Thursday, October 27, 2011

I Can’t Take Your Call – Please Leave A Message

How do you keep track of your phone messages? Does your assistant hand you pink message slips? Do you rely on Post-it notes all over your desk? Are they lost in a notebook somewhere?

With the number of phone calls and messages I receive every day, it gets very hard to keep track of who I need to get back to and what specifically a call was about. That is why I absolutely love how easy Credenza makes it to not only record the details of incoming and outgoing phone calls, but to track the details of voice messages as they are picked up.

And to further simplify life, Credenza also lets you take messages for other team members. Say somebody is out of the office, in a meeting, or just can’t get to the phone, you can take a message on their behalf - right from your Outlook. When you work in a team environment, there is a drop down box (right beside the callback required button) with all of your colleagues’ names. Just select the appropriate person and the message will appear in their list of required callbacks.


Every morning, I come in and go straight to my phone call list. Here I see a complete history of all of my incoming and outgoing communications. And because Credenza runs as a part of Outlook, I can see my phone call notes alongside my emails. I can also see all of my files and a record of all phone calls, even those recorded by my colleagues who are also working on a given file.


And for those days when I know I will out of the office without access to a computer, I simply print off a report showing me all the callbacks I need to place, and take it with me. That way, if I have any spare time, I can return a call or two!

Being able to track messages and record details of incoming and outgoing phone calls has had a very positive impact for me. I am confident in saying that calls are retuned in a timely fashion and I no longer find myself scrambling to gather information or trying to decipher just what that phone message said.

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

It’s Easy to Follow Up with Clients on Overdue Accounts with Credenza Pro

A couple of weeks ago I discovered how easy it is to use Credenza Pro’s Collection Assistant to help me follow up with my firm’s clients on matters that still have outstanding balances.
Last month as I received a couple of checks in payment of invoices that I’d sent out at the beginning of last month, I tracked the incoming payments in Credenza Pro. But I knew that I’d sent out invoices for more than a couple of accounts, which meant that I still had a couple of outstanding bills to collect on.

Not only did the Collection Assistant help me to send out reminder messages to clients who didn’t pay on time, it was a very effective way for me to obtain payment for those unpaid invoices! This was probably because as I was using Credenza to organize my email and calendar, enter time and expenses, as well as keep all of our client matter files in order, the Collection Assistant was never very far away to remind me to collect on our unpaid bills.

So in the Collection Assistant I decided to view all matters for which no payment was received in the last 30 days that had an outstanding balance of at least $0. Up popped a list of delinquent client matter files! Since it showed whether a payment was made at the last payment date or not, I could see just how overdue these payments were. That meant that I had outstanding balances that had remained unpaid for longer than just the most recent month. I knew I had to get busy now and remind these clients to pay our firm so that it could maintain a healthy cash flow.


With one click of my mouse I created late payment reminders for the outstanding client accounts, attaching the pertinent invoices for each. That’s a pretty direct way to remind my clients to pay their overdue accounts, and since I sent payment reminders twice in the last month to these clients with overdue accounts, they paid up. What a great way to reduce our outstanding accounts receivable!

I’ve found that Credenza Pro’s Collection Assistant is easy to access from various points while I’m carrying out my regular work. I can just click on it when I’m in the Billing view of the Billing module. Or else I can choose it right from the Credenza menu.

Using the Collection Assistant has proved to be the most effective way for me to collect on our delinquent accounts in a professional and easy way.

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Batch Billing in Credenza Pro Speeds Up the Billing Process

This morning I decided to take a look at the financial status of my client files in Credenza®, my practice management program in Outlook®. I was pretty sure that I had accumulated quite a bit of work in progress time for many of my files, and that I’d also amassed a lot of expenses in long distance telephone calls and travel that I’d done for one client in particular.

Now since it was the beginning of a fresh new month, it was time to take a look at where I was at from a business point of view and see what work I could create invoices for. I usually like to stay organized and send out my bills at the beginning of each month for previous work done during the past month.

In this blog post I’m going to go through the step-by-step process of creating multiple invoices with one click, through Credenza Pro’s Batch Billing feature.

Before even going into Credenza Pro’s Batch Billing feature, I clicked on the Billing tab to check things out. To my pleasant surprise, I discovered that I could see each client file and how much was billed and what was still outstanding. All I needed to narrow down was how much work I could include on the invoice up to the last day of the previous month. I had worked on a couple of files over the weekend, on October 1st and 2nd, and I wanted to be sure that this time wouldn’t be included in the invoices I was about to prepare.

So I clicked on the Batch Bill tab. Right at the top of the page I could designate that only the Matters with unbilled time or expenses up to the last day of September would be included in my current billing. What a time-saver! I could just plug in the last day of the month, September 30, to get a list of all unbilled time or expenses up to that point! Then I clicked Create Invoices, and within an instant all of the necessary bills for September were created – all I now have to do is just send them out through my Outlook email.

This great feature is probably the biggest time saver for people like me, who regularly send out invoices at the beginning of every month for the previous month’s work. Instead of creating bills one by one and going through the Draft Bill screen, I could quickly create final invoices in one single step.

Just to keep it interesting, there’s another way that Credenza Pro lets me do my billing en masse. I can go to the WIP view of the Billing module that lists all of the unbilled expenses and work in progress, and just click on the Batch Bill button at the bottom of the page. This is a great way to get my invoices out when I bill more frequently than once a month – sometimes it’s just better to get an invoice out to a client as work in progress and expenses warrant it.

In the next blog post, I’ll be writing about Credenza Pro’s Collection Assistant, a useful tool that easily helps me follow up with any client on matters with outstanding balances.

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Web-Based Document Management Improves How Teams Work Together

I work with my colleague Jody on pretty well everything, and we share many of our documents. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, except that she works from home much of the time and can’t access any of my documents as I change them.

We work with Credenza Pro, and each time we use it we’re discovering more about what a great solution it is for us. What I discovered the other day is that we don’t have to email our drafts back and forth to each other anymore. Rather than multiple email attachments, we just save our documents to the files we are working on in Credenza. It’s a lot easier. And, since we’re using Credenza Pro, we save all our shared documents as web documents. I’ll explain why that is so helpful.

In general there are three places you can store your documents in Credenza Pro – on your own PC, on your firm’s server, or on the web. The one that I like the best is the third option, and now Jody and I store all of our shared documents as web documents.  For Credenza this means that the latest Microsoft technologies are used to store the documents on a Windows Azure™ “cloud” server with 256-bit encryption, and it’s super-secure. But for me it just means that everything that I put there is safe, and I never have to worry about them. They’re even backed up for me, so no matter what happens to my computer, I know my documents are available and secure.

One of the best things about sharing documents on the web is that you can have the most recent version regardless of who last edited them or where each member of your team is located. You can access shared documents from a laptop while you’re on the road, collaborate with other professionals who are located in different states, or stay updated on documents that many different users are working on right in the same office. As long as you have an Internet connection, it’s easy to stay updated with your group’s latest projects using Credenza Pro’s web-based document management feature.

Storing all of our documents on the web has really improved how we work together. We both have access to all of our files, and even if we’re working on the same file we know that we’re both going to be updated with the latest version all of the time, no matter who has worked on it. For me this means that I never have to worry that anyone’s changes have been missed.

There’s another little tip that I just discovered today. It’s incredibly easy to save my documents as Credenza web documents, right from inside Microsoft Word. In its “Save” dialog, Word has a list of your “Favorite” places that you save documents. Credenza’s Web Documents appear there as a Favorite – and your full list of client/matter files is available, so you can choose exactly the file to save it to. So right from the standard Word Save dialog you can organize your documents, and make them available online to everyone you’re working with. It really couldn’t be any easier than that.