How to export claims data from Dentrix

What exporting claims data from Dentrix means

Exporting claims data from Dentrix means getting the insurance claims list (dates, carriers, amounts and status notes) into a file another tool can read. Billers need it to work aged claims in a spreadsheet, report to an office owner or move to new software.

This guide covers three Dentrix products, and the steps differ for each:

• Dentrix G-series is the desktop product. Its menus start in the Office Manager.
• Dentrix Ascend is the cloud product, with reports under Power Reporting.
• Dentrix Enterprise is the product for DSOs, with its own DXOne Reports menu.

Check which one the office runs before you start. Each step below follows, and links to, Henry Schein's own Dentrix Help pages.

How to export the Dentrix Insurance Aging Report (G-series)

The Insurance Aging Report is the report to export for claim follow-up in Dentrix G-series. It lists open claims with the date the claim was sent, the date a tracer was sent, the date the claim was placed on hold, the date the claim was re-sent, and any status notes. Those fields tell a biller which claim to chase next.

1. Open the Office Manager.
2. Click Reports, point to Ledger, and click Insurance Aging Report (Dentrix Help).
3. Choose Dental or Medical claims.
4. Set the ranges you want: patient, primary provider and carrier. Leave them open to include every claim.
5. Pick the minimum days past due (0, 30, 60 or 90). Use 0 for a full list or 30 for a follow-up list.
6. Decide whether to exclude partially paid claims. Keep them in if you are looking for short payments.
7. Select Print Status Notes if you want the status notes on the report.
8. Select Print to File and type a file name ending in ".txt". Dentrix saves the report as a tab-delimited file.
9. Finish the report. It goes to the Batch Processor, where you can preview it before printing.
10. Open the.txt file in your spreadsheet tool. Because it is tab-delimited, each field lands in its own column.

Run it once per office (or per database). If you bill for several Dentrix offices, name each file with the office and run date.

What the export leaves out

The aging report shows where each claim stands inside Dentrix, not what the payer says today. A claim sent 45 days ago with no status note could be paid, pended or denied. Someone still has to ask the payer (through a portal, a phone call or an X12 276 claim status request) before the list turns into work. Our guide to asking every dental payer where a claim is covers those paths.

Other Dentrix ledger reports that touch claims

The same Ledger folder in Dentrix Help lists more reports that touch claims (Ledger reports overview):

• Insurance Claims to Process: claims created but not yet sent.
• Secondary Insurance Claims Not Created: where a secondary claim is still owed.
• Procedures Not Attached to Insurance Claims: completed work that never reached a claim.
• Preauthorizations to Process and Preauthorization Aging.
• Patient's Ledger and Family Ledger, for a single account's history. The Patient's Ledger runs from Office Manager, Reports, Ledger, Patient's Ledger (Dentrix Help).

Henry Schein documents Print to File only on the Insurance Aging Report page. For the other reports, check each dialog for the option before you build a workflow on it.

Two other places look like exports but are not:

• The Dentrix Reports module exports reports as PDF files, one report at a time. A PDF is fine for an office owner and poor for sorting claims.
• The Claims Manager (File, Claims Manager, from the Office Manager or the Ledger) lets you work with an interactive aging report and view the status of printed and electronic claims. Its help pages describe no export. Claims with a zero dollar amount count as closed and do not appear.

Dentrix data export options compared

Sources: Insurance Aging Report, Dentrix Reports, Claims Manager, DXPort, Ascend Report Builder, Dentrix Enterprise blog, API Exchange.

Dentrix Ascend

In Ascend, go to Home, Reports, Power Reporting and open the Analysis Ledger Report Builder. Build the report, then click an Export option to save it as a.pdf,xlsx or.csv file. Mind the sync time shown on the report. Data entered after it waits for the next sync, so a same-day export can miss the latest entries.

Dentrix Enterprise

In Enterprise, open the Office Manager, click DXOne Reports, select Ledger and double-click Insurance Claim Aging. Enterprise also has an Outstanding Claim Manager under the File menu that closes several unpaid claims at one time rather than one by one.

DXPort is for accounting

DXPort exports totals to QuickBooks, Excel or Text from Analysis, DXPort Setup (the linked page is from the Dentrix Canada help). It sends accounting totals to the bookkeeper, with no claim-level detail, so it will not help with follow-up.

What needs Henry Schein One

Everything above is self-serve inside Dentrix. Other software reading Dentrix data goes through the Henry Schein One API Exchange. Henry Schein describes it as giving "authorized integration vendors access to practices." An office or a billing company cannot sign up for self-serve database access. To get claims data out of Dentrix daily without running a report, use software from a vendor that already works with Dentrix.

Exporting claims before you switch from Dentrix

If the office is moving to another practice management system, export the open claims first. Open Dental's conversion documentation says "most final conversions do not convert outstanding claims", and that conversions from Dentrix "convert outstanding primary claims, but not secondary claims." It advises printing an outstanding claim report from the old software on the final conversion date, then recreating each claim.

A clean switch from Dentrix looks like this:

1. On the final conversion date, run the Insurance Aging Report with minimum days past due set to 0 and partially paid claims included.
2. Save it with Print to File, and also keep a printed or PDF copy as the record.
3. Run Secondary Insurance Claims Not Created and Insurance Claims to Process, so unsent and secondary claims are not lost.
4. After conversion, check each exported open claim against the new system. Recreate the missing ones, secondaries first.
5. Keep working the old claims until each one is paid or closed. Our Open Dental export guide and Eaglesoft export guide cover the other side of the move.

Watch timely filing during the switch. A secondary claim lost in a conversion can age past the payer's limit before anyone notices. See how dental timely filing works.

Is a manual export the right tool for you?

A Dentrix export is a good fit when you need a snapshot: a monthly report for an office owner, a one-time cleanup of old claims, or the record for a software switch.

It is a poor fit as the start of daily follow-up across many offices. The file is stale by the time it is sorted, each office is a separate run, and every claim still needs someone to ask the payer.

That is the work Daybook takes on for dental billing companies and the billing offices of dental groups. Every night, Daybook asks each payer where your claims stand. It downloads the raw EDI files from the clearinghouse, parses the 835s and matches each payment to its claims. It writes back to Dentrix, so the answer lands on the claim in the system the office already uses. Nobody switches software, and your billers still decide every appeal, write-off and posting. Pricing is usage based, with no subscriptions and no seats.

Daybook works through the billing companies, RCM firms and software vendors that serve dental offices, not with individual practices. If you run a single office, ask your biller or software vendor.

For more on write-back, read how claim data gets written back to a dental practice management system, AI claim status for dental offices and our comparison of dental claims automation software. If you bill across Dentrix and other systems, see how a billing company works across several practice management systems.