Your First Note, Start to Finish

This post removes exactly one friction

Most writing about documentation tools, including most of ours, argues about whether you have a problem. This post assumes you have already had that argument with yourself. What usually remains is a quieter obstacle: you do not know what starting actually involves, so starting keeps losing to whatever else the day demands. So here is the literal sequence, from opening a trial to signing your first real note. No persuasion, just the path.

Everything below describes what Chairside does today, as shipped. If a step reads differently when you try it, that is a bug in this post, not a feature we are hinting at.

Before you start: what the trial actually is

The trial is self-serve and free, and it does not ask for a card. You do not book a demo call to get in, nobody phones you afterward to walk you through it, and there is no setup project to schedule. You sign up, and you are looking at the app. That matters because the honest test of a documentation tool is not a salesperson's screen share. It is your own encounter, in your own words, judged by your own standard.

Step one: make it sound like your practice

A few minutes in Settings pays for itself immediately. Add your sign-off, meaning your name and credentials, and that is what signs your letters and patient summaries. Upload your logo and pick your brand color, and patient-facing pages and letterhead carry them. Tune your voice, and drafts come out in your phrasing, length, and format instead of a generic register. Sign-off and voice are per clinician, so in a shared practice each provider signs and sounds like themselves.

You do not have to finish setup before your first encounter. A checklist at the top of the app tracks where you are and picks up where you left off. Plenty of people run their first encounter before touching Settings, then circle back once they have seen a draft.

Step two: capture a real encounter

From My day or Encounters, choose New encounter. There are three ways to get the visit in: record it live in your browser, upload an audio file you recorded elsewhere, or paste a transcript. A live recording and a pasted transcript produce the same drafts, so use whichever fits your operatory and your comfort level. If you want a zero-risk first run, paste the transcript of a visit you have already documented and compare the draft against the note you wrote by hand.

Step three: Analyze

One click, and Chairside drafts three things from the same encounter: the clinical note, a referral letter on your letterhead, and a plain-English patient summary. The note renders in a standard framework like SOAP or in your clinic's own custom template. Every draft is cited, meaning each clinical statement links back to the moment in the transcript it came from. That is the part to test hardest on your first run, because it is the difference between a record of the visit and a plausible story about it.

Step four: review, edit, sign

Open the encounter and the transcript sits alongside the drafts. Read the note against its citations and follow the ones that matter clinically. The draft is a normal editor, so fix, add, or cut anything. When it says what you would have written, sign. Signing marks the note final under your name and credentials. Nothing files on its own, ever. Chairside drafts; you decide.

Step five, when you are ready: connect your practice management system

This step is optional for the trial and most people do it after the first few notes, once the drafts have earned it. An admin or owner links the practice's system from Integrations, and a connected system lets Chairside read eligibility and patient data. Where supported, the finished note also lands in the chart after you sign: on Dentrix G7 as a native clinical note, and on Dentrix Enterprise, Eaglesoft, and Open Dental as a document attached to the chart. NexHealth and Cloud9 connections are read-only, with no note write-back. Chairside reports a system as connected only once it can actually read from it, so a green status means the link really works.

An honest concession

The first note tells you almost everything. If the draft is not close enough to your standard to be worth editing, no amount of marketing should talk you past that, ours included. Walk away with our respect. But run the test on a real encounter, not a hypothetical one, because the whole point of the sequence above is that the test costs you one visit and zero commitments.

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