The Dentrix Blog

Helping You Do More with Your Dentrix System

Does your office routinely generate the same set of reports each evening? For example, you might run a chronological day sheet for each provider so that they can check their clinical notes or sign off on their work before they leave. If so, this means that every day your front office staff is doing a lot of repetitive clicking within the report options: choosing the same options, report after report, day after day!
Instead of manually selecting these same settings, automate them! This tip explains how to create an End of Day Reports queue in the Reports and Tasks Scheduler, set up the options for each report once, and then run the queue manually each night!

Create the Queue

In the Task Scheduler (Office Manager > Maintenance > Task Scheduler), scroll to the bottom of the Scheduled Tasks column. At the right side, click Create New Queue.

Enter a Queue Name (for example, End of Day Reports) and set the recurrence to Yearly, and to Recur every 9 years.

Why set a 9-year recurrence? Because when you create a queue, it must be assigned to some time period, and 9 years is the longest that it allows. You’ll be running this queue manually, so you don’t really need an automatic recurrence schedule to happen, but you can’t create a queue without it. So once every 9 years, these reports are going to run overnight on their own. When that happens, just delete the extra copies from the batch processor.

Assign the Reports

In the Available Tasks column, find the report you want to add. For our example of generating the Chronological Day Sheet, you’ll right-click Daysheet under Management Reports, click Add to Queue and select the End of Day Reports queue you just created.

A Day Sheet window opens allowing you to set the options for this report. Under Select Provider Range, select By Specific and select a single provider. Under Select Date Range, select Today. Enter other settings for the report as needed, and then click OK.

The report will then be assigned to your End of Day Reports queue.


Repeat these steps to create a report/task for each provider.

Daily Operation

At the end of each day, open the Task Scheduler (Office Manager > Maintenance > Task Scheduler) and scroll to the End of Day Reports queue. When you hover your mouse over the queue name, the queue line is shaded. Right-click the queue name and select Run Now.

Then open the Office Manager’s Batch Processer, and the individual reports will all be listed and ready to print.

For additional information about setting up queues and using the Reports and Tasks Scheduler, read Schedule Routine Tasks and Reports to Run Automatically in Dentrix Magazine and the Running Reports or Tasks Now topic in Dentrix Help.