There's a Billing Program in my Outlook®

Your email program is probably the last place you’d ever expect to do your bills from. But since Outlook is the place where you spend most of your day, Credenza puts all the tools you need into it for you. It’s very easy to open up the Billing module in the Pro version of Credenza and create an invoice for a client right while you’re working on that client’s file – which is also within Outlook.  As well as tracking your time and expenses in Credenza, you can create draft bills, send invoices, track payments, monitor work-in-progress, manage Trust activity and manage collections. This means that you can use the integrated billing features that are built right into Credenza while you are making phone calls, sending emails, or completing client documents – all from within Outlook.

Where billing-related functionality starts for most users is with recording their time and expenses. Credenza has a Time & Expenses module, seamlessly woven into Outlook. It’s easy to complete Time Entries for any of your Outlook activities, as well as for other activities. There are other built-in features that help you record time in Credenza as you work in your practice. You can run a timer on any email that you send, record the time directly from the recorded phone call feature, record time spent on tasks, or utilize the product’s Time Entry Assistant – that makes a list of everything in Outlook that no time entry was done for. The Time & Expenses Module allows you to see and filter all of your time entries and expenses in a single view.

Credenza Pro’s centralized billing functionality enables users to optionally include all of their recorded time entries and expenses on client invoices. When it’s time to bill a client, a number of filtering options let users decide what criteria to choose in order to produce a draft bill – as well as what information to include on the bill. Once a draft bill has been checked and finalized, Credenza Pro creates the final bill and then handles emailing it to the client.

When a client emails about the status of their bill, you can find the answers - right from within their Outlook. Within the Billing module, Credenza Pro offers users the option of seeing different financial and Work in Progress information related to their Files. Users can select either the Billing view that shows a history of all invoices and payments, or the Work In Progress view that lists all unbilled WIP time.  And of course track all the payments.

And if clients are slow to pay, there’s another useful tool: Credenza Pro’s Collections Assistant. This handy tool quickly finds all files that have a balance owing and offers the option to create a Late Payment Reminder, making Credenza Pro the complete practice management tool that professionals value to run their practice.