They say
“We ask every new patient how they found us.”
We say
And a good practice records it. This checks that record against collected production and adds the campaign behind it, which the field cannot hold.
For Dentrix
Which campaigns produced treatment that was actually paid for?
Match accepted, completed and collected treatment to the campaigns and calls that produced the patient.
- No API key
- Nothing to install in DentrixNothing to install
- No card requiredNo card
CloseRev reads a Dentrix export of collected production — patient contact detail, the amount collected and the procedure date — and joins it to the calls and forms that produced the booking. For a practice, the difference between a booked appointment and collected production is the whole question, and it is the half ad reporting never sees. Production that matches no lead is reported as Direct / Unknown.
Page updated September 24, 2026.
The gap
A new patient exam is worth a hundred dollars. The implant case they accept four months later is worth four thousand, and nothing credits the advertisement for it.
Dentrix sees
What was sold, to whom, and for how much.
no shared row
Your ad account sees
The click, the keyword, the call, and what each one cost.
The file
What the export needs in it.
Three things carry the match: who, how much, and when. Anything else is optional and only changes how the report can be sliced.
- Needed
Patient phone or email
The patient record. Phone is usually the more complete field in a dental practice.
- Needed
Collected production
What was actually collected, not scheduled or accepted. Acceptance and collection diverge, and the divergence is not the same across channels.
- Needed
Procedure or completion date
The date the work was done or paid for, used consistently.
- Optional
Location
The office the patient attends, mapped as Location, for a group with more than one. Nothing about the work done on the patient goes in this column or any other.
Step by step
Getting the file out of Dentrix.
Written for somebody with Dentrix open in the next tab. Report names vary by edition, so each step says what to look for.
-
Run a production and collections report by patient
One row per patient or per procedure, carrying a contact detail, the collected amount and a date.
-
Cover at least a year
High-value dentistry is decided slowly. A quarter of data captures hygiene and misses implants, which is the opposite of what you want to measure.
-
Keep the patient contact column
Phone or email on each row is what makes the file matchable.
-
Export CSV and upload
Mapping is suggested and you confirm it; manual mapping is always available.
-
Add the call and ad exports
Dental demand arrives by phone. A call tracking export, where you have one, goes into the lead file beside the ad exports, with the source named on each row.
What comes back
The page Dentrix cannot show you.
Revenue by channel, the count of sales behind each figure, and an honest bucket for the ones nobody could trace. Sample figures, from the worked example on the Dentists page — not from a Dentrix account.
Traced to a channel$207,00068% of $304,400
Sales matched83 of 129high confidence only
Average sale$2,340per paid sale
| Channel | Share | Sales | Revenue |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Ads | 38 | $124,800 | |
| Meta Ads | 31 | $54,800 | |
| Email marketing | 14 | $27,400 | |
| Direct / Unknown | 46 | $97,400 |
Unmatched sales stay in Direct / Unknown. They are never spread across the paid channels to make the total look better.
The argument
What changes when the treatment and the ad share a row.
New patient count is the wrong number and everybody knows it
Dental marketing is sold and measured on new patients. It is countable, it is fast, and it is almost uncorrelated with what a practice earns. A channel that delivers thirty hygiene patients and a channel that delivers eight who accept restorative and implant work look identical on that metric, and are not close on revenue.
The number that matters is collected production per patient, traced back to the channel that produced them. That is a join between the practice management system and the ad or call data, and it is the join nobody makes because the two systems have no reason to talk.
Once made, it can reorder the channel list: the cheapest source of new patients can turn out to be the most expensive source of revenue.
The implant case accepted four months after the exam
High-value dentistry is a considered purchase. A patient comes in for a cleaning, hears about a crown or an implant, thinks about it, checks their insurance, gets a second opinion and accepts in the next quarter or the one after.
Because the match is on the patient rather than a visit, all of that later production credits the channel that produced them the first time. There is no attribution window and nothing decays: the person in April's inquiry file and the person in September's production file are the same person, so the match is made.
Accepted is not collected, and the gap differs by channel
Treatment plans get accepted and then not scheduled; scheduled and then canceled; completed and then not paid. If one channel's patients accept enthusiastically and pay poorly, a report built on accepted treatment will rank it first and be wrong.
Exporting collected production is the correction. It also makes the report reconcilable to the practice's own numbers, which is what makes it repeatable in a partners' meeting rather than an interesting one-off.
What the practice sends, and what it does not
A contact detail, an amount and a date, plus the office if the group has several. No clinical notes, no diagnoses, no treatment detail and no service line: none of it is read by the match and none of it should be in the export.
Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, isolated per workspace and deletable in one click, with a DPA available. CloseRev does not sign HIPAA Business Associate Agreements and is not built for protected health information, so what the export may contain is for the practice and its compliance lead to settle before anything is uploaded.
Reactivation is not acquisition, and blending them flatters everything
A recall campaign that brings a lapsed patient back for hygiene is valuable and is not new patient acquisition. If reactivated patients are counted as conversions in the same report as first-time patients, the cost per new patient falls and means nothing.
Mark them at the export with a new-versus-existing column mapped as Product / service, and the report shows how much production each group brought and how much of it traced to a channel. A reactivated patient still credits the earliest lead the file holds for them, so keep recall campaigns out of the lead file, or under a source name of their own, when acquisition is the question.
Seeing those two numbers apart, and the ratio between them, is one of the more useful things this produces.
Fair questions
“Dentrix already does that.” Not quite.
They say
“Our software is not a marketing tool.”
We say
It does not need to be. If it exports production and collections with a patient contact detail and a date, that is the file.
They say
“Most of our growth is referral.”
We say
Then the report will show that plainly, and you will be able to size the paid budget against it instead of guessing.
Production and collections by patient: a phone or email, the collected amount, and a date.
Collected. Acceptance-to-collection differs by channel and hides the difference.
Not in CloseRev: a hygiene-or-implant column on each patient's row would put health information in the file. The whole-practice report still captures the implant cases — a year-long file reaches them — and a Location column splits it by office.
At least twelve months, because high-value cases are accepted slowly.
No. A contact detail, an amount, a date, and the office if you have several.
Not required, but dental inquiries are overwhelmingly phone calls, so it is the strongest second file.
Yes — map a location column as Location.
Yes, and it credits the channel that produced the patient originally.
No. This works from a CSV export.
CloseRev does not sign HIPAA Business Associate Agreements and is not built for protected health information. Export only non-clinical fields from Dentrix — a phone or email, the amount and the date — never diagnoses, treatments or notes. If those contact fields count as PHI under your obligations, talk to your compliance lead first.
Yes, with a new-versus-existing column. Blending them makes cost per new patient meaningless.
They appear with the production they generated, which may be only an exam. That is the honest figure for that channel.
Many, as payments against the patient. That way the revenue credits the original channel as it is actually collected.
Not directly. The sales file holds collected production, one row per sale, and presented treatment is not revenue. Per channel, the report shows leads beside collected production.
Give patient referrals their own source name in the lead file and they rank on collected production beside paid channels.
By trade
Trades that run Dentrix.
What the report looks like once the export is in, written for each one.
Other systems
Also worth reading.
Running more than one system, or comparing? The method is the same and the columns are not.
Closed-sales file Tebra (Kareo) Independent practices, formerly on Kareo Closed-sales file What to export Closed-sales file athenahealth Medical groups Closed-sales file What to export Closed-sales file Open Dental Dental practices and groups Closed-sales file What to export
All 122 systems 
Dentrix and the other product names and logos on this page belong to their owners and are shown to identify the software a file comes from. CloseRev is not affiliated with or endorsed by them, and connects to none of them: it reads a file you export.
From the blog
Further reading.
Measuring healthcare marketing without touching a medical record
Multi-site healthcare groups usually conclude that attribution is off limits because the data is clinical. It is not, because attribution does not need clinical data. What it needs is a phone number, an amount and a date, and there is a way to handle even those properly.
Read the articleAttribution across forty locations, where the averages lie to you
A multi-location business that reports one national attribution number is hiding its most important finding. The same campaign performs differently in every market, and the aggregate is an average of things that should never have been averaged.
Read the articleMarketing attribution report: a monthly template and what to include
Most monthly marketing reports describe activity: clicks, leads, impressions. An attribution report has a narrower job: say where this month's revenue came from, and how much of it nobody can trace. Here is the template, column by column, with a complete example that adds up, how to show what is still under review, which periods to compare, the notes that explain a change, what to leave out, and how to walk an owner or a client through it in five minutes.
Read the article
Start today
Two exports, and you will know.
Nothing to install in Dentrix, no API key, and no need to have been tracking anything until now. Last year works as well as this month.