5 Things to Do Before You Convert to Open Dental

So you've asked yourself the hard questions, you've identified your why, you've got a project owner, and you're ready to actually move. Now what? This is where most practices stall. The decision is made but the plan isn't. And a conversion without a plan is just chaos with a go-live date.

Here's what to actually do before you switch to Open Dental.

1. Set your 90-day timeline and schedule your test conversion immediately

The moment you decide you're converting, two things need to happen. First, set a 90-day timeline. This isn't arbitrary... it gives you enough runway to do this right without dragging it out so long that momentum dies.

Second, and this one is severely underutilized: schedule your test conversion right away. Open Dental requires a test conversion before your final one, and most practices barely touch it. Don't do that. Your test conversion is where you catch problems before they become go-live day emergencies. Schedule it early, protect it on the calendar, and actually use it.

2. Dig into your test conversion like it's the real thing

A lot of offices will do a 10-patient audit of their test conversion. We recommend closer to 15. And here's the part most people miss... have different members of your staff audit the same patients together.

Your admin and your hygienist are going to move through that chart completely differently. Admin is looking for billing and insurance. Hygiene is looking for clinical notes and medical history. They're going to find different things, flag different gaps, and catch things the other person never would have noticed.

Things like medical history notes showing up as a pop-up or in the comm log instead of the chart are exactly the kind of issues you can identify and fix before the final conversion, but only if you spend enough time in the test conversion to actually find them.

This is your dress rehearsal. Treat it like one.

3. Build your game plan

This is where a lot of pieces come together, and it's worth slowing down to get it right.

Start building your training timeline early. You don't have to wait for go-live to start learning the software. Lunch and learn style sessions, training videos, even our free Open Dental games like Jeopardy or Family Feud... all of it helps your team feel exposed to the software before full team training day arrives. The goal is that nobody walks into go-live having never seen Open Dental before.

Also start thinning out your schedule for go-live week now. You want to be at about 50 to 75 percent of your normal patient load at the start of that week. By the end of the week you can work back up toward 100 percent, but you don't want to go straight from a light day to a full schedule. Give your team room to breathe while they're learning.

Plan to close the office on the actual day of conversion. Your team can't access the software that day anyway, so make the most of it with full team training.

Around the 30-day mark, start making your third-party vendor selections. X-ray software, patient communication, payment processing, clearinghouse... if you're outsourcing billing or insurance verifications, those decisions need to be made with enough lead time to get everything scheduled and integrated before go-live. Most vendors need to be scheduled ahead of time to be ready on day one, and some will offer their own training that you'll want to get on the calendar too. If you want a starting point, check out our Ideal Tech Stack for our favorite Open Dental third-party vendors.

Get into the Open Dental community while you're at it. The Facebook groups, the forums, the SKF community. Start asking questions and learning in real time from other users who've already been through it.

4. Get your billing workflow documented and your claims handled before final paperwork

Before you can schedule your final conversion, you have to complete your conversion paperwork. And in that paperwork, you're going to be asked how you plan to handle your insurance claims, verifications, and billing.

Here's what you need to know: in most Open Dental conversions, outstanding insurance claims do not come over automatically. You have to decide if you're going to recreate them all at once or as you go. Our recommendation is to sit down and make them all at once. Divide and conquer as a team on one of your training days. If you have ten people working on it for 30 minutes, you can knock out a significant chunk of outstanding claims pretty quickly. Use it as practice for creating claims in Open Dental.

Why does this matter so much? Because if you don't create those claims before go-live, you can't send statements. You can't follow up on outstanding AR. You won't have visibility into why your numbers look the way they do. It creates a bottleneck in your billing that ripples out for months.

Handle it before final conversion. Not after.

5. Plan your post-conversion retraining before you ever go live

Go-live is not the finish line. It's actually just the beginning.

Plan right now to retrain at 30, 60, and 90 days post-conversion. Not a full training day each time... one to two hours is enough to dig deeper into different parts of the system, address what's come up, and build on what your team already knows. Then plan for a refresher once a year for your existing team, and make sure any new hires who come on after the conversion go through the same foundational training.

If you're working with SKF Practice Solutions, your trainer is your point person on go-live day. One contact person, one firefighter. Any time support needs to get looped in, it goes through them. One of the biggest mistakes we see is every team member calling Open Dental support independently, and suddenly you've got five people fixing problems that don't exist or switching things back and forth all day. One person. That's the rule.

If you're doing this on your own, designate that person internally before go-live day. Same rule applies.

And over the weekend before go-live? If you're working with us, our team will get your database fully customized using your top procedure codes, auto notes, schedule templates, block outs, providers, employees, adjustment and payment types, claim tracking statuses, security settings, report settings... all of it. We go in so that your team walks in on Monday ready to see patients, not ready to set up software.

If you're not working with a consultant, plan for that setup to take between 12 and 18 hours if you do it thoroughly. Block the time. Don't skip it.

A 90-day runway, a real test conversion, a solid game plan, clean billing before you cross the finish line, and a retraining schedule already on the calendar. That's what a good Open Dental conversion actually looks like.

It's not always a clean process. But if you go in with a plan, you'll get to the other side faster, and you'll actually be able to enjoy the software you just switched to.

👉 SKF Practice Solutions