Reporting on Your Practice: Always Know Where You Stand

In my last post, I talked about how Credenza can help to streamline your practice by aiding with legal research… in my case, helping me actually stick to one of my New Year’s Resolutions. Lucky for me (and you), there are even more ways Credenza simplifies my job - so of course I want to share them with you!

Today we’re going to take a look at Credenza’s report-drafting capabilities. These make it unbelievably easy to see cross-sections and summaries of important practice information.

For example, instead of going from file to file to check if/how many cases I opened in a given month, I can just run one of Credenza’s many reports to give me a summary of what I am looking for. Once you have the data you are seeking, you can easily print it out, save it to Adobe PDF, or export it to Microsoft Excel.

Here is a quick how-to on creating reports through your Credenza:

1. First, click on the Credenza tab in your Outlook.
2. Click on the Reports option. This will launch a new window.
3. In the new window, select from the Files, Time Sheets, Phone Calls, or Billing tabs. Each tab contains more filtering options to choose from, like date ranges, etc. With the Time Sheets tab, you will also be asked what team member you want the information pulled from. This is a great way to see what your group members are doing, or just how busy you’ve been.
4. Click ‘Run Report.’ The report will then open in a new window within your Outlook
5. Click on the report’s File tab to print the report, publish it to PDF or to save it in Excel format.

With Credenza’s vast reporting capabilities, you can easily access the data you want, when you want it, where you want it.

New Year, Better Business: How Credenza Will Help Your New Year’s Resolution

It’s January, meaning it’s time for the classic New Year’s Resolution. While many people commit to eating healthier, saving more money or cutting out stress, I have committed to streamlining my work processes. But unlike those who give up 3 weeks in, I have a secret weapon to guarantee success - and that is my Credenza.

Like many of you, doing research is an integral part of my job. Because I do it so much, research details need to be easy to save, find, and access.

With Credenza, this is a cinch! It stores all research details in the file the material relates to. This makes it really easy for me to see all components of each file. Plus it gives me a snapshot of the big picture: research details are placed right alongside emails, appointment and other items save to the file.

Credenza even has a built-in Research Assistant, making it super easy to do online research from within your Outlook! I use it to look through search engines like Google Scholar, Google Legal and Bing; when I find an article of relevance, I can easily save it to a research article in a single click.

Credenza can’t help you with those last five pounds but it does make it easier to reference and store all of your research.

Adding File and Time Columns

In recent posts I have talked about customizing my Credenza during set-up as well as tailoring certain parts as I get more familiar with the program. Today’s post combines these two things as I share a tip on how to change folders or lists you create to mirror those created on set-up… you’ll see what I mean in a moment.

One very neat feature of Credenza is that File and Time Entry columns are added to most item lists in Outlook. These columns display any associated files and let you know if a time entry has been created giving you a quick summary of work done on any given item.

Now here’s something to keep in mind. These columns are automatically created upon your initial Credenza set-up, but you need to add them yourself to new folders or any additional list views that you create. Sounds time consuming, but I promise it’s really not! It’s just as easy as everything else is with Credenza.

Here is a step by step guide to help walk you through this process.

1.       You will be using the standard Outlook function to perform this task.

2.       Open the list view in which you want the column(s) to appear.

3.       Right-click on the view’s column headings and choose Field Chooser.

4.       Click New.

5.       For the File column, enter the name “File” (or “Matter”, or “Project”, or whichever term you set Credenza to display). Note: leave the type and format set to Text, then click OK.

6.       For the Time Entry column, enter the name “Time?”. Note: leave the type and format set to Text, then click OK.

7.       Drag the new field from the Field Chooser list to the desired position on the column headers.
 

8.       If the term shown for file/matter/project was changed, remove the old column (showing the old term) by simply dragging it off the header row.

And don’t forget, if you remove a column from any view, you can always add it back later. Also, if you ever decide to change the terminology used for files/matters/projects, the column name will change automatically.