Properly managing user access is essential for maintaining security, ensuring audit compliance, and preserving historical data. This guide outlines how to manage access for staff who leave your practice — including practitioners and the Practice Owner — without compromising your records.
🔒 Why you should not delete users
When a staff member leaves, do not delete their Dentally account. Instead, set their profile to inactive. This preserves their activity history for auditing and reporting purposes, while ensuring they can no longer access the system.
💡 Top Tip: Need to adjust someone’s access? Make sure you're logged in as a Permission Level 4 (Administrator) — only users with this level can update access permissions for others.
Practice Owner vs Admin Accounts
The Practice owner role has elevated administrative privileges beyond those of standard admin accounts. Important considerations:
Owners cannot be deactivated without Dentally involvement: Practice owner accounts are protected and cannot be made inactive or removed without a formal request of transfer.
Ownership transfers require documentation: If the practice owner is leaving the business, Dentally’s finance team requires a signed request confirming the new owner, please contact Support Chat for assistance in starting this process.
Once approved: Dentally will update the account to reflect the new practice owner and deactivate the previous one.
How to remove a user’s access (non-practitioner)
To remove general staff login access (requires Permission Level 4 admin rights):
Navigate to Settings > Users > Users tab.
Find and edit the user.
Change their Permission Level to ‘0 – No Access’.
Click Save.
This prevents the user from logging in, while maintaining all their historical activity in the system.
🩺 Practitioner-specific removal steps
Additional care must be taken when managing practitioner access to ensure their diaries and reports are correctly handled.
Making a practitioner inactive
Go to Settings > Users > Practitioners tab.
Locate and edit the practitioner.
Change 'Active' status to ‘No’.
This removes them from schedules and practitioner lists across Dentally.
Retaining diary and report access temporarily
If temporary access is still needed, for example if there are still patients in the diary to re-arrange:
Change their Permission Level to ‘0 – No Access’ in their 'User' settings, to block login.
Edit their schedule availability after their final working day to prevent new bookings.
Once their presence in the diary is no longer required, return to the 'Practitioners' tab and set their status to inactive as per the directions above.
For more information on removing a practitioner’s diary column and making them inactive, refer to our help article here.