The path for how to print dental insurance claim aging report in Dentrix is four clicks: in the Office Manager, click Reports, point to Ledger, then click Insurance Aging Report. Set the report date, pick Dental or Medical carriers, set the minimum days past due, and click OK. The report queues in the Batch Processor, where you select it and click the print icon. The whole sequence takes under a minute. Deciding what to do with the pages it produces takes considerably longer, and that is the part this guide is really about.
How to print an aging report in Dentrix?
Every Dentrix report prints the same way, which is worth knowing because printing is not where people get stuck. Reports are generated in the Office Manager, they queue in the Batch Processor, and you print from the queue.
- Open the Office Manager.
- Click Reports on the menu bar. Patient balance aging lives under Management, then Aging Report. Outstanding insurance claims live under Ledger, then Insurance Aging Report. These are two different reports and they answer two different questions.
- Set the options in the dialog and click OK. Nothing prints at this point.
- Look at the Batch Processor list in the Office Manager. Your report is there, stamped with the date and time it was generated.
- Select it, then click preview to read it on screen or print to send it to paper.
If the preview button does nothing, preview is switched off in Office Manager, Maintenance, Practice Setup, Preferences, on the print options tab. Turning it on saves a lot of paper, because most runs of this report exist to be read once and thrown away.
To keep a digital copy, print to whatever PDF printer the workstation has. Dentrix lays these reports out for a printed page, so a PDF preserves the columns while copying text off the screen does not. Getting the data into a spreadsheet is harder than it should be, because the report is built to be read rather than exported. Practices that want it in columns either print to a file and parse it or run a third party report conversion utility.
Two housekeeping notes. Reports stay in the Batch Processor until somebody deletes them, so last month's run is still sitting there alongside this month's. Delete after printing or the list becomes unusable within a quarter. And both the queue and the printed stack contain patient names attached to dollar amounts, which makes the paper version a privacy item, not scratch paper.
If your office runs Dentrix Ascend rather than the installed Dentrix system, the equivalent report lives in the reports area rather than an Office Manager module and the option names differ. Everything below about what the report means still applies.
How do I run the Dental Insurance Aging Report in Dentrix?
Office Manager, Reports, Ledger, Insurance Aging Report. Dentrix documentation sometimes calls it the insurance claims aging report while the menu item reads Insurance Aging Report. Same report.
The dialog is where this report is won or lost. Most practices accept the defaults, print forty pages, and work the first three.
| Setting | What to choose | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Report date | Today, unless you are rebuilding a prior month | Every aging bucket is calculated backward from this date, so changing it re-ages the whole report |
| Claim type | Dental, or Medical, or both | Medical claims for dental procedures follow different rules and deadlines, so they work better as a separate list |
| Minimum days past due | 30 for a working list, 0 for a full picture | At 0 you get claims sent yesterday, which nobody should be calling about |
| Primary and secondary | Both for the monthly run, secondary alone when auditing coordination of benefits | Missing secondary claims hide as patient balances rather than insurance balances |
| Provider range | All, unless one provider is asking about their own accounts receivable | Splitting by provider makes the follow up list smaller than it should be |
| Carrier range | All first, then one carrier once you spot a pattern | A single carrier stacked in the old columns is a payer problem, not a staffing problem |
| Claim status notes | On | This is the setting that turns a list into a work list |
| Sort order | By carrier when you plan to call payers, by patient when you plan to work accounts | Calling one payer about nine claims beats nine calls about one claim each |
The status notes option deserves the emphasis. Without it, you get claim numbers, dates and dollar amounts. With it, you get the note the last person left after they called, which is the difference between following up and starting over. If nobody on your team writes status notes on claims, that is the habit to fix before the next time you print this.
What is an insurance aging report?
An insurance aging report lists every claim you have submitted that the payer has not paid, grouped by how long it has been outstanding. It answers one question: how much money is sitting with insurance companies, and how old is it.
What it includes: claims that were created and sent, that still carry an outstanding amount, and that nobody has marked as received.
What it leaves out: patient balances, claims marked received even when the payment entered was zero, claims that were deleted, treatment that was never turned into a claim at all, and pre-treatment estimates, which are requests for an opinion rather than requests for money.
That last group is why the report and your general ledger tell different stories. It is also why the two Dentrix reports with similar names confuse new office managers.
| Aging Report | Insurance Aging Report | |
|---|---|---|
| Menu path | Reports, Management, Aging Report | Reports, Ledger, Insurance Aging Report |
| The unit being aged | Guarantor account | One insurance claim |
| Aged from | Account balance history | The date the claim was sent |
| Who owes the money | The patient or guarantor | The payer |
| Used for | Statements and patient collections | Claim follow up |
| Includes estimated insurance portion | Shown as a separate column | Not applicable, the whole report is insurance |
The totals on these two will not agree, and they are not meant to. A practice that reconciles one against the other and concludes the software is broken has simply asked two different questions.
Reading the columns: what each bucket should trigger
The buckets are not descriptive. They are a triage order, and the action changes at each line.
| Age | What it usually means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| 0 to 30 days | Normal float. Clean electronic claims commonly pay inside this window | Nothing, except claims with no clearinghouse acknowledgment at all, which never reached the payer |
| 31 to 60 days | The first real follow up point | Confirm receipt and status. Most claims that will need work show their problem here |
| 61 to 90 days | Something is wrong and nobody has found it yet | Look for a denial whose remittance never reached you, a pend for attachments, a wrong payer id, or payment issued to the patient |
| Over 90 days | Where money dies | Work by dollar amount, check the filing deadline before anything else, and decide claim by claim what is still collectible |
Filing deadlines are the reason the last row is urgent rather than annoying. They vary widely by payer, plan and state, commonly running from 90 days to a year or more from the date of service, and the only reliable source is your own contract with that payer. A claim that crosses its deadline stops being accounts receivable and becomes a write off, usually one the patient cannot be billed for under the participating provider agreement.
Claims stuck past 90 days also cluster around a short list of causes, most of them preventable at submission. Our rundown of the top 10 reasons for dental insurance claim denials covers what the cluster usually contains. Two specific cases worth separating out of the pile: orthodontic claims, which have their own approval logic and are covered in our guide to disputing a dental insurance denial for braces, and claims returned over code selection, which are handled differently and are covered in overcoming a dental claim denial for upcoding.
If you selected Medical rather than Dental on the dialog, treat that list as a separate project. Medical claims for dental procedures age through different departments and reject for different reasons. Our guide to billing medical insurance for dental procedures explains what those claims need before they are sent.
The five numbers to pull off it every month
Printing the report is not measuring anything. These five figures are, and all of them come off a single monthly run.
| Number | How to read it |
|---|---|
| Total insurance accounts receivable | A common rule of thumb is that it should sit near one month of production. Treat that as a starting reference, not a rule |
| Percent of the total over 90 days | Many practices manage to a target under 10 percent. The direction of travel matters more than the number |
| Claim count over 90 days, alongside the dollars | Ten claims at 2,000 dollars each is a payer problem. Two hundred claims at 100 dollars each is a process problem |
| Largest single outstanding claim | Whoever works the list should know this number without looking it up |
| The carrier holding the most aged dollars | Concentration in one carrier points at a contract, a payer id, or a submission habit |
When one carrier owns the aged column month after month, the question stops being follow up and becomes the relationship itself, including whether the rates you are chasing are worth the chase. Our guide to maximizing dental insurance reimbursement rates covers how to work that out.
How to update dental claim form in Dentrix?
Two different tasks hide behind this question, and they are solved in different places.
Changing the claim form version. The printed ADA form revision is a property of the insurance plan, not of the claim. Go to Office Manager, Maintenance, Reference, Insurance Maintenance. Select the carrier and plan, open it for editing, and set the claim format field to the current ADA revision your version offers. Format names follow the year of the ADA form revision. If the revision you want is not in the list, the fix is a software update rather than a setting, because the forms ship with the product. Note that a carrier with several plans has several records, so changing one does not change the rest.
Fixing information on one claim. Open the Ledger, double click the claim, then double click the block that is wrong: subscriber information, treating or billing provider, place of service, or attachments. Change it, close the claim, and resend. Editing a claim changes that claim only. If the same error will repeat on the next patient with that plan, correct it in the Family File or in Insurance Maintenance as well, or you will be doing this again next week.
Two practical notes. Print one claim as a test before running a batch on a new form version, because alignment problems surface on paper and not on screen. And for electronic submission, the printed format is irrelevant. What the payer reads is the data, so a claim that prints perfectly and rejects electronically has a provider identifier or payer id problem, not a form problem.
Where this report quietly misleads you
- Claims created but never sent. These age from the date they were created while sitting in a queue nobody opens. That is real receivable with nobody assigned to it. Check unsent claims separately, at least weekly.
- Claims marked received at zero to clear the list. It works, in the sense that the claim leaves the report. It also moves the balance to the patient or to a write off without anyone deciding that on purpose, and the denial behind it disappears from every follow up list you have.
- Secondary claims that were never created. The money sits in patient accounts receivable instead, and the patient gets a statement for something a payer owes.
- Reading the total as collectible. Part of that total is already denied, part is past its filing deadline, and part is duplicate claims for one service. The report shows outstanding, not recoverable.
- Running it monthly. Filing windows move every day. A weekly run of the 30 day and older list is a smaller job than a monthly run of everything, and it catches problems while they are still fixable.
- Working it top to bottom. Alphabetical order by patient is not a priority order. Work oldest and largest first, always.
From a printed list to a worked list
The gap between practices with clean insurance aging and practices with four pages of claims over 90 days is almost never the report. Everyone can print it. The difference is whether each line has an owner, a date, a note about what was tried, and a next action, and whether the claims that keep landing on it get fixed at submission rather than chased afterward. That prevention side is worth its own look, and our piece on whether AI can prevent dental insurance claim denials goes through what is realistic there.
Curo reads your outstanding claims and remittances directly, ages them without anyone printing anything, and routes each claim to the reason it stalled, whether that is a missing attachment, a filing deadline about to close, or a payment that already posted short. If you would rather work a live queue than a stack of paper, that approach is described in more detail under balance collection.
Print the report this week anyway. Then set the minimum days past due to 30, turn the status notes on, and see how much of what comes out is a claim nobody has touched since the day it went out the door.