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August 2011

DentaLab NewsAugust 2011
from Mainstreet Systems & Software

FAQ  DentaLab News

 

Wow...We Did It!

In our July newsletter, we set a list of goals to accomplish for DentaLab for QuickBooks for the summer season.  To begin this August newsletter to you, we took a look at the list midway through the summer and surprised ourselves at how much has already been completed or is well underway.  

We are happy to see that some of you also accomplished quite a bit this summer and on behalf of everyone in the user group, we thank those who sent in suggestions for making DQB even more capable.

Labor Day here in the USA is Monday, September 5.   Although this is not the official end of summer, the cooler days, the start of school sessions...all have us getting in gear for the beautiful fall season.  Our offices will be closed on Labor Day, but we will check voicemail and email for those in other countries. 

Group Training this Fall

This week we received our first request for DQB group training in September and would like to know how many others are interested in coming to Pennsylvania for this.   We typically schedule on a Monday to provide for traveling here over the weekend.  We can schedule one in September and another in October if there is sufficient interest.

Autumn with its balmy Indian summer days and colorfull foliage is typically a great time to travel here.   Please let us know within the next two weeks if you are interested and which date(s) are good for you.   The fee for the day of training is $150 per person for those with a service agreement; otherwise $220 per person.  

 

    Easy, versatile software for the modern dental laboratory.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q:  Is there a limit to the number of transactions QuickBooks can handle ?

A:  There is a limit, but it is over 2 billion transactions per company file.   There are recommended limits, however, involved with each version of QuickBooks for the various tables such as customers, items, employees, vendors.   These typically are in the range of 10,000 to 15,000 for the Pro and Premier versions but much higher for Enterprise.  This is because the database technology for Pro/Premier is Intuit's proprietary format while Enterprise uses SQL-based technology.  If you would like to view your counts, you can press F2 on your keyboard to get an overview of your statistics.

If your processing starts to slow down significantly with Pro or Premier, it would be best to check your counts, then call to determine whether to compress/archive your transactions, to start a new company file, to move up to Enterprise and/or upgrade your computer equipment.  

On a side note, DQB uses SQL-based technology, so you would most likely run out of space on your disk before you would run into the very high limitations on the database.

Q:  When we installed the new release of DQB, we seemed to have lost our custom work ticket.  Was it overwritten?

A:  When we develop a custom format for a work ticket or another form or report, we send instructions to install it in your Custom Reports folder so that it will not be overwritten by future standard releases.  But we find that many times, labs do not pay attention to the instructions and place their custom version in the standard Reports folder...so yes, if there, it would be overwritten.   We do, however, keep a copy of your customizations here in a folder with your lab name so that we can have you reinstall it.

      With the same look and feel of QuickBooks.

Emailing Customer Statements

For a number of years now, QuickBooks has offered the capability of emailing various forms to customers and vendors, but this was a capability largely ignored by most of the dental labs using QuickBooks.   We actually have had better luck with the Email Notifications supplement that is offered in conjunction with DQB and provides emailed reports to the dental offices on cases received and recently shipped cases.

Now this summer, there were several labs that have decided to start sending out their monthly statements to customers via email.   As part of their service agreements, we have coached them on how to set up this feature and have also written a guide for those who want to consider doing this.   If you have not acquired email addresses for your customers, this must be the first step.    We recommend that you take the time to communicate this new method so that your customers have time to adapt to the change.   It might be good to send both printed and emailed statements for a few months or to begin with mid-month statement/reminders.  

For most cases, a printed invoice is sent along with the completed work to the dental office.  If, however, a customer requests an extra copy of past invoices, having the email capability can save a number of steps involved in printing, labeling, and mailing. 

Once you have all of this setup and in motion, it becomes much easier to implement in other parts of the system such as purchase orders and vendors.  If you would like a copy of the email guide we have written, please send an email or give us a call. 

On Digital Photography in the Lab....Definitely Worth Reading

The Dental Lab Products Report this month featured the second part of an excellent article "Picture Yourself Communicating Better" by Tom Zaleske of Matrix Dental Laboratory who also serves as Benchtop Editor for DLPR.  This focuses on using digital photography to track cases in the lab and provide technicians with a higher level of communication for removable and full-mouth reconstruction.  

In addition to scanning prescriptions and other case documents, the Image Scanning supplement to DQB can be used to store other digital images and documents and have these readily available for viewing from the Case Entry screen. To encourage more of you to implement this, we have been offering reduced rates this summer for Image Scanning that will remain valid until August 31, 2011.   For more details, see our July newsletter and/or give us a call.

This newsletter has been developed and sent to you using the Spreading the News supplement to DQB.

 

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Customization is available for all products.

Contact us at 1-800-257-4535 or www.mainstreet-systems.com.

"I hope the suggestions are helpful. I know they are things that would definitely make my experience with an already great product an even better one! Keep up the good work and I look forward to future improvements!"

Katherine Hopkins
Crown Dental Laboratory
Michigan, USA


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