Hiring an Open Dental Expert? Here's What to Actually Look For

If you've spent any time hiring in the dental space, you've heard it. "I'm an Open Dental expert." It comes up in interviews, on resumes, in consultant pitches. And honestly? Most of the time, it's not a lie, the person saying it genuinely believes it. That's exactly what makes it tricky, because you don't know what you don't know.

What "Open Dental expert" usually actually means

What most people mean when they say they're an Open Dental expert is that they're an expert at how their previous practice used Open Dental. And that's a real thing. That knowledge has value. But it's not the same as understanding how the software actually works, why it's built the way it is, or what happens downstream when something gets set up wrong.

They learned Open Dental the way most people do, by using it inside a practice, picking things up as they went, and figuring out workarounds when something didn't make sense. What they didn't do is sit down and read what makes everything tick. They haven't tested things in a demo database where they could make a giant mess and then fix it without consequences. They haven't dedicated thousands of hours over years to understanding exactly how the software works at every level.

And because of that, they don't always know what they don't know.

The quiz doesn't lie

We've had plenty of people apply to work with SKF who put "Open Dental expert" on their resume. We give them our Open Dental quiz. A lot of them don't do well on it.

And again, it's not that they don't know Open Dental. It's that they have a limited understanding of how everything works, and they didn't know that until they sat down and took the quiz. We've actually had other Open Dental consultants come through our training program for exactly this reason. They took the quiz, got humbled a little, and realized their knowledge base had more gaps than they thought. Some of those same people still reach out to us when they hit something they can't figure out. We're always happy to help because we genuinely love to collaborate... but it does say something about how loosely the word "expert" gets thrown around.

None of this is us saying we're the best or that everyone else doesn't know what they're doing. We have gaps too. I've called into Open Dental support, asked a question, been told it wasn't possible, and then said "well what if we did it this way?" and the rep goes "oh yeah, that works." There have been times we're literally teaching the support team workarounds in real time. Even the people who are closest to the software don't know everything. The difference is being honest about that instead of leading with "expert."

What to actually watch for

When someone tells you they have Open Dental experience, whether that's a new hire or an outside consultant, here are the specific things worth paying attention to.

They use adjustments for refunds instead of the correct payment workflow. This is one of the most common Open Dental mistakes we see, and it's almost always a sign that someone learned a workaround early on and never questioned it. Adjustments and payments are not interchangeable in Open Dental. Using adjustments for refunds skews your production numbers and creates reporting problems that are hard to trace back to the source.

They don't use the overpaid or underpaid buttons on claims. These buttons exist for a reason. When someone doesn't know they're there, or doesn't understand when to use them, it creates a billing mess that compounds over time. This is the kind of thing that gets missed when you learn Open Dental by doing instead of by understanding.

Their chart is missing buttons and auto codes for top billed procedure codes. A well-built Open Dental chart is one of the biggest efficiency drivers in the whole system. If someone has been working in Open Dental for years and their chart buttons are still a mess, or they're manually entering procedure codes instead of using auto codes, that tells you they were never taught how to build it correctly.

They don't have a solid grasp on insurance categories and code groups. This is a more advanced area of Open Dental and it shows. Insurance categories and code groups directly affect how benefits are calculated, how treatment plans present to patients, and how your billing flows. Offices that don't have these set up correctly often don't realize it until they're staring at a treatment plan that doesn't make sense or an insurance payment that didn't come back the way they expected.

They set up in-network plans as category percentage. This one is so common and the intention behind it makes sense... people do it because they want the ledger to show the insurance rate. We get it. But setting up in-network plans as category percentage leads to literal chaos in your system and it's actually against Open Dental's own recommendations. If you want to go deeper on why, we wrote a whole blog post on it. The short version is that it creates downstream billing and reporting problems that are genuinely hard to untangle once they're baked into your database.

So what do you do with this?

Be leery of the word expert. That's really it.

When you're hiring someone with Open Dental experience, ask them the why, not just the how. Don't just ask if they know how to post a payment. Ask them what happens if a payment gets posted incorrectly and how they'd fix it. Ask them how they'd set up a co-pay plan for a patient with two insurances. Ask them what they'd do if an insurance payment came back different than estimated.

The people who really know the software can tell you the way. The people who learned it by doing can tell you what button they click. Both have value... but only one of them is going to catch the setup issues before they cost you thousands of dollars to clean up.

👉 SKF Practice Solutions