottom of the Case List.  It is typically worthwhile to try limiting to one of the date ranges on the left.  Other criteria might be one of the statuses such as Open/In Lab or if you know both the doctor and the patient name. 

If this does not resolve the issue, we recommend you consult with your local hardware/network service to review your network settings and performance and determine whether improvements are needed. 

You can click the Send to Mainstreet button when you wish to also call or email a request for our support. Doing this sends a message to our weblog with the technical details such as what actions were taking place and whether the timeout was detected by the SQL database or by your network. 

Taxation in QuickBooks desktop vs online

In the desktop versions of QuickBooks such as Pro, Premier and Enterprise, calculating and adding taxation to the QB invoice occurs if the tax indicators in both the customer and item records have been set on.  This has changed in the online versions.   Taxation will be based on the ship-to address and you must have the taxing authorities, rates and chart of accounts set up for each possibility.   It is also important that you enter a correct ship-to address for each customer. 

It is important to understand that taxes are handled in QuickBooks, not in DQB.  We will, however, be adding some enhancements in DQB to show both the bill-to and ship-to addresses in critical spots so that it is clear to the user should these two addresses differ.

The easiest way to provide status reports to those not in the lab

For those in management who are travelling or out of the lab for other reasons or if you have personnel mostly working away from the lab, here is one simple solution to provide vital information to them.  This is quick and easy and does not require remembering technical details for access.  

Because there are potentially many situations involving cases, customers, production and sales, we think one of the best ways to assure that they receive the timely information is to set up for internal notifications via email   Here are some of the recommended steps: 

• Dedicate an email address to these that does not include a lot of advertisements or personal communications.   
• If you have not done so already, request a license for the DQB Notifications supplement.   
• In DQB Notifications, set up each dedicated email to receive internal reports on the schedule(s) you choose.  
• Select the DQB reports you wish to have them receive via email.  If desired, you can request customization of these or new reports. 
• In addition to their computer(s), they can also set up their mobile device(s) such as a smartphone or tablet to view these email notifications anytime anywhere.
  

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