Before you ask what Dentao does, ask what it doesn’t. That’s the more useful question, because every page about Dentao features will tell you what’s there. Almost none will tell you what’s missing, and missing matters more when you’re the one explaining to your receptionist on day one why a button isn’t where she expected it.
So here’s the list. No reminders. No time slots. No billing. No prescriptions. No lab tracking. No tooth chart. No roles. No dictation. No automatic recall report. Nine gaps, nine reasons, no spin.
We’d rather you know the edges now than discover them in week three, mid-afternoon, with a patient in the chair.
No automatic reminders
Dentao does not send automatic SMS or WhatsApp reminders. This is by design, not an oversight. The dashboard gives you a Message button on every row that opens WhatsApp with the patient’s number already loaded; a human reads the appointment and types the line. It’s slower than a scheduled broadcast. It’s also a message a patient actually opens, because it doesn’t read like a bot. The argument lives in more detail over at why automatic reminders aren’t always better than a human calling.
No time slots
The public booking form has three fields: name, phone, date. No 10:30 am, no 11:15 am, no calendar grid of fifteen-minute boxes. Patients pick a day; your desk still orders the day, same as it does on the phone, because a dentist’s day moves with judgement, not with a slot system that pretends a filling and a root canal take the same time. If this feels like a gap, read why Dentao chose dates over time slots before you decide it’s a dealbreaker.
No billing, no prescriptions, no lab tracking
Dentao doesn’t do money. No invoices, no GST, no payment collection inside the software. No prescription pad. No lab order tracking for crowns and dentures going out and coming back. These are real jobs in a clinic and we’re not pretending otherwise; we just didn’t build them, because the moment Dentao starts doing accounts, it stops being the thing that answers “who’s coming today” in two seconds.
No tooth chart, not yet
If you need a visual tooth chart or a perio chart on the record today, Dentao doesn’t have one, not yet. Clinical notes are free text: typed, readable by anyone with the clinic login, and that includes the allergy line, which lives inside the note rather than as a separate flag or icon. It’s not as visual as a chart. It’s also something your assistant can type in fifteen seconds without hunting for the right tooth number on a diagram, or scrolling past six other patients’ charts to find the shading she needs. For a two-chair clinic, a readable sentence (“upper right molar, caries, filled 14 Nov”) does the same job a chart would, just slower to glance at and faster to write.
No roles, no dictation, no recall report
One login per clinic. The receptionist and the doctor see the same screen, which means there’s no permissions setup to argue about, and also no way to hide anything from anyone on staff; if that bothers you because of staff size or privacy, it’s worth knowing before you sign up, not after. There’s no dictation or note templates; every note is typed from scratch, every time, which is slower on a long treatment plan but means nobody is reading an auto-filled sentence that doesn’t match what actually happened in the chair. And there’s no automatic recall report pinging you about patients due for a check-up; recall still means someone scanning the visit history and deciding who to call, the way it’s described in how clinics run patient recall without a push-button report.
Every feature on a product costs someone something: a screen to learn, a setting to misconfigure, a Thursday afternoon to go wrong. That’s the maths behind this whole list. A product with two hundred features isn’t two hundred times more useful to a two-chair clinic; it’s two hundred extra places for a locum, a new hire, or a tired receptionist to get stuck. We said no to a long list of requests, not because the ideas were bad, but because each yes would have made the booking screen and the record screen slightly harder for the clinic that only wanted to know who’s coming and who they are.
Dentao is honest about its edges so you don’t spend a month finding them yourself.
Does Dentao do everything a dental clinic needs?
No, and it isn’t trying to. If your clinic’s real daily friction is missed calls, forgotten follow-ups, and a steel cupboard full of files nobody can find fast, Dentao is built for exactly that. If your friction is GST filing or insurance claim forms, Dentao will not help you this year, and we’d rather say that plainly than let you find out after onboarding.
Where Dentao fits
Dentao is a booking form and a patient record, nothing more. The form takes name, phone, and date; the dashboard counts your day in five counters (Total and four statuses) and lets you message a patient on WhatsApp with one tap; records hold visit history, free-text notes, treatment plan items marked pending or done, and attached X-rays or photos you can forward from your phone. It runs in a browser on whatever device is open on the desk. That’s the whole list, and it stays that short on purpose. See the full working list in what Dentao actually includes, feature by feature.
What you lose in features, you gain in not having to think about them.
Try Dentao on your clinic at dentao.in.
Dentao is a booking link and a patient record for one- and two-chair clinics. Three fields for the patient, one dashboard for the desk, one file per phone number. Try Dentao on your clinic →