March 2012

The Personal Touch

We have often taken note that one of the key ingredients in building and maintaining a successful dental laboratory businesss is placing a priority on keeping a personal touch with your customers.  This can be accomplished in a variety of ways, for some it is in their telephone conversations, their followups on issues, their attention to detail.  For some labs, this also includes seminars and other get-togethers where the lab managers and staff get to meet and talk with their dental customers.  In some circumstances, an extra written note or email adds to the personal touch.

We too place a high priority on providing a personal touch.   Two of the ways we have accomplished this in recent months have been:

1) We have been offering to do annual reviews working with a combination of logmein for remote access to the lab's computer, telephone conversations, addressing specific issues and providing extra guidance and education on how to accomplish tasks more easily and efficiently.

2) We have been encouraging webinars for both prospective and existing customers in which they take a look at our training computer from their lab computer,  again accompanied by telephone conversations and addressing specific issues, as well as providing guidance and education.

Both of these typically take place in the time span of one to two hours, often saving labs many hours that would be involved if they were trying to do this on their own or were doing things inefficiently.  

We encourage all of you to take advantage of these offerings whenever you feel the need.  Call and we will schedule a time for you.

Upcoming in DQB 1.30 - Graphic Reports

We are in the final stage of testing DQB 1.30 scheduled for release in April.  One of the new features will be graphic reports to provide overviews and trends.  We are viewing this as a starter set and will be interested to hear if you have more suggestions on graphic reports you would like to see in the system.

Results of the  Pop Quiz!

Here was the quiz:  What would you guess is the most frequent beginning to dental lab names?

1) A word beginning with "Dent"

2) An adjective conveying a positive quality such as "superior"  or "reliable"

3) A family name or set of initials

The answer was 2). We were somewhat surprised that no one submitted the correct answer, not even the ones whose lab name fits this description.  

Frequently Asked Questions

Q:  As our case load has grown, we would like to speed up invoicing.   Do you have any ideas for us?

A:  Yes, we have found a variety of ways to help speed the invoicing process, both for the creation of the invoice record and for the synchronization from DQB to QuickBooks.   Some of the issues we address when helping labs with this are 1) whether the lab is doing a lot of editing for the transformation of the case record to the invoice record 2) how the lab is handling discounting 3) whether the implementation of lab notes can help with invoice messages 4) the transfer of the case fields such as patient, shade, dates, etc. to QuickBooks 5) whether the lab has updated their system to take advantage of the new remote connector used for synchronization.

See the Remote Connector topic below.  Please contact us if you would like some help on this issue.

Q:  We have been comparing our product group report to our sales analysis report for the same date span, but they do not match.  Can you tell us why?

A:  Yes, this is because they are based on different dates.   The product group report is based on scheduled dates for case items and is designed to reflect production work in progress.   The sales analysis reports are based on invoice dates for billed case items. 

Another set of reports where confusion on dates sometimes arises are those involving shipping.   The Cases to be Shipped report is based on the Ship Date that appears at the top of the case entry screens.   The Cases Shipped report is based on the actual date a case is shipped if this is recorded in the QC and Ship screen.

Custom Fields, Custom Columns

We have found in our support calls and annual reviews that some labs are not aware of the custom fields and custom columns that are available in DentaLab for QuickBooks.  For three types of records--customers, items and cases--you can add up to 10 custom fields, each with your own assigned field name and field contents.  You can set these up in Options or in Basic Lists. 

Then, when you are adding or updating a customer, item or case, you can enter the specific field contents.  The custom fields for items are available for entry when entering case items, with two of the popular choices being Shade and Teeth when you want to specify these by item rather than for the case. 

In conjunction with this, you can use the Customize Columns option in the actions menu for the Case List and the Customer List or right-click on the column headers to designate which of these custom fields (as well as other fields) you wish to show in your grid.  You can then left-click on the column headings for the grid to sort forward or backward.

Excellent Results with the New Remote Connector

When we were performing testing on the new remote connector developed in-house to synchronize between DQB and QuickBooks, the statistics showed an improvement of 350 to 400% increase in speed, i.e. it was 3.5 to 4 times faster than the IBiz connector we had been using.  The new connector also provides for synchronization of more of the QuickBooks fields than the set provided by IBiz.

We have been asking the high-volume dental labs that have installed this to let us know the results and we are pleased to report that in actual production, the speeds have increased significantly, sometimes to the level of about 30 times faster.  This is particularly useful when you are processing a substantial volume of invoices. 

We urge those who have not updated their systems recently to do so.   If you are a bit hesitant to do this yourself, you can request a logmein session with our tech support personnel to do this for you.  

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