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.
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Client Service Gets Cutting Edge with Credenza Pro
Credenza Pro is great when your client calls and you need to know what everyone in your firm is doing on their case. It’s as easy as opening a shared file in Outlook and seeing the whole firm’s work listed and updated in real time, right while you are on the phone with a client.
Let’s say you are using just Outlook, and your client calls and wants to be updated on their file that has been on the back burner for a while. To refresh your memory, you quickly look to your inbox for recent correspondence from your client. Maybe you moved all the messages for that file to a folder, so you check there. Still nothing new, so you look through your calendar. But it’s hard to tell from there what file each appointment is related to. Now you scan your task list because you remember completing a task recently on the file. Next you put your client on hold and call your partner. You ask her if she has done anything recently on this matter. She repeats this process with her own Outlook, and lets you know of a couple of things that have been happening. It took several minutes and you had to put the client on hold, but you’ve been able to piece together the details – you hope.
Now let’s say you are using Outlook with Credenza Pro and your client calls in. Without having to hunt for details, you just open the client’s file in Outlook – where you see everything you need to know. You not only see what you’ve been doing on the file, but you can also see anything that your partner or assistant has been working on related to it as well. When files are shared, all of the common information on files is also shared – such as emails that firm members send relating to files, any appointments that are associated to them, or tasks that relate to them. Any changes made to any shared file are immediately updated on everyone else’s Credenza Pro. Unlike the experience above, it didn’t take you any time to get up to date on the file and without missing a beat you can fill your client in on the details.
Information-sharing with Credenza Pro is both secure and simple to use. Our last blog post described many of the product’s hybrid-cloud features and the security of being hosted in the cloud with Microsoft® Azure. Information-sharing in Credenza Pro occurs when a file is assigned to more than one firm member – it’s that easy. The flexibility afforded by Credenza Pro’s multi-user practice management feature enables sharing with one user or hundreds of users – it’s completely scalable. And Credenza Pro not only facilitates collaboration among people in your office, it also allows your team to work together no matter where in the world they are located.
Shared tasks and notes are important elements of successful collaboration, and with Credenza Pro users can delegate and keep track of the status of everyone’s task completion within their team. Group calendaring is simple in Credenza Pro as well – since appointments associated with a file are shared with all users who have been given access to that file. Each team member’s calendar is visible to other members of the team in that case, and it’s easy to drag-and-drop changed appointments to other users’ calendars to keep everyone updated.
Credenza Pro not only takes the security of sharing information in the cloud seriously, it takes privacy seriously as well. Any emails, appointments or documents not associated to client files will not be shared with other Credenza Pro members, ensuring that your personal information within Outlook remains completely private. Security access in Credenza Pro is determined on a per client file basis, and files can be marked Private to restrict all information to your own access. This means that with Credenza Pro you can rest assured that not only will all of your clients’ confidential matters remain secure in Microsoft® Azure, your own personal information in Outlook will always remain private.
With the proliferation of professionals working either from home, off-site locations or from offices in different regions, multi-user collaboration on files, tasks, emails and calendaring has become commonplace. Credenza Pro ensures optimal customer service for your client by making it so easy to locate real-time, up-to-date information on a File. At just $24.95/month, it’s also the most cost-effective collaborative practice management tool on the market today.
Let’s say you are using just Outlook, and your client calls and wants to be updated on their file that has been on the back burner for a while. To refresh your memory, you quickly look to your inbox for recent correspondence from your client. Maybe you moved all the messages for that file to a folder, so you check there. Still nothing new, so you look through your calendar. But it’s hard to tell from there what file each appointment is related to. Now you scan your task list because you remember completing a task recently on the file. Next you put your client on hold and call your partner. You ask her if she has done anything recently on this matter. She repeats this process with her own Outlook, and lets you know of a couple of things that have been happening. It took several minutes and you had to put the client on hold, but you’ve been able to piece together the details – you hope.
Now let’s say you are using Outlook with Credenza Pro and your client calls in. Without having to hunt for details, you just open the client’s file in Outlook – where you see everything you need to know. You not only see what you’ve been doing on the file, but you can also see anything that your partner or assistant has been working on related to it as well. When files are shared, all of the common information on files is also shared – such as emails that firm members send relating to files, any appointments that are associated to them, or tasks that relate to them. Any changes made to any shared file are immediately updated on everyone else’s Credenza Pro. Unlike the experience above, it didn’t take you any time to get up to date on the file and without missing a beat you can fill your client in on the details.
Information-sharing with Credenza Pro is both secure and simple to use. Our last blog post described many of the product’s hybrid-cloud features and the security of being hosted in the cloud with Microsoft® Azure. Information-sharing in Credenza Pro occurs when a file is assigned to more than one firm member – it’s that easy. The flexibility afforded by Credenza Pro’s multi-user practice management feature enables sharing with one user or hundreds of users – it’s completely scalable. And Credenza Pro not only facilitates collaboration among people in your office, it also allows your team to work together no matter where in the world they are located.
Shared tasks and notes are important elements of successful collaboration, and with Credenza Pro users can delegate and keep track of the status of everyone’s task completion within their team. Group calendaring is simple in Credenza Pro as well – since appointments associated with a file are shared with all users who have been given access to that file. Each team member’s calendar is visible to other members of the team in that case, and it’s easy to drag-and-drop changed appointments to other users’ calendars to keep everyone updated.
Credenza Pro not only takes the security of sharing information in the cloud seriously, it takes privacy seriously as well. Any emails, appointments or documents not associated to client files will not be shared with other Credenza Pro members, ensuring that your personal information within Outlook remains completely private. Security access in Credenza Pro is determined on a per client file basis, and files can be marked Private to restrict all information to your own access. This means that with Credenza Pro you can rest assured that not only will all of your clients’ confidential matters remain secure in Microsoft® Azure, your own personal information in Outlook will always remain private.
With the proliferation of professionals working either from home, off-site locations or from offices in different regions, multi-user collaboration on files, tasks, emails and calendaring has become commonplace. Credenza Pro ensures optimal customer service for your client by making it so easy to locate real-time, up-to-date information on a File. At just $24.95/month, it’s also the most cost-effective collaborative practice management tool on the market today.
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Credenza Pro is a Secure Cloud Solution Backed by Microsoft® Azure
There are a number of reasons why some people are choosing cloud solutions. For some, it is the “pay-as-you-go” subscription model that is attractive. For others, it’s the security and data safety considerations that stand out. For still others, the lure of moving to the cloud is having no setup required to get their practice management systems up and running.
Credenza Pro, launched in August 2011, is a new cloud-based practice management system that wins on all three counts. Its central database is securely hosted in Microsoft Azure – and data hosting just doesn’t get any more secure than that. You may have already heard that Credenza Pro is just $24.95/month. And since it’s a cloud solution with its user interface in Outlook® - the program most PC-based professionals already use in their practices - it’s extremely simple to use and doesn’t require any setup!
As a cloud solution, Credenza Pro can be accessed from anywhere in the world using just an Internet connection and Outlook. As long as you have an Internet connection you can use Credenza Pro, and share information with other users. Users with any questions can contact Credenza’s support department, since all updates and unlimited technical support are included in the Credenza Pro subscription.
Credenza Pro is a new way for professionals to share practice information in the cloud. In Credenza Pro when one person puts information on a File, everyone who is sharing that File information can access it – but the personal information of each user remains private. Whether your team is 2 or 200, you can share documents, billing, execute group calendaring and task delegation, and access common emails on each file without ever worrying that the privacy of your information has been breached.
Most importantly, with Credenza Pro you don’t have to worry about the security of your data at all. The world-leading security of Microsoft Azure guarantees optimum uptime and ensures that all Credenza Pro data is automatically backed up on redundant servers. You can relax in the knowledge that the Credenza Pro database on your own local computer is fully encrypted to protect your information. When you utilize the product’s multi-user practice management feature, Microsoft’s central database enables the synchronization of that information with other users. As a valued provider who supports Credenza’s vision, Microsoft recently produced a case study showcasing Credenza’s use of Microsoft technologies.
Customers call Credenza Pro the best of both worlds, which enables collaboration with colleagues and web-accessible practice management using Outlook when online – while still allowing users to use Outlook with all of their own data when they are offline.
In upcoming blog posts we’ll be highlighting some of Credenza Pro’s other features like multi-user practice management, billing and collections, web-based document management, fast and easy system-wide search, and batch billing. Stay tuned!
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
What's New - Credenza Basic & Credenza Pro
Our users have spoken and we’ve responded with our new Credenza blog. Now you can keep tabs on Credenza through regular postings in this blog, which we call “Improve your Outlook”. We’ll feature tips and tricks on getting the most out of Credenza, industry news, and provide a window into the inner workings here at Team Credenza.
Margaret Khomenko is behind the initiative, and her insight and wit will provide for an interesting read.
We welcome your comments on the blog or you can send them directly to Margaret or anyone on the team at info@credenzasoft.com. Don’t be shy, we’d love to hear from you.
What’s New – Credenza Basic & Credenza Pro
While the fact that we have a blog is exciting, it isn’t the biggest news around here. More importantly, we just recently announced some exciting changes with the release of Credenza Basic and Credenza Pro.
Credenza Basic is a powerful FREE product that transforms Outlook into a practice management tool, with organization for email, appointments, tasks, documents, notes, research and phone calls around client matters, files or projects. Credenza Basic can also track the time spent on each activity, which in turn can be sent to your accounting system. Credenza basic supports single users.
Credenza Pro takes Credenza to a new level by adding billing, collections and trust functionality. The billing capabilities mean that you can create bills, send out invoices, track payments, manage trust and retainer balances, monitor WIP, batch bill, and more. Credenza Pro also provides full multi-user practice management, allowing the sharing of practice information with some or all of the members of your firm. It adds many collaboration tools, internet-based document management and centralized billing for a firm. Because it uses a secure hosted central database, users can connect regardless of their location.
Visit the new feature tour pages on the site for Credenza Basic and Credenza Pro. We’ve also added a new comparison chart on our site so you can understand the differences.
Did we mention Credenza Basic is FREE? Credenza Basic users can update to Credenza Pro at any time for only $24.95 per user per month.
We now have a phone number!
You might also notice a new phone number on our site. You can now reach our sales team at 888-444-1224 or 416-203-9087, or of course via email at sales@credenzasoft.com. Please note that this number does not go through to support – you still need to do an email or online support request for that. We do a great deal of our support by telephone, but we can help our customers better by managing inbound requests through the web.
Margaret Khomenko is behind the initiative, and her insight and wit will provide for an interesting read.
We welcome your comments on the blog or you can send them directly to Margaret or anyone on the team at info@credenzasoft.com. Don’t be shy, we’d love to hear from you.
What’s New – Credenza Basic & Credenza Pro
While the fact that we have a blog is exciting, it isn’t the biggest news around here. More importantly, we just recently announced some exciting changes with the release of Credenza Basic and Credenza Pro.
Credenza Basic is a powerful FREE product that transforms Outlook into a practice management tool, with organization for email, appointments, tasks, documents, notes, research and phone calls around client matters, files or projects. Credenza Basic can also track the time spent on each activity, which in turn can be sent to your accounting system. Credenza basic supports single users.
Credenza Pro takes Credenza to a new level by adding billing, collections and trust functionality. The billing capabilities mean that you can create bills, send out invoices, track payments, manage trust and retainer balances, monitor WIP, batch bill, and more. Credenza Pro also provides full multi-user practice management, allowing the sharing of practice information with some or all of the members of your firm. It adds many collaboration tools, internet-based document management and centralized billing for a firm. Because it uses a secure hosted central database, users can connect regardless of their location.
Visit the new feature tour pages on the site for Credenza Basic and Credenza Pro. We’ve also added a new comparison chart on our site so you can understand the differences.
Did we mention Credenza Basic is FREE? Credenza Basic users can update to Credenza Pro at any time for only $24.95 per user per month.
We now have a phone number!
You might also notice a new phone number on our site. You can now reach our sales team at 888-444-1224 or 416-203-9087, or of course via email at sales@credenzasoft.com. Please note that this number does not go through to support – you still need to do an email or online support request for that. We do a great deal of our support by telephone, but we can help our customers better by managing inbound requests through the web.
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