Enter the Setup Wizard by clicking the Control Centre icon on the Main Form toolbar, or by choosing Control Centre from the Tools menu.

The Control Centre starts up in Setup Wizard mode, you should see the green tick at the top left indicating this.

Choose "My Company"

To make changes to this page, click the 'Edit this page' button at the bottom of the page.

Your company name, address, telephone, email etc. will appear at the top of many documents.

It's a good idea to fill in your bank details as this will show on the bottom of some reports, such as the customer statement.

If you enter anything in the "Tax Reg No" box, your invoices will display a Tax amount, even if it's zero. If you do not want to see any tax indication on your invoices, ensure this box is cleared.

Choose "Users/Technicians"

If you are getting started with LabManager, you may want to skip this page for now and let your users log in as MANAGER.

If you want to change the default password, double-click the MANAGER user and set the new password at the top left of the Edit User window.

For creating new users, refer to the help documentation for this subject.

Choose "Images"

From this page you can add your company logo, if you have it available as an image file on your computer or network. You may find you need to resize your logo, so if you decide it doesn't look quite right on your reports you can disable the logo by setting it back to a blank image.

To add your logo, double click on the "Company logo" row, then click on the "Get Image" button and locate your image file.

Experiment with your reports to see how the logo looks. You'll find it should appear on any of the reports that would normally be passed to the customer, such as invoices and statements.

If you wish to remove the logo, you can always set this to a blank image.

Choose "Price Bands"

The price bands represent different price lists - for example, a product may have one price when charged at NHS rates, and another when charged to a private customer.

You will set the actual prices of items on the "Products" page a little later.

The number of possible price bands is unlimited but we believe it's best not to be tempted to add more than absolutely necessary. If a lab needs to offer a special price list to a customer, then we recommend using the customer's order discount (you can set this in the customer's profile) to apply against one of your existing price lists. Another attractive option is the 'early payment discount' so that there is a strong incentive to pay invoices within a specified number days.

With too many price bands it will become difficult to spot errors in your pricing.

Read more about discounts here: Customer Discounts 

Choose "Practices"

You can Add, Edit or Remove practices from this page. Just use the familiar green plus symbol to add, the pencil to edit the currently selected practice, or the red cross to remove the currently selected practice.

You can also double click on a practice to view its details.

Fill in as many details as you have for the practice, you can always edit the details later. Once you've added practices on this page you can then create the dentists that work at each practice on the next page.

Practices are often referred to as a "Deliver To".

Usually, a number of dentist accounts will be linked to a practice account (via the Practice/Deliver To button), and the jobs, invoices and payments will be created on the individual dentist accounts.

The practice account itself, will usually have no activity recorded on it.

Choose "Dentists"

Your practices are shown in the list at the top half of the page, and the dentists working at the selected practice are shown in the bottom half of the page. The number in brackets after the dentist name is that dentist's customer ID. (ie. account number)

In the example below, we've selected "My example practice" from the top list, which shows two dentists work at that practice - as shown in the bottom list.

Although you can add and edit dentists and practices 'on the fly' ( see Add a New Customer ) the setup wizard gives you the bigger picture. It's easy to add or edit several dentists or practices and see the relationships between them.

In the Setup Wizard dentists page, highlight a practice (use the practices page to create one if you don't have any available) and then click the green icon. Add some details to a new dentist record, then click OK. Again, fill in as much details as you can as you can always come back and update the details later.

Refer to the Add a New Customer page for guidance on setting up a dentist.

Notice that after adding a new dentist, the selected practice now shows the new dentist.

Usually, a number of dentist accounts will be linked to a practice account (via the Practice/Deliver To button), and the jobs, invoices and payments will be created on the individual dentist accounts.

The practice account itself, will usually have no activity recorded on it.

Choose "Products"

This window gives the ability to view, add, remove, edit and copy products, including non-financial items (line notes).

Please refer to the Add a New Product Item page for guidance on adding a new product.

Note that in our documentation, products may also be referred to as 'sales items'.

Most products are normal items (physical products and services) which may have a financial value, and some are just codes for 'line notes', which includes note items such as PATIENT, SHADE, NOTATION.

Choose "Send to's"

These are your output channels, including email, printer and PDF file destination.

Your print-outs will usually go to the 'Printer windows default' channel, which will be whichever printer has been set as your default printer on this computer.

If you have multiple printers you want to use, you can add a new printer Send To channel by clicking the green plus icon on the right, assigning it to your secondary printer and naming it accordingly.

If you only have one printer, you can probably leave this page at it's default settings as you're good to go.

Choose "Printing Rules"

These are the suggested documents to create when you perform an action on a job, such as booking it in or out, and they're not just limited to printing. For example, you may wish to have a job ticket printed when booking in a job, or a job invoice emailed to the customer when you complete a job.

Here are some example printing rules we've configured to occur when the user books out a job as completed.

In the above example, we've chosen to edit the rules for when the action 'Book Out Completed' occurs, as shown in the box at the top. From the screenshot you can see that LabManager will prompt to automatically send a patient statement and invoice to the preview window, and attach a PDF copy of both of those to the job.

Sending delivery notes to the Queue is pretty useful. These are collated by practice so when you print the queue you get one delivery note per practice, containing all the jobs in the queue. After a batch of jobs have been booked out, choose Report menu > Jobs > Delivery Notes Print Queue and choose "All Unprinted".

You can change which action you are configuring by clicking the Action box at the top of the page, then use the Add, Edit and Delete icons to configure the rules.

Click "New Jobs"

Use this page to configure what happens when you create a new job.

The Next new Job no will be the job number issued automatically if the Job # box on the Main Form is blank when you click 'Action - New Job'. If you want to use your own job numbers you should type it in to the Job # box on the Main Form and press RETURN. If LabManager finds a job already exists with this number, it will count on and use the next available number.

If the Customer must be selected onto form before Action - New Job box is ticked, then the user will be prevented from creating a new job until they add a customer to the Main Form first.

The Job due date - Turnaround days are the number of days added to the current date to calculate the job due date. You can always update a job's due date later if you decide it will be ready sooner or later than the standard turnaround period. You can choose to skip Saturdays and Sundays if the lab is closed on those days of the week.

Products automatically added to new jobs. These line items will be added to any new job you create. You can add or remove any product or line notes that already exist in your products list. This is a powerful control to ensure you gather the data you want on your jobs.

In the example shown, if we made a new job it would be numbered T101, and will be due in 5 days, but can be due on a Saturday or Sunday eventhough the lab is usually closed. The new job will automatically have space for us to fill out the PATIENT name, SHADE and NOTATION.  

Choose "Main Form"

Use these settings to configure how some data is displayed on the Main Form, and the usual type of customer you deal with.

Remember you will need to click the 'Edit this page' button before you can make any changes to this page.

The Customer details options allow you to choose which of the customer's details appear at the top of the Main Form.

The Item columns govern what data is shown for line items. You can also change this 'on-the-fly' while using the Main Form, by right-mouse clicking on a row and choosing "Set display format..."

The Sub Totals options let you decide what information to show at the bottom right of the job.

The Usual customer type is the default used when creating new customers.

Select from the list of Patient entry options to use that format for patient name data entry. Note this is for ENTERING patient details only, to control how patient names are DISPLAYED use the controls on the Other Settings page.

Use Lab can do pickups to allow the lab to add pickups to the delivery run queue. Usually this is something the practice would do.

Choose "Other Settings"

Miscellaneous settings to configure LabManager further.

The Next Payment number refers to the ID number of payments added to the system. Again, if you specify a number and then when you add a payment LabManager finds that number is already in use, it will find the next available number automatically.

You can set the Next invoice number, which determines the invoice number used the next time you book out a job as completed. If the invoice number is already in use, LabManager will automatically try to use the next sequential number until it finds an invoice number that hasn't been used before.

Choose Local help to use the help files on your computer (if available), or Web based help to use online help. Web based help will always be more up-to-date than the local help so if you have internet access on your LabManager PC you should leave web based help enabled.

Usual patient name format determines how patient names should appear on internal reports (those you use in the lab) and external reports such as invoices and statements, as well as on patient statements, and on-screen. Use the abbreviations as shown to edit the default formats.

Sub-locations can be defined and used along with the location setting for jobs.

Tick the box to Maximize application window if you have a smaller screen. If this is ticked, LabManager will automatically start full screen rather than windowed.

Tick the box for Early Payment Discount - Exclude non-discountables to exclude items from the early payment discount calculation if they haven't been ticked as 'discountable' in the product edit window.

Choose to show barcodes on appropriate documents, or to hide them.

Define what currency prefix to use when money is displayed on reports.

When opening files, LabManager will usually use your default Windows application for that file type. Override this with the Application used for opening attachments box.

Use Change File Attachment settings to adjust where external file attachments are saved to. It is very important you understand how this affects your attachments, their privacy, and how they might be backed up. Please read the appropriate article in the help documentation for this feature.

If you have a MyDentist (IDH) account number, enter it in the box. This number will appear on your MyDentist invoices.

If there is a specific customisation setting available for your lab, you'll find this available in the Customisation box.

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