The "Save and New" button

In all of the “entry” type windows in TurboLaw Time and Billing you will find the humble Save & New button sitting right up next to the Save & Close button. For many people, the Save & Close button is all you need – after all, once you are done entering something (such as a time entry, an expense, or a payment) you are typically done and don’t need to enter the same thing again.

However, let’s suppose that you’ve got a list of things you need to enter – maybe a list of work you’ve done during the day but didn’t get around to entering into TurboLaw Time and Billing yet. This is where the Save & New button can really save you some effort.

The Save & New button does basically the same thing as the Save & Close button – except, as its name suggests, after you click it, instead of closing the window, it clears the window and makes it ready for you to enter a new item again immediately.

Let’s take the example of having a list of work you’ve done during the day. You might think that in order to enter all these time entries into the program, you would have to:

• Double-click your client’s name from the list of clients
• Click the Time/Work drop-down button and select Enter New
• Enter the time
• Click Save & Close for the time entry window
• Click the Time/Work drop-down button again and select Enter New
• Enter some more time
• Click Save & Close for the time entry window
• Click Save & Close for the client window
• Start over again with the next client you did work for

That’s a lot of clicking! Fortunately, you don’t have to do it that way - thanks to the Save & New button, you can save yourself a lot of time and effort. Starting from the Home screen, you could instead:

• Click the Enter Time/Expense button and choose Enter Time
• Enter the time
• Click Save & New
• Enter more time… and repeat as many times as you need.

As you can see, that is a lot less clicking! Thanks to the humble Save & New button, you don’t have to keep going all over the program – you can stay in the same window and enter multiple items (time, expenses, payments, etc.) all without ever leaving the same screen.

This is just an example of one of the many ways that TurboLaw Time and Billing was designed to help save you time and effort in completing your billing. After all, wouldn’t you rather spend your time doing something else?

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To help with this, we are going to be posting a series of articles that describe step-by-step how to produce the same reports you’re used to from your old billing system in TurboLaw Time and Billing.

Displaying an “Aging Report” in TurboLaw Time and Billing

In today’s article, we’re going to show you how to display what other billing programs might call an “aging report.”

Step 1: Switch to the Bills view by clicking Bills from the left-hand navigation bar.

Step 2: Using the options at the bottom of the left-hand navigation bar, choose to see bills grouped by Age.

That’s it! The bills you see are now grouped by age, so you can see at a glance how many bills are in each age category, and what the totals are for each age category. This is what some programs might call an “aging report.”

You can also print this view by clicking the File menu and choosing Print.

As always, our goal is to make TurboLaw Time and Billing as easy to use as possible – and that includes making it easy to switch to TurboLaw Time and Billing from another billing program. If you have questions about how to produce a report from your old billing program in TurboLaw Time and Billing, feel free to ask us!

No related posts.

To help with this, we are going to be posting a series of articles that describe step-by-step how to produce the same reports you’re used to from your old billing system in TurboLaw Time and Billing.

How to Produce a “Client Recap” Report in TurboLaw Time and Billing

What some billing programs might call a “Client Recap,” TurboLaw Time and Billing calls “Account History.”

TurboLaw Time and Billing makes it very easy to see a “client recap” report for a particular client.

Step 1: Open the client you wish to view the recap report for.

Step 2: Click the Account History button.

That’s it! The account history window is the TurboLaw Time and Billing equivalent to a “Client Recap” report in some other billing programs. You can view the account history as either a “tree” type view (with items “grouped” into 4 main groups) or as a grid (like a check register). You can also  print both views by clicking the Print button.

As always, our goal is to make TurboLaw Time and Billing as easy to use as possible – and that includes making it easy to switch to TurboLaw Time and Billing from another billing program. If you have questions about how to produce a report from your old billing program in TurboLaw Time and Billing, feel free to ask us!

No related posts.

To help with this, we are going to be posting a series of articles that describe step-by-step how to produce the same reports you’re used to from your old billing system in TurboLaw Time and Billing.

How to Produce MTD or YTD “Billed by Client” or “Billed by Time Keeper” Reports in TurboLaw Time and Billing

In today’s article, we’re going to describe how to produce a class of reports, and not just one particular report. Specifically, we’re going to show you how to produce MTD (month-to-date) or YTD (year-to-date) “Billed by Client” or “Billed by Time Keeper” (what TurboLaw Time and Billing calls “Staff Member”) reports.

Although TurboLaw Time and Billing doesn’t let you restrict the displayed information to just a particular range of dates (e.g., YTD or MTD), you can easily export the data you see on your screen into a program such as Microsoft Excel, which is capable of very advanced data manipulation and display – including the desired MTD or YTD reports.

In general, it is possible to pull up these types of reports in Excel in just a minute or two.

Step 1: From the Home screen, click the Add/Edit Work Items button to bring up the Time/Work window.

Step 2: From the Time/Work window, click the Export button and save the exported data on your computer.

Step 3: Open the file you just saved with your preferred spreadsheet program (e.g., Microsoft Excel).

Step 4: Now that you have the data in Excel, you can bring Excel’s advanced filtering and reporting tools to bear on it. Just select the columns you would like to filter by, and then click the Sort and Filter button in Excel.

Step 5: Set the filtering options you would like on the columns you have selected. You can do this by clicking the little drop-down type box which appears in the heading of each column.

Above: the Date column showing the filter drop-down button

Above: the filter drop-down lets you filter dates in any way you like. In this picture, we are filtering for YTD (year-to-date).

Above: you can also filter by name. In this picture, we are filtering by client name.

That’s it! Now your data is filtered to be either MTD or YTD, as well as restricted by client or time keeper (what TurboLaw Time and Billing calls “Staff member”).

You can print this data directly from Excel, or use it to perform other manipulations on the data – for example, you might want it to sum  up the Amount column.

Of course, there are no limits on what you can do to the report – Excel provides a tremendous number of tools for analyzing data such as this. The only real limit is your imagination as to what sorts of reports you’d like to see!

As always, our goal is to make TurboLaw Time and Billing as easy to use as possible – and that includes making it easy to switch to TurboLaw Time and Billing from another billing program. If you have questions about how to produce a report from your old billing program in TurboLaw Time and Billing, feel free to ask us!

No related posts.

To help with this, we are going to be posting a series of articles that describe step-by-step how to produce the same reports you’re used to from your old billing system in TurboLaw Time and Billing.

How to Produce an “Open Slips” Report in TurboLaw Time and Billing

In today’s article, we’re going to explain how to produce what some billing programs call an “open slips” report.

In TurboLaw Time and Billing, what other programs might call an “open slip” we call simply an “unbilled” item. Here’s how to see a list of unbilled items.

Step 1: From the Home screen, click the Add/Edit Work Items button.

This will bring up the Time and Expenses window.

Step 2: Click the Status column to sort the items by status (billed or unbilled). You’ll have to click the column twice if you want unbilled items to appear first (the first click sorts the list alphabetically, the second click reverses the sort).

Once the list is sorted, you are looking at your report of unbilled items – in other words, the “open slips.”

You can either print this report (click the Print button) or use the Copy or Export buttons to copy the list to another program or save it as a file for further modification.

That’s it! That’s how you pull up a report of unbilled items in TurboLaw Time and Billing – what other programs might call an “open slips” report.

Pro Tip: the steps above will show unbilled items for all clients – if you want to restrict your report to the unbilled items for just one client, first open that client’s window and choose the Edit Time/Work option as shown here:

This will display the same window, but the items shown will be only for that one client.

As always, our goal is to make TurboLaw Time and Billing as easy to use as possible – and that includes making it easy to switch to TurboLaw Time and Billing from another billing program. If you have questions about how to produce a report from your old billing program in TurboLaw Time and Billing, feel free to ask us!

No related posts.

To help with this, we are going to be posting a series of articles that describe step-by-step how to produce the same reports you’re used to from your old billing system in TurboLaw Time and Billing.

Displaying an “Open Invoice” Report in TurboLaw Time and Billing

In today’s article, we’re going to show how to display an “Open Invoice” report in TurboLaw Time and Billing.

In TurboLaw Time and Billing, “Invoices” are called simply “Bills,” and bills can be either Open (Unpaid) or Closed (Paid). Here’s how to bring up a list of Open (Unpaid) Bills, or what other programs might call “Open Invoices.”

Step 1: Switch to the Bills view by clicking Bills from the left-hand navigation bar.

Step 2: Using the options at the bottom of the left-hand navigation bar, choose to see Unpaid Bills. You can choose to group the bills in any way you want – for simplicity in this example we choose No Grouping to produce just a simple list of bills.

The list you see will be all of your open (unpaid) bills – that is to say, all of your “open invoices.” You can print this list by clicking the File menu and choosing Print.

That’s it! That’s how you bring up what other billing programs would call an “Open Invoices” report in TurboLaw Time and Billing.

As always, our goal is to make TurboLaw Time and Billing as easy to use as possible – and that includes making it easy to switch to TurboLaw Time and Billing from another billing program. If you have questions about how to produce a report from your old billing program in TurboLaw Time and Billing, feel free to ask us!

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One of our customers, a former user of Timeslips, called asking if she could print worksheets in TurboLaw Time and Billing. If you’ve been wondering the same thing – here’s your answer!

Our customer explained that the type of “worksheet” she used to print was just a list (a grid, really) of the time/expenses for a particular client or staff member. Since TurboLaw Time and Billing allows you to print just about anything you see on your screen, all you need to do is just bring up a list of the time/expenses for a client or staff member and you can print that out as a “worksheet.”

For a client, you do this by first double-clicking the client’s name from the Clients list. Then, click either the Time/Work button or the Expenses button (circled in red in the picture below), and choose Edit Time/Work or Edit Expenses.

This will open a new window which shows you the time and expenses for this client.

Note the Print button (we’ve circled it in red) in the top-left corner of the window – this means that you can print what you see on the screen!

Just click the Print button to print out the list that you see – this is your worksheet! (You can also choose Print Preview and save the results as a PDF, or add watermarks, headings, and other options – or choose Page Setup to make changes to the page margins.)

If you would rather see the time and expenses for a particular staff member, just switch to the Staff list, select the staff member you’d like to view work for and then click on View Work (circled in red in the picture below).

The same sort of window will open up as shown previously, except now it will list time and expense entries for that staff member, instead of for a client. You can print the list just the same as before.

TurboLaw Time and Billing allows you to print just about anything you see in the program – most windows have a Print button in the upper-left corner, and if you see a print button – you can print what you see!

Although the terminology used in TurboLaw Time and Billing is sometimes different from other billing programs (we try to stick with “plain English”), you’ll find that you can still do most – if not all – of the same things. Of course if you are not sure how to do something, just contact us and we’ll be happy to help you!

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By default, TurboLaw Time and Billing saves everything you enter into a file called “TurboLawBilling Database.mdb,” and it saves this file in your My Documents folder, in a folder called TurboLaw Time and Billing. This one file contains everything you’ve ever entered into the program – staff, clients, time, expenses, payments, and bills.

The TurboLaw Time and Billing Folder.

A sample TurboLaw Time and Billing database file.

When it comes time to make a backup of files on your computer, or if you just want to share your data with another user in your office, this file can be easily backed up or shared with other users just as you would share any other file on your computer.

Although this data file is called a “database,” it’s also a file – which means you can treat it just like other files on your computer. You also don’t need a special database server to share it with other users in your office – just put it wherever you share your other files.

You can open a TurboLaw Time and Billing data file by using the File > Open menu. TurboLaw Time and Billing remembers the last file you opened and will keep opening that same file each time you open the program, unless you choose to open a different file.

You can also save a copy of your TurboLaw Time and Billing data file by using the File > Save As menu. When you do this, TurboLaw Time and Billing creates a copy of your data file, and then opens that new copy.

Being able to treat your TurboLaw Time and Billing database as a file is just another way we’ve worked to keep the program simple and easy-to-use.

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Although virtually every computer has some sort of calculator program built-in, it might take you a few seconds to bring it up – or even longer if you’re not sure where where it is. Fortunately, TurboLaw Time and Billing has its own calculator built right into the program, and bringing it up is as easy as clicking a button.

The Calculator in TurboLaw Time and Billing

In any place where you’d type a dollar amount (for example, when entering an expense) you can click the drop-down arrow button on the right side of the box to bring up the in-place calculator.

This calculator works just like most desk calculators, so you can use it to add up expenses quickly (perhaps if you are consolidating them) or just to do any other quick calculation you might need.

This is just another example of our attention to detail in TurboLaw Time and Billing. Using the calculator in your computer or on your desk might not take much longer, but those seconds can add up – and if you have trouble finding your calculator, that little bit of frustration you feel can add up too.

“Easy to use” means more than just making a program simple, it also means making it convenient, and we strive to provide that convenience to you in every aspect of our program.

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Although TurboLaw Time and Billing saves everything you enter, sometimes you’d also like to have a paper printout. Fortunately, this is very easy to accomplish in TurboLaw Time and Billing. Almost every screen you see has a Print button which you can use to print whatever you are currently viewing. Here are a few of the print buttons from various windows in TurboLaw Time and Billing:

You can print individual items (such as a client’s entry, a time entry, an expense entry, or a payment entry) or you can print out a list of items (such as the list of clients, the list of time & expenses, or the list of bills).

The Print button also gives you all the usual printing options you’d expect – printer setup, page size, etc. – as well as offering you a Print Preview option, which opens the standard TurboLaw Time and Billing Print Preview window.

The Print Preview Window (click for larger image)

From the Print Preview window, you can not only print what you see to your printer, but you can also export what you see to any of the different file formats that TurboLaw Time and Billing supports – such as PDF, plain text, RTF (for Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, OpenOffice, or any other word processing program), or even as an image.

Supported file formats for exporting (click for larger image)

As you can see, TurboLaw Time and Billing can be used to print much more than just bills and statements. As always, we encourage you to use the program however you see fit and in whatever way best suits your firm’s business.

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