We’re always looking for ways to make TurboLaw Time and Billing even better, and one of the things we noticed was how people were using the “matters” feature of the program. With that in mind, we set out to improve the experience of using matters.

Matters have traditionally been a sort of “second-class citizen” in the world of TurboLaw Time and Billing – in order to even see matters, you had to open up a client first. This was a bit cumbersome, and we don’t like cumbersome things here at TurboLaw software, so we set out to make matters more of a “first-class citizen” and to improve the experience of using and working with matters in general.

To make this happen, we realized we’d need to make a few specific changes:

  • Make it easier to get to matters in the first place
  • Streamline the process of creating matters and entering time, expenses, and bills for matters
  • Make it possible to assign payments to a matter

With those goals in mind, we set about making it happen, and now we’re very nearly done – and we think you’ll be very pleased with the results.

Matters in the Main Window

Matters in the main window? Oh my!

You read that right – the most visible change we’ve made is to make matters appear in the main window of TurboLaw Time and Billing, right alongside clients, bills, and staff members. This way, you can see all of your matters at a glance, and quickly access matters when you need to.

Gone is the awkward process of opening a client, clicking on the matters button, choosing “View Matters,” then double-clicking on your desired matter. Instead, you can now just click on “Matters” from the left-hand navigation bar and double-click on your desired matter. (You can also right-click on a matter and choose from a number of common actions.)

Simple and easy – just the way we like it!

Receive Payments for a Matter

Although you’ve always been able to create a bill and file it under a matter, until now there’s never been a way to enter a payment and have it be assigned to that same matter. Because of this, matters couldn’t display any sort of “balance” or “amount due” (on a per-matter basis).

You can now assign a payment to a matter

Naturally, this is not going to be the case any longer, because we’ve added the ability to assign payments to matters.

When entering a payment, you can now file that payment under any matter for that client – just like you would when entering anything else.

Show “How Much You Owe” for Matters

Matters now show "unpaid" and "unbilled" amounts

To make matters even more useful, you need to be able to see at a glance how much is owed for that matter – and since you can now assign payments to a matter, we can display that information!

Matters now display the total amount that is currently “unpaid” (or owed) for that matter, as well as the total amount of time and expenses you haven’t yet billed for that matter.

Show Matters on Statements

Showing matters on statements is nothing new – if you created a bill for a matter, when you printed a statement, that matter’s name would appear next to that bill. However, we’ve taken it even further, by allowing you to “group” items on a statement by matter, making it even easier for your clients to see and understand activity on their account.

Sample statement showing "matter grouping" - click the image above to see it full-size.

We’ve introduced new statement templates which use this new feature, so you can just pick one of those if you want – or if you’d prefer not to have this grouping, the old statement templates (without the grouping) are still there as well.

These are just a few of the most significant changes we’ve made to make matters even easier to work with in TurboLaw Time and Billing. All these changes (and more!) are coming in the next major update – stay tuned to our blog and our twitter for more!