Practice Management System or Chameleon?

One of Credenza’s notable traits is its chameleon-like qualities. There is vast potential for customization in this program; it isn’t a simple one-size-fits-all practice management solution. You can set it up many different ways so that it meets the needs of all types of professions. Basically, you can customize Credenza so that it works the way you want it to.

When you first set up Credenza, you are prompted to select your profession from a set list (legal, accounting, consulting, or other). Could it get any easier? Well, it does! When you select one of the pre-set professions, Credenza automatically offers you pre-populated lists with industry-specific terminology. Let’s say you select Legal: you will be offered terms such as Cases or Files. Credenza even makes suggestions for related case types and contact roles.

 

And don’t worry, if you don’t see the term you want to use, you can simply create your own. One thing I really like is that you always have the option to change or add terms – and changes are applied to all users, so consistency is not an issue.

Getting too crazy for you? Don’t feel like we are forcing your hand to customize. If you want to keep Credenza the exact same as when you installed it, feel free. One of the most intrinsic parts of this program is that it is ready to go right out of the box, without fuss, muss or intense adaptation.

I’ll leave you with the following thought. I like to think that Credenza gets absorbed by Outlook… you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. This program really does adapt to every environment. So, is Credenza a highly specialized and intuitive practice management system or is it a really cool reptile adapting to its environment?

Organize Your Inbox

In last week’s A File Centric Outlook post, I mentioned that there is a way to set Credenza to automatically move messages out of my inbox into subfolders. This helps me to keep my inbox tidy so that I am better able to stay on top of my email. Of course I could always drag messages out to folders that I've created once I've dealt with it, but why not let Credenza do it for me?

I know my first question when I heard about this was ‘does Credenza know what to name the folders or do I have to specify each folder name?’ The answer is very simple and will save you precious time. Credenza creates a folder for each of your client files, and when you’re ready, moves the emails out of the inbox to the appropriate folder, so you don’t have to do anything!

This really cool feature is very helpful, especially when used to manage not only your incoming but outgoing email as well.

I have my Inbox Control set to move emails from my inbox to their associated folder if the message isn’t marked for follow-up, if it has been in my inbox for five days and if a time entry has been created. Since I have three different criteria set, each one of them must be met before Credenza will move an email. With these controls, I know that messages won’t go unattended and I know exactly where to find them if I need to reference them at a later date.

As I mentioned above, one major plus that Credenza offers is the ability to sort emails from your outbox. I feel like sent items are often overlooked. If you are a lawyer, accountant, or any business professional, you know that it is just as important to keep track of your outgoing messages.

When I want to review my communications for a specific project, all I have to do is go the folder Credenza created and voila! A list of all my received and sent emails.

You can also access all emails pertaining to a specific File - along with phone call details, appointments, tasks, time and expenses - directly from the File. It really is that easy to stay organized and track information in Credenza!

A File Centric Outlook®

Some might say that I am slightly obsessed with order. Before I started using Credenza, my Outlook inbox looked like an overly-segmented organizational diagram. There was an endless list of folders with subfolder and sub-subfolders. Not to mention my list of custom rules that was a mile long.

When you look at how emails are sorted in Outlook, they are generally organized by date, sender, or subject – a more transactional approach. The one thing that always bothered me about this was how there was no way to centrally locate information – not just emails, but associated appointments or contacts. Sure, you can create rules so emails are automatically sent to particular folders as they come in, but that’s as far it goes.

Like many practices out there, I work and think in a file centric manner. If you’re new to our blog or don’t use Credenza yet, you’re probably thinking “if only Outlook were file centric”. Well, with Credenza it is, and it makes it super easy to associate emails to Files! Essentially, Credenza turns Outlook® into a file centric practice management tool. While with Outlook you can use rules to move emails to folders, with Credenza you can easily associate emails to Files - in addition to moving messages to folders named after a specific File (I’ll elaborate on this part in our next post). And it’s up to you whether you want to set future emails to or from the same email address to be automatically associated to the same File.

Since Credenza adds Files to Outlook, I can see all File related material (appointments, contacts, expenses, time entries…) in one place. Just open a File and it is all there.

With Credenza, information is not only organized by sender and recipient, but by project! Now that my emails are organized by File, I can’t imagine having to go back to Outlook’s basic sorting capabilities.

Attention Credenza Customers - A New Update Is Now Available

One of the perks of subscription based software is that any new features or updates are immediately available to you – and at no additional charge! When I came into work last Wednesday, I launched my Outlook and poof – there it was, waiting for me.

Last week’s update included some great new features, many of which came from suggestions submitted by fellow Credenza users. So, a big thank you for sharing your valuable feedback. In case you missed the “what’s included in the update”, here is a quick summary.

1. With Credenza you can generate bills for your fees and expenses. All it takes is a single click and you have a draft bill for your selected time entries. Once you are ready, you can convert the draft bill into an invoice. Now say you get to this point and notice that there is a missed time entry for an appointment that should have been included in the invoice. In the past, you would have had to create a second separate invoice to send to the client. But now, you can simply revert the invoice back to a draft bill, go in and make any necessary adjustments before sending out the invoice. Huge time saver, and much cleaner if I do say so myself!
2. Credenza comes with all types of reports that look at the various cross-sections of your business. My personal favorites were the Client Payment Distribution and the Time and Fee Listing reports. I run them at the end of every week so I can see how much work had been done and how much had been collected. You may have noticed my use of the past tense – favorites were… That’s because of the new Client Profitability report. This report is by far my new favorite! It not only gives me a complete overview of all work, it shows me how much revenue is being contributed by person- in a single report!
3. When creating a bill in Credenza, you will notice that there is a very handy section at the bottom of the screen that totals all fees, expenses and taxes. And now, just below this amount due there is a spot where you can specify what portion (if any) is to be withdrawn from a retainer or trust account. This definitely makes it much easier to use any money in trust or held as a retainer towards bills.
4. The last new feature in this update was a must have. Credenza now allows you to make partial payments from retainer or trust accounts. You either had to have enough money to cover the entire bill in retainer or trust, or you couldn’t use it. Amazing how such a small thing can make such a big difference.

All in all, this update provided some pretty useful features. Enjoy!

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.

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.

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.