Billing Matters Takes On Timeslips And The Billing World

Billing MattersT is the advanced billing system from the makers of Time Matters, the most award-winning, most widely used law office practice management system. An elegant balance of simplicity, flexibility, and power, Billing Matters is designed to manage the full range of billing processes, from the simplest to the most advanced requirements. It is affordable to purchase and maintain, easy to use, flexible and scalable, and best of all comes with award-winning service.

Firms needing basic billing can generate a bill and post a payment in one easy step. Firms needing advanced billing can use split, flat, consolidated and allocated fees, plus trust accounting, budgeting, productivity reporting, and more. Billing Matters includes pre-customized configurations for many practice areas, such as bankruptcy, corporate, elder law, estate planning, insurance defense, intellectual property, personal injury, workers compensation, and more. Billing Matters can easily be further customized for the precise needs of your practice.

With an unlimited number of billing rates, billing codes, clients, and timekeepers, Billing Matters is scalable for professional practices of all sizes and types, and operates in a wide range of technology environments, including Microsoft SQL Server. Billing Matters is uniquely able to accommodate transactional practices, litigation practices, and both, a lifesaver for diverse practices.

Examples of Billing Matters’ flexibility include: three ways to enter time and expenses: 1) Quick Item Entry (fast edit-in-place form), 2) Timesheet (intuitive calendar view), or 3) the traditional Billing Item form (precise and comprehensive). Best of all, you can eliminate errors, lost time, and duplicate entries by billing activities directly from your Calendars, Task tracking, or Matter/Case activities.

If you are already using another billing system, Billing Matters has made it easy to change. For example, unlike other systems where you must send in your confidential billing information to be converted, Billing Matters includes, at no additional cost, a comprehensive Timeslips conversion feature for Timeslips versions 8 through 11. Your Timeslips Clients, Client References, Open Invoice balances, Fund balances, and Unbilled slips are easily converted into Billing Matters using a step-by-step process to get you quickly started with Billing Matters.

Billing Matters lets you control how you enter time and expenses, bill clients and customers, track and report Matter/Case information, manage workflow and tasks, and control the schedules for the entire office. The office-wide Contact and Matter/Case screens are fully customizable, allowing you to collect and track the information you need the way you need it. For example, customization of a data entry field goes beyond changing a field label; you can select from15 different field types and entry form layouts, all selectable from menus without programming or scripting.

With powerful and innovative productivity tools like its Navigators, BillFlowT Manager, Billing Reviewer, Quick Item, and Timesheet Calendar, your billing process is dramatically simplified, and the time it takes to prepare bills is greatly reduced. Most firms that bill time and expenses have a billing process that typically includes printing pre-bills, manually distributing them for review, only to receive piles of pre-bills with an array of sticky notes or manually written billing instructions. Once someone has deciphered the edits, bills are printed and posted. Unfortunately, the piles of pre-bills are often kept in banker boxes, on office floors, or in filing cabinets for future reference. The developers of Billing Matters paid a lot of attention to this process and created a new, highly simplified and streamlined approach around unique features such as the BillFlow Manager and Billing Reviewer.

From the BillFlow Manager, you can filter billing into logical groups, tracking whether it is in review, has been approved for billing, or is being recycled for another time. Unlike most time and billing applications that require printing of the pre-bill to calculate interest and tax, the BillFlow Manager gives you all of your current activity, previous balances, last payment, and last bill date so you can make informed decisions. You can add Clients, edit time and expense, change the billing arrangements, and make adjustments to the bill all without having to print the pre-bill. If you are responsible for reviewing multiple bills, go to the BillFlow Manager to only view those bills that are assigned to you.

In addition to the BillFlow Manager, the Bill Reviewer lets you collaborate with others that are working on the same Matter/Case, all while keeping an audit trail of changes and a thread of the activity regarding the bill. It is longer necessary to save those sticky notes and marked up pre-bill reports, it’s now all in the Bill Reviewer records.

Billing Matters has a real-time, bi-directional synchronizing link to QuickBooksr 2002/2003 Pro, Premier, and Enterprise (US and Canadian versions). Billing Matters will bi-directionally synchronize your Customers and Jobs. Expenses entered in Billing Matters that need to be paid are sent to QuickBooks as a payable. Refunds entered are sent as a check to be printed in QuickBooks. No more double entry. Journals are sent over to QuickBooks updating your checking accounts, customer registers, and more.

Billing Matters ships with a base of over 50 standard reports (with hundreds of variations) that include aging reports for work in progress and accounts receivable, productivity and profitability, write-up/write-down, effective bill rates, fee allocations by client and staff, and GL distribution reporting. The integrated Report and Bill Designer provides users with a virtually unlimited number of reports to get exactly the reports they need. Design tools such as calculated fields, graphics, auto-completing text fields, and guides that align across multiple bands, make report and bill designing easy.

Billing Matters includes many of the best features of the Time Matters practice management software, including true real-time group calendaring and scheduling. Both include a variety of calendar views, such as Daily, Weekly, and Monthly, as well as the Gantt Chart Scheduler view that shows staff vertically and appointments horizontally, and the Parallel view which shows different staff calendars side-by-side.

When it comes to working with Time Matters practice management, Billing Matters is not a separate module with a separate database, like virtually all other products. Billing Matters is totally integrated into the source code and database of Time Matters (and vice versa). While Billing Matters can be purchased separately, it still includes several of Time Matters’ best features, such as Calendars, Task Delegation, Client Relations Management, and Matter/Case Management. Use Billing Matters with or without Time Matters. Time Matters users who purchase Billing Matters get billing and practice management integration so seamless that they don’t install Billing Matters; they simply activate it. Think of Time Matters and Billing Matters as the same application, but with different feature sets activated. Now that’s integration!

Like Time Matters, Billing Matters comes in two Editions: Professional and Enterprise. Features and functionality are nearly identical for the two Editions. The difference is the Enterprise Edition uses the ultra-fast, ultra-reliable Microsoftr SQL Server Database Engine (a free MSDE version of SQL is included for 25 Users or less). Billing Matters is also available in a LexisNexis version with general web research and integrated LexisNexis research.

For more information or to review the list of possible usage scenarios, contact Sales at 800.328.2898, or visit our web site at http://www.billingmatters.com.