Posts tagged ‘time and billing’

Once again, we’re very proud to announce the release of a new version of TurboLaw Time and Billing. This new version (version 1.24) contains a number of behind-the-scenes improvements, as well as some changes based on actual feedback and suggestions we’ve received from our customers.

In particular, the new features are:

• When using the Stopwatch window, there is now a drop-down box so you can select the client you are recording time for. (When you click Stop and Save, the selected client will carry over to the Enter Time window as well.)
• New Report: we’ve added a new report to the Reports window, called “All Bills.” This report (as its name suggests) shows you all bills, both paid and unpaid.
• The list of reports is now sorted alphabetically by name.
• The Account History window will now remember if you maximized it previously, and open that way again in the future.
• The Enter Time and Enter Expense windows can now be opened independently from the Home screen or from the left-hand nav bar. (Previously, once these windows were opened, you would have to close the window before you could do anything else with the program; now you can open other windows and switch back and forth as desired.)
• If you have time or expense entries which have no category (perhaps because you deleted that category), these items will now appear in lists as “Uncategorized” instead of the more generic labels of “Time” or “Work.”

It’s been a busy summer here at TurboLaw Software, and we’re very pleased to announce the results of all that work: TurboLaw Time and Billing version 1.23! This new version is going to be a big deal for a lot of people, as we’ve incorporated many new features and enhancements that have been directly requested by our users and which really do make everyday tasks faster and easier to perform.

Click on any of the headings below to read more about that particular feature.

Custom Billing Rates

One new feature that’s going to have a lot of people very excited is Custom Billing Rates. Starting with this version of Time and Billing, you can now set a different billing rate for a client or matter.

Custom billing rates will allow you to handle many different situations, such as old clients who still get your older, lower rate, clients who get a discounted rate, or matters that you bill for at a different rate than usual. Whatever the situation, you can now handle it by setting a custom billing rate.

Windows 7 Jump Lists

Another handy new feature that will help you save time is the addition of support for Windows 7 “jump list” commands. Jump lists are new to Windows 7, and they allow you to quickly perform certain actions by right-clicking a program’s icon in the Windows Task Bar (they also give you additional shortcuts if the program’s icon is on your start menu).

With the jump list commands in TurboLaw Time and Billing, you can open the stopwatch, create a new client, enter time and expenses, or perform a search – even if Time and Billing isn’t open on your screen! We love shortcuts here at TurboLaw, and we hope you will too.

Additional Reports

In this version of Time and Billing, we’ve added some new reports to the reporting section of the program. These two new reports are “All Time (billed and unbilled)” and “All Expenses (billed and unbilled).” These two new reports, along with the report filtering options, allow you to create many more types of reports to suit your needs. For example, you can use the new “All Time” report, combine it with filtering by a specific staff member and a specific day, and you now have a report of all the time that has been entered by that person on that day.

New Way To Enter Time

While we’re sure most people are comfortable entering time as hours (e.g., 1.5 hours), sometimes it is handy to be able to enter time more “naturally” (e.g., 00:14:00 for entering 14 minutes). This is especially important when you’re trying to capture more of the smaller tasks you do each day. To help with this, we’ve added the ability to enter time as hours, minutes, and seconds directly from the “Enter Time” window. Now you can type in exactly how much time you spent, without having to convert it to hours in your head.

Separate User Templates

In this version, we’ve revised the way the bill and statement window works – now, templates are separated into “built-in” templates and “user” templates. This way, if you customize a template, it is considered one of the “user” templates instead of potentially overwriting one of the built-in templates. This way, you can customize templates to your heart’s content without ever worrying about accidentally deleting or messing up one of the built-in templates.

There are also a number of other, smaller improvements in this version:

• When adding existing items to an existing bill, you can now add more than one item at a time
• Improved the sorting of items on a bill when they all occur on the exact same date
• Fixed a problem where the “bill total” would not appear on the screen if your computer screen’s DPI setting was set higher than 100%
• Added some self-repair capability for the rare cases when the user’s settings file becomes corrupted

As you can tell, we’re pretty excited about all the new features in this new version – and we hope you will be, too. This new version is available immediately – as long as you haven’t turned off automatic updates, you should receive a notification shortly after you open the program (it may take a little while, depending on your Internet connection speed).

TurboLaw Time and Billing version 1.22 has just been released with some great new features based on feedback from our customers.

The new features in this version are:

• Automatic updates: when an update is available, TurboLaw Time and Billing will download it for you, and if you don’t click to install it yourself, the next time you open Time and Billing, the update will be installed automatically, so you always have the latest version.
• New Templates: we’ve updated some of the default bill templates as well as added a totally new one, called “Acme.” This is a very simple, plain template that works well if you just need something straightforward for your bills – but it’s also a great starting point for creating your own custom template.
• Sample data: speaking of templates, when you are customizing a bill or statement template, when you click on the “Preview” tab you will now see your template with some sample data so you can get a better idea of how it will look.
• No more pop-up balloon tips: when you start TurboLaw Time and Billing, you will no longer see a pop-up balloon asking if you’ve noticed the icon which appears in your notification area (a.k.a. the system tray).
• No more minimizing when clicking the “close” button: now, when you click the red “X” close button, TurboLaw Time and Billing will close, instead of minimizing itself as it previously did.
• User-selectable spell-check language: instead of trying to guess which dialect of English you are using, TurboLaw Time and Billing now defaults to US English and you can select from several other variations (e.g., UK English) from the Options & Settings window.

As always, we hope that you enjoy this latest release of TurboLaw Time and Billing and all the new features and improvements we’ve made.

p.s. If you don’t already have TurboLaw Time and Billing, be sure to check out our free trial!

We’ve just released version 1.21 of TurboLaw Time and Billing. This release is primarily a maintenance release, focusing mostly on some very minor issues. Although primarily a maintenance release, there are 2 new features in this release, and we do highly recommend that all users install this update once your software notifies you (watch for the notification in the bottom of your TurboLaw Time and Billing window!).

The 2 new features in this version are:

• In the Account History window, if your client has matters listed, these matters will have a subtotal, just like the top-level items in this window.
• In the Clients window, we’ve added a new column for Client ID which will either show your custom client ID number (if you’ve entered one), or TurboLaw Time and Billing’s own internal ID number if there is nothing else to display. This column can also be sorted, so you can use your client ID number to find clients quickly.

Both of these new features are the result of customer suggestions – so if you have suggestions or ideas of your own, please don’t hesitate to let us know!

Once again, we here at TurboLaw are very excited to announce a major new release of our simple, easy-to-use time and billing software, TurboLaw Time and Billing version 1.20! This is a major new version of TurboLaw Time and Billing, and includes some exciting new features that make it even easier to manage your firm’s billing and timekeeping.

New feature: Reports

The biggest new feature in version 1.20 is the new Reports module. This new module, which can be found on the left-hand navigation bar (right next to “Graphs”) allows you to pull up various reports on how your firm is doing.

The available reports include:

• Received payments
• How much have I billed, overall
• Billed Expenses
• Billed Time
• Unbilled Expenses
• Unbilled Time
• Paid bills
• Voided bills

All of these reports can be filtered by date, as well as other options such as including or excluding certain clients, staff members, or categories. Most reports also include the ability to “group” the results so that you can see, for example, all of your billed time, grouped by client.

In addition, all of the reports can be printed, previewed directly on your screen, or saved to one of several formats, including PDF, RTF (an editable document format), plain-text, Microsoft Excel, or CSV.

New feature: Export to LEDES

Another major new feature in this version of TurboLaw Time and Billing is the ability to export a bill to LEDES 1998B format. This format (which stands for “legal electronic data exchange standard”) is used to submit bills electronically. With version 1.20, you can now click the Export to LEDES button when viewing a bill to save it to this format, so that you can submit it electronically.

Other improvements

This version of TurboLaw Time and Billing also includes a number of other improvements:

• When viewing a graph, the labels along the X-axis will now automatically rotate 45 degrees when there are more than 5 labels to help make it easier to read (so that the labels don’t overlap one another).
• When merging data from another TurboLaw Time and Billing database file, the program can now detect when two entries are identical so that unnecessary duplicates are not created.
• There are a number of behind-the-scenes improvements to the Time and Billing database to significantly reduce the (already small) chance of file corruption when opening a file on an unreliable network connection (e.g., a wireless network).
• The bill and statement template editors as well as the print preview windows have received a graphical update.

As always, your TurboLaw Time and Billing program will check for updates automatically and notify you when a new update is available. Just watch for the pop-up balloon, or for this message at the bottom of your screen:

Many of the new features in this version of TurboLaw Time and Billing were inspired by feedback we received from our users, but we are always looking for more ways to improve the program – so if you have any ideas, suggestions, or other thoughts, please let us know what you think. (If you don’t have TurboLaw Time and Billing yet, you can try it for free for 30 days.)

We hope you enjoy this latest version of TurboLaw Time and Billing!

The latest version of TurboLaw Time and Billing, Version 1.19, contains some new features that were implemented based on suggestions and feedback we received from you!

The most anticipated new feature is the ability to add a client’s “account balance” to a bill. Previously, to show a client’s overall balance (including any retainers paid and anything billed against that retainer), you had to print a statement. Now, however, you can add some of the information previously only found on statements to your bills instead – saving you both time and effort.

To help illustrate this new feature, this version of TurboLaw Time and Billing also includes new bill templates designed to take advantage of the new information that can now be added to a bill.

Other new features and improvements in this version include:

• A new “Refresh” button in the main window so you can easily re-load the list of bills/clients/staff if something has changed. (You can still refresh any list in the program by simply pressing the F5 key on your keyboard.)
• Significantly improved performance when you have a very large number of clients/work items/expenses/etc. listed in the program all at once.
• Fixed a small problem that was causing a preview of your selected template not to appear in the “Settings” window.

As always, your TurboLaw Time and Billing will check for updates automatically and notify you when a new update is available. Just watch for the pop-up balloon, or for this message at the bottom of your screen:

Remember – we really do listen your feedback (as this new version demonstrates), so please don’t hesitate to let us know if you have any thoughts or comments about the program.

We hope you enjoy this latest version of TurboLaw Time and Billing!