Text-to-pay and payment links
Text-to-pay collects balances without the awkward phone call — and without taking card numbers over the phone, which your team shouldn’t be doing anyway. The patient gets a secure link and pays from their own device.
Sending
Section titled “Sending”- On the patient profile, select Collect Payment.
- Set the Amount to collect, choose Send SMS, Send Email, or SMS + Email, then select Continue.
- Pick a template from the dropdown. For SMS the SMS text box is editable before you send — keep the
{{payment_link}}placeholder, which is filled with the live link at send time. - Select Send Payment SMS (or Send Payment Email, or Send SMS & Email).
See Collecting a payment for the full chooser, validation, and disabled-state details.
Template variables
Section titled “Template variables”SMS and email templates support variables that are substituted before sending — for example {{patient_first_name}}, {{patient_balance}}, and {{site_name}}. The {{payment_link}} variable is filled at send time with the patient’s unique link. SMS + Email sends share a single payment link, so the patient can pay from either message.
What the patient sees
Section titled “What the patient sees”The link opens the practice’s secure hosted payment page in the patient’s browser — nothing to install. On a Moolah site this is the /process-payment page: the practice logo and name, an Amount Due, the patient’s name, an embedded card form (Moolah Collect.js), and a Pay $X.XX button. The payment then records in Teamio and posts to the patient’s Open Dental ledger automatically.
On a Stripe-configured site the patient instead gets a Stripe payment link. The amount can include a processing fee (the patient total), and the success page notes “A receipt will be sent to your email by Stripe.”
Patient-page states
Section titled “Patient-page states”| The patient sees | Meaning |
|---|---|
| The card form + Pay $X.XX | The link is live and unpaid. |
| Payment Successful! | The charge went through. |
| Payment Received | This link was already paid. |
| Payment Link Expired | The link is no longer valid — the patient should contact the practice for a new one. |
- A short personal text before the link lands better than a bare link: “Hi, it’s [Practice] — here’s the secure link for today’s balance.”
- Patient says they paid but you don’t see it? Give it a moment, then check the ledger; see Payments and Open Dental.
- Links going unanswered for days are a follow-up, not a re-blast.