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Features and Benefits

Contact Management:

We recommend you enter all contacts into your ProTempus database, not just clients. This allows for better conflict checks. Entering potential clients, attorneys, witnesses, etc. will provide you with the ultimate conflict checking tool.

You can save multiple phone numbers and addresses for each contact to provide the entire office with the most current contact information.

All cases, invoices, payments, calendar events and tasks for each client are just one click away from the contact’s main window.

Intake forms allow you to easily collect unlimited data about each client/case.

Calendar and
Billing Time:
The shared database allows you or your staff to quickly view and update your calendar from any computer on your network.

Our unique integration of the billing system and your calendar allows you to easily convert scheduled events on your calendar to billable items to be included on the client’s next invoice with two clicks. No more double entry into a separate billing system.

Color coding allows you to assign different colors to different activities. Want court dates to stand out? Highlight them in blue.

Green on your screen means green in your pocket. As you mark your calendar items billable, they turn green. As you accumulate billable phone calls during the day, they are displayed on your daily calendar in green. Your calendar is your daily score card for your law practice.

Our group view calendar allows your staff to easily track the activity of up to 6 attorneys from one window.

The daily, weekly and monthly views of your calendar allow you and your staff an easy way to locate and schedule a new appointment with a client. They also make it easy to look ahead to prevent overloading your calendar. For instance, you may want to block out a few days prior to next month’s big trial.

Linking calendar events to the client gives you more information about your day. One click will display the client’s phone number. The complete case history is one more click away. All the documents, are also one click away. Preparing for meetings just got a lot easier!

Syncing your ProTempus calendar with your Google calendar allows you to see your up-to-date calendar on your phone when you are out of the office. No need to remember to sync your phone, it is in real time. Need to schedule an appointment when you are out of the office or bill a client for the phone call you just completed? No problem. Add it to your Google calendar on your phone and it will be added to your ProTempus calendar. You are always current with this dynamite feature.

Task Management:
Missed deadlines are one of the leading causes of malpractice law suits against attorneys. ProTempus can help make sure it never happens to you.

Our unique trigger date and due date combination not only lets you know when a pleading is due, ProTempus alerts you in advance that it is due. No more walking into the office and realizing there is a major pleading due today. We all have hundreds of things on our To Do Lists, but only a few must be completed today. ProTempus helps you sort it out.

Our To Do list also integrates with our billing system. When a task is completed, one click can add it to the client’s next invoice. You can accumulate the time you worked on a task over a period of time whether it takes a week or a day. Starting the stop watch each time you work on a task will accumulate the total time you have spent. Once completed, just click billable and you have added the accumlated time worked to the client’s invoice and added money into your practice.

Document Management:



Misplaced documents can consume a lot of hours in the office. ProTempus can eliminate that wasted time. Two clicks from the client’s contact window allows you to create a new document in that client’s folder with 100% accuracy.

ProTempus also supports numeric filing, minimizing errors when filing hard copies. When you add a new case ProTempus can automatically assign the next sequential file number. Starting each year with case number one, using the year as a prefix, makes archiving and purging older cases easy.

Our unique approach to document management does not require you to upload all your documents into ProTempus. You merely tell ProTempus which subfolder on your system contains the documents for a given client. Once linked, ProTempus will instantly display all of the client’s documents with one click from the contact’s window. Everyone in the office will be able to easily locate any document belonging to any client.

Our integrated document assembley, tool allows you to design intake forms that can collect any amount of data for a case. This data can then be used to populate any number of documents from your forms library. No more repeating yourself. Entering a social security number once into the intake form will populate it into all of your forms for that type case. It generates documents using the universal RTF format that is compatible with Word, Word Perfect or Google Docs.

Have you just created a document that you think you may want to reuse in the future? Tag it with multi-level keywords using our indexing feature. Have you created a document in a divorce case involving a handicapped child? Five years down the road, entering the keywords, "divorce" and "handicapped child" will locate the document, even if you cannot remember the client’s name. No need to re-invent the wheel with ProTempus.

Email is an important part of most cases today. Its management is an important part of your document management. Our integration with Outlook allows you to easily archive all emails to and from your client with two clicks. These emails will be stored into the same Windows folder where you have stored the client’s documents. All correspondence with the client can be saved to the same folder.

Our integration with your scanner makes it easy for your staff to save incoming scanned mail into the correct client’s document folder. They can send you a stick-e-note that allows you to view the scanned mail with one click and take any needed action with the client or courts. No more piles of mail on your desk. Stick-e-notes with the attached document stay on your computer’s desktop until you have time to act. If an item does not need action for a couple of weeks, send it to your To Do list and ProTempus will remind you then.

Case Management:
We make it easy to set up a new client and a new case. Contacts can have multiple cases with different billing types and rates.

Each attorney and paralegal can have a different billing rate for a given case.

You can connect an unlimited number of parties to a given case. ProTempus will keep track of each partys role. Need the phone number for the opposing attorney but cannot remember the name? No problem, select the client, click on the case’s button, click on the party’s button, click on the attorney to display their phone number.

ProTempus allows you to easily track and bill case-related expenses. This is another area where many attorneys lose money. Over the life of a case, it is common to rack up hundreds of dollars in mileage charges, copying and printing fees and postage. Not charging your client for these expenses is taking money out of your own pocket. Some firms add an additional administrative fee to each month’s invoice to cover these normal expenses. ProTempus supports both ways of doing business.

Email Integration: This feature requires Outlook desktop.

You can easily archive an email from the client to the client’s document folder. Highlight the email in your inbox, select the client in ProTempus then click on the Outlook sync button. ProTempus will archive the email to the client’s document folder. It is now viewable by anyone in your office who is working on the case. Want to send the email to someone else in the office? Just select it in the client’s document folder and click on "Send Stick-e-note". The recipient will be able to view the email with one click.

You can create emails directly within ProTempus or archive sent emails from Outlook’s sent folder if you composed an email within Outlook.

Billing / Invoicing:
Our "Green on the screen, Green in your pocket" philosophy has proven to be our most popular feature.

As you click items as billable on your daily calendar, they turn green, giving you instant feedback as to how your day is shaping up, financially. It puts billable time front and center virtually guaranteeing that every minute gets billed. With many of our client’s, attorneys compete to see who can put the most green on the screen each day. If you are not billing 7 to 8 hours a day, ask yourself if you need more clients or if you need a better system.

We offer 8 different invoice formats. Once we add your letterhead, you can generate custom invoices.

Our pre-billing detail helps guarantee that every minute is billed. Prior to running invoices each month, you will run a pre-billing detail report showing the line item detail that the client is to be billed. If you have a calendar item or a task that you forgot to check as billable, this report gives you a chance to catch those omissions. As you review the pre-billing detail, you can quickly access and correct any item that needs to be changed, getting your invoices right the first time.

You can create an ad-hoc invoice with two clicks or create monthly invoices for a select group of clients or all your clients. Choose which approach works best for you.

Our invoices include past due balances on each month’s invoices. You and your clients always know exactly how much money they owe. If you have an inactive client that still owes you money, ProTempus automatically reprints the client’s last invoice so you can resend it as a reminder that they have not paid your bill. You can put a client on invoice hold or close the case if you do not want to send invoices for uncollectable accounts. Closing the case does NOT purge that client’s detail; it merely takes that case out of the billing cycle. Closed cases are not included on the pre-billing detail and will not generate an invoice. You can change the status back to active if the client walks back into your office. Want a reminder to send the case to collections in two years? One click creates an item on your to-do list.

An option allows you to automatically apply pre-payments to the client’s new invoice. If they have money in the trust account, ProTempus can pay the new invoice with that money and it reduces the remaining balance in their trust account.

You can optionally charge administrative fees to each month’s invoice. ProTempus can calculate and add interest charges to past due accounts. This can be set up on a case-by-case basis.

We have developed a unique approach to split billing. Do you handle custody cases where the judge has ordered one parent pays 70% and the other pays 30%? If you have had these type cases you know it can be a real headache keeping track of who has paid and who has not. If you charge interest on unpaid balances your headache just got bigger. ProTempus simplifies this whole process. You bill your time under the child or children as the ProTempus client, setting up the parents as parties in the case. In the parties section of the case, you set the role of the father as "Invoice: 70" and for mother as "Invoice: 30." This tells ProTempus the case is a split billing. When you generate invoices, the child’s account is credited with the amounts that each parent will pay, although the child’s account balance will always be zero. Each parent’s account is debited with their portion of the new invoice. If the father is slow to pay, it has no effect on mother’s account. If you charge interest on past due accounts, the father will get an interest charge, but it will not affect the mother.

Accounts Receivable:
ProTempus contains a complete accounts receivable subsystem.

When a client sends a payment, it can be easily posted to the client’s account. We support partial payments as well as paying multiple invoices with one check.

We link with PayPal and LawPay to accept credit card payments. Your emailed invoice can have a link at the bottom that allows your client post there credit card payment into their secure on line payment site. You never have to know or store a client’s credit card information, making you PCI compliant.

Our AR aging report and cash receipts report makes it easy to track who has paid and who has not paid. The activity screen lets you view an individual payment register for each client as well as quickly showing you the client’s current status. This knowledge allows you to stay on top of past due accounts as you work their cases and can prevent clients from running up a tab they cannot pay.

Trust Accounting: ProTempus contains a complete trust accounting subsystem.

When a client prepays their case you will post that prepayment into their trust account. As you work on the case and generate invoices each month, ProTempus can automatically pay that invoice from the client’s prepayment, tracking the balance remaining. Their monthly invoice will display the payment from their trust account and the balance remaining in their trust account. If you use the optional QuickBooks sync, ProTempus will even post the entries into your QuickBooks check registers.

The trust account report makes it easy to manage and audit your trust accounts. ProTempus even has an audit feature that compares the current balance of each client’s trust account within ProTempus with the client’s subaccount in QuickBooks, spotting any potential issue before it becomes a problem.

QuickBooks Interface: We have an optional interface with QuickBooks.

Many ProTempus users find that the Accounts Receivable subsystem in ProTempus eliminates the need to use QuickBooks. Others like having QuickBooks to help balance their bank accounts and like the Quick Books general ledger for year-end tax reports. We have designed a very simple interface with QuickBooks. When you post a payment or deposit into ProTempus, our sync program will add those deposits into the appropriate check register in QuickBooks. Payments will be added as deposits into your operations accounts, prepayments will be added as deposits into your trust account. ProTempus automatically creates subaccounts within your trust account for each client. This makes it very easy to know the balance of each client’s trust account at a glance.

Remote Access:
ProTempus supports several options to provide remote access to your ProTempus data, depending on your goals and definition of remote access.

Our Google sync allows you to export your ProTempus contacts into your Google contacts and provides real time sync between your ProTempus calendar and your Google calendar. If you set your smart phone to sync with your Google contacts and calendar, you have the ultimate device for managing your calendar and accessing your contacts when you are out of the office.

Billing your time when you are out of the office is simple. Click on the current day on your Google calendar and create a new event. Click on the microphone and dictate, "Bill John Decker .5 hours Discussed the custody of the dog." Turn off the microphone and click "Done." When you get back to your office, you will see a Green billable event on today’s ProTempus calendar. John will be billed for that phone call on his next month’s invoice. Scheduling a future event is just as easy. Select the starting date and time, click on the microphone, dictate, "Schedule meeting with John Decker for 1 hour to discuss property settlement." DONE! No more typing on your phone’s tiny keyboard. Want to send yourself a stick-e-note? Just dictate, "Send note: Call John tomorrow about case" to your phone’s calendar. You will have a stick-e-note on your desktop when you get back to the office. Billable events and stick-e-notes are removed from your Google calendar once they are processed by ProTempus (usually every 2 minutes), so they will not clutter up your Google calendar.

If you prefer using Outlook’s calendar, we also sync with Outlook’s calendar providing the same features as discussed above with the Google calendar. If your smart phone is already syncing with your Outlook calendar, there is no need to change. It will still work as discussed with the Google sync.

If you want to be able to view and create documents while you are out of your office, we have tested several remote access products. These provide secure access to your desktop computer at your office and allow you to perform any function that you could perform while sitting at your office computer. These products work on a PC notebooks Mac Airs, Chrome books, tablets and smartphones, although we seriously question the feasibility of creating a Word document on a smart phone. The three products we have tested and can recommend are Log Mein, Team Viewer and Splash Top. We have also tested Google Chrome desktop but cannot recommend it at this time, it still needs some work. Check their websites for pricing and features. All have a free trial period.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

© ProTempus 2014