Run a Virtual Lab on Cympha in One Afternoon

A virtual lab needs the same portal, intake and billing as a physical one, and this cookbook builds them in dental lab case management software in about four hours.

A real dental lab — the kind with a CAD seat, a few designers, and a billing person — used to need an office lease, a file server, an accountant who understood per-case invoices, and someone to babysit the scanner folders.

You don't need any of that anymore. Here's how a solo designer or a two-person startup goes from "I'd like to run my own lab" to "I just took my first case" in a single afternoon — using only Cympha.

Before you start

You need three things:

A Cympha account (free 15-day trial; sign up at app.cympha.com).
A Windows machine where you'll do the design work.
A bank account or Stripe-supported entity that can receive payouts.

That's it. No office, no server, no CAD license seat to negotiate, no payment-processor onboarding call.

Hour 1 — Make Cympha look like your lab

Sign in to app.cympha.com. You land on the case dashboard. A trial banner at the top says you have 15 days left; ignore it for now — that timer doesn't start counting against you in any way that matters until you have paying work.

Open My Lab and click Onboard My Lab. It walks you through four steps: Lab Info (name, contact, location), Introduction (the paragraph doctors read when they're deciding whether to trust you with work), Services, and Payment.

Services is the step that matters: Cympha does not put you on someone else's case form. You define the services you actually offer.

Add a service for each thing your lab does: Crown & Bridge, Aligner setup, Surgical guide, Implant model, custom.
Upload the order form you already use as a PDF and click Extract fields. Cympha reads it, turns it into a structured form, and tells you how many fields it found. Preview form then shows you exactly what the doctor sees: your fields, and the files you expect with the case.
Set pricing: a fixed price per service, or a flexible range you confirm per case.
Save. Every doctor who submits to your lab from now on picks from your services, sees your fields, and sees your pricing — not Cympha's defaults.

Most of this step is deciding what your services should look like, not configuring the software.

Hour 2 — Install the Cympha Agent

The Agent is a small Windows tray app that does the boring part of running a lab: moving files between your computer and the cloud, watching your scanner folders, kicking off design pipelines unattended.

From the left sidebar of your Cympha dashboard, click Download agent. Run the installer; the agent lives in your system tray afterwards.

First launch:

Open the tray menu and click Pair to Cympha…. The dialog asks for exactly one thing — your Cympha account email — and then you click Send pair request.
No browser page opens. In the Cympha tab you already have open, a Cympha Agent pair request modal appears showing the machine name, the operating system, the agent version and the install ID. It cannot be dismissed by clicking away: you decide.
Click Approve — or Deny, if that request did not come from you. The agent reports Paired as {your email}, and cloud monitoring starts. To undo it later, use Unpair from Cympha in the tray; there is no sign-out in the agent, because the agent has no login of its own.

Now open File Monitoring → Configure folders… from the tray menu and add the export folders for whatever scanners and CBCT systems your doctors use. Common ones:

C:\Scanners\3Shape\Exports
C:\Scanners\Medit\Exports
C:\CBCT\Vatech

The Agent now runs four sub-agents in the background. You don't have to think about which one is doing what; they coordinate themselves:

Cloud Monitor keeps your assigned cases on disk. Pick a workspace folder (anywhere on your machine); new cases land inside it organised by category and patient the moment they're assigned to you. Save work back into a case folder and it shows up in the Cloud Monitor panel under New in workspace, with Upload per file and Upload all — you vet what leaves your machine before it goes. Two things upload on their own: a self-contained design output (a .zip or a .gvw), and anything you drop into a dispatchable category folder. Nothing else goes without your click.
File Monitor watches the folders you just configured. When a new scan drops, a small popup appears in your tray: "upper_arch.stl just landed — Create a case?" One click and Cympha turns the scan into a case in your own lab.
CBCT Segmentation turns a CBCT into per-tooth STLs, separated upper and lower jaws, and the inferior alveolar nerve. It runs on your own workstation, so the scan itself never leaves your machine — only the STLs you choose to upload. It is a separate paid add-on: it needs an active CBCT Segmentation subscription alongside your Cympha subscription, and a supported NVIDIA RTX 30- or 40-series card. Buy it before you promise a doctor CBCT work.
AlignerBot runs OrthoPlus end-to-end if you want to take aligner work. AlignerBot itself is included from the OrthoPlus Starter tier. Bringing a CBCT or a facial scan into OrthoPlus needs Studio; direct-print aligners, retainers, automatic trim path generation, bracket surgical guides and case restart are Enterprise only. Match the tier to the work you intend to sell. We'll come back to this in Month 2.

Most of this step is waiting for the installer.

Hour 3 — Get your first doctor

Cympha doesn't expect you to bring a sales team, and it doesn't run a directory either. The connection is made offline, the way it always was — a conversation, a referral, a study club. Cympha carries the relationship afterwards; it doesn't broker it.

The doctor finds you, not the other way round. There is no lab-side invite to send and no preferred-labs list to appear on. On their New case page the doctor searches by your lab name, or by your name or email address as lab manager, and picks you. Only labs that finished onboarding are findable — which is why Hour 1 was worth doing properly.

Nothing ranks you against anyone. A search result shows the lab name and the manager's name or email. No pricing, no reviews, no turnaround league table, no sort but alphabetical. Nobody is bidding your work down in a directory, and the doctor gets the lab they already decided to trust instead of the cheapest bid — which is the whole reason they were willing to move their cases in the first place.

When a doctor opens "New case" on their side, they see your case-type form. They type the case description in their own words. Cympha's AI parses the free-text description and fills the structured fields in your form. The doctor drops the scans. They hit Submit.

In your dashboard, a new case appears.

Hour 4 — The first case, end to end

Click into the new case. Here's what you see, all without lifting a finger:

The files, already matched to the slots you defined. As the doctor uploaded, Cympha matched each file against the files your service says it expects — upper_arch_final.stl to "Upper arch scan", bite.stl to "Bite registration" — and the doctor watched the checklist tick off in green as it went. The matching is language-agnostic: a file named 上颌.ply lands in the upper-arch slot just as readily. Anything it isn't confident about it simply leaves unmatched rather than guessing wrong.
The doctor's answers to your form — the structured fields your own order form defined. If the service has no form, you get their notes verbatim under Treatment Notes.
No price yet — pricing is yours to set. You enter a price and send it to the doctor for approval; they accept or reject it, and can counter with a reason.

Before you commit, review the data in the browser. Open the file in Cympha Studio — Studio renders STL, PLY, CBCT, and face scans in your browser with no install. Spin the model, check the margins, eyeball the bite registration. Studio is where a case gets looked at and worked on; nothing is signed off there. Approval is recorded separately, on the doctor's own approve page, where they see the files and the lab slip before they commit. If you want a colleague's second opinion, share the case — the share is read-only, so they can open it and its files without being able to change anything, and they don't need an account with you first.

The case is yours from the moment the doctor submits it. Your controls are Refuse Case, available only before design starts, so a case you cannot take goes back for another lab instead of dying in your queue; Assign Designer; and the status dropdown, which previews who will receive the case before you commit to the change. Assigning a designer moves the case to Designing and records the assignment against the case. Cloud Monitor pulls the files down into your configured workspace folder. You open the design software. You work the case the way you always have.

Save the finished design into the case folder and Cloud Monitor picks it up. A .gvw review file arriving through the agent, on a case in Designing in an approval category, goes one step further on its own: the case flips to Awaiting Approval with the right step label, records an approval-requested event, and emails the doctor — no lab click involved. The same file dragged into the browser deliberately does not auto-advance, so you keep the last word on what reaches a doctor. Everything else waits for your Upload.

That record is the quiet part worth paying for. Every case carries an append-only event log — status changes, files in and out, labels, comments, approvals — and it names the machine when a file came in through the agent. Six months on, "who changed this, and when" is a question with an answer, which is the difference between a bad afternoon and a lost client.

When the doctor approves, the case is billed: Cympha generates a Stripe Checkout link and the doctor pays. Two fees come out of a paid case — Stripe's card-processing fee, and Cympha's 8% platform fee — and the rest is yours. Payouts run monthly: on the 1st, Cympha generates a payout sheet covering every case past its 15-day settlement window and wires the total to your bank. You email your wire or ACH details to billing@cympha.com when you accept your first case, and you can follow every case through the My Earnings page — Pending, on the payout sheet, then paid out — with a CSV export for your accountant.

You haven't touched a billing system, a portal, an email, or a payment link. Your lab just delivered its first paying case.

The next morning — AI proposals are waiting

Open the dashboard. Sitting at the top of the case list are two or three AI proposals:

"Case #14 has been awaiting approval for 5 days — nudge the doctor?"
"Case #17 is missing a CBCT export the form expected — flag back to the doctor?"
"Case #19 design is ready; mark it complete?"

Each proposal has Apply / Dismiss. Click Apply and the action happens. Or, if you trust the AI for certain case types — say, "missing-file flagback" on Crown & Bridge — open the case type and flip auto-apply on for that proposal class. From then on, those proposals fire without waiting for you.

Important: AI proposals never make irreversible decisions on their own. They never delete files. They never charge a card. They never send a final-delivery notification. Auto-apply is opt-in per case type, per proposal class. The only thing that happens unattended is the busywork.

Month 2 — Scale without scaling overhead

When you're ready for a second pair of hands, the designer comes to you rather than the other way round: they sign up, choose the Designer role, and enter your lab-manager email address. Their request lands in My Team → Approval Requests, and you click Approve. They install the Agent and pair it, and cases you assign flow to their disk exactly the same way — files land in their workspace, they save the finished design back into the case folder, and the upload happens automatically.

Paying the designer is your arrangement with them, settled off the platform — Cympha does not split a payout between lab and designer. What it gives you is the arithmetic to settle from: My Earnings lists every paid case with gross, card fee, platform fee and net to you, case by case, with a CSV export for whoever does your books.

When you're ready to take aligner work, open AlignerBot in your tray menu and point it at a workspace folder. Aligner cases assigned to your lab get picked up unattended; AlignerBot runs OrthoPlus on each one — scan repair, segmentation, setup, staging, attachments — and hands a review file back to Cympha for the doctor's approval. You handle the clinical judgment; AlignerBot handles the repetitive setup.

What this actually changes

A real lab built the old way had three lines of friction that kept new entrants out:

Infrastructure — file server, scanner integrations, billing system, doctor portal.
Operations — someone to invoice, someone to chase doctors who haven't approved, someone to route files between scanner and designer.
Capital — months of revenue before the first paying case.

Cympha collapses all three into a monthly subscription. The infrastructure is the platform. The operations are the Case Agent on your desktop and the AI coworkers proposing the next move. The capital is a 15-day trial that becomes a flat monthly bill once you start billing doctors.

That is what a Virtual Lab actually is. Not "spin up a portal," not "rent a CAD seat." Each case arrives as a Living Case, and stays one: the 3D data, the timeline of everything that happened to it, the dialogue with the doctor, the intent behind the treatment, and the people who touched it — one object, not five systems. It means you can credibly accept a case from a clinic in another country, deliver it, and get paid, without ever owning a server. And it means you stop lying awake wondering what you forgot to send. A lab this small used to run on permanent low-grade anxiety; being able to hand a doctor work you are proud of, with a record that backs you up, is worth as much as the margin.

You can be running by the end of the afternoon. The rest is the work you came here to do.

Open Cympha LMS at app.cympha.com to start the trial. Cookbook #1 in our series on running modern dental services on Cympha — the next entries cover the clinician's side, lab orchestration at scale, and how AI proposals actually work under the hood.