For every lawyer, timekeeping is precious.
It is paramount.
It is vital.
It’s your basic bread and butter.
Without a reliable timekeeping system, lawyers and legal staff cannot accurately keep track of what they are doing for a particular client, which greatly impacts their ability to properly bill that client.
It’s important to use a reliable timekeeping system to help your firm track time spent on cases and projects to capture all time for billing purposes and to help you evaluate how your firm’s time is being spent and whether you feel it is being spent productively.
There are tons of billing and time tracking apps and systems on the market. Today, Select Court Reporters will assess 5 timekeeping applications that can help you and your employees maintain a punctual and organized system of keeping your time.
With that said, let’s get started:
1. BigTime Tracking & Invoicing
BigTime is a time tracking and invoicing software that allows you to manually keep track of your time as you move along. It offers the ability to keep your time on your desktop and via your mobile device through the BigTime app. BigTime integrates with Quickbooks Online and Quickbooks desktop. It allows you to set specific billing rates for each attorney and paralegal and it offers up things like direct invoicing from the website, project management, resource allocation, and expense tracking.
Summary of Application Abilities:
• Manage your clients. 360-degree view of your clients & engagements. Mobile access to contacts & address books. Activity & engagement tracking. Integrated teams/budgets. Total control over who gets access to what.
• Tame your workflow. Personal and firm-wide engagement tracking. Client and engagement-specific activities. Recurring engagements. Real-time workflow management.
• Track and Bill WIP. Time and expense tracking. Mobile tools. One-click invoicing for T&M or fixed-fee engagements. Full suite of WIP-related reports.
• Increase your entire team’s IQ. Flexible reporting. Project/engagement and staffer utilization. WIP tracking and engagement workflow. Real-time dashboards and reports. A time and billing software with your business intelligence in mind.
Chrometa is a timekeeping software that enables users to passively capture their time as they work, eliminating the epidemic of lost time due to memory loss. Attorneys are people and sometimes people forget to write things down. It’s a common issue for all humans. Chrometa eliminates that issue by tracking everything that you do on your computer and any device on which the Chrometa application is installed.
Summary of Application Abilities:
• Automated Time Tracking: Chrometa’s automatic time trackers for Mac and PC capture your computer-based time as you work. When you work on Office documents (ex. Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Adobe, Photoshop, Outlook) or when visiting a website on Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, or Firefox, Chrometa’s time tracker records what you’re working on , including which application, along with other info that helps you identify the task after the fact.
• Assign time to Clients and Projects: By setting up keyword-based rules, keyword(s), email address(es), phone number(s), etc., you can “teach” Chrometa how to create most of your Timesheet for you each day. Which means you’ll only need to do some quick cleanup and annotations, resulting in the most comprehensive and accurate timesheet you’ve ever created so that you can get paid for ALL of your time (aka hard work).
• Create invoices: Chrometa exports your timesheet to major attorney billing and practice management systems. You can create and send invoices from within Chrometa or sync them with Quickbooks online.
TimeSolv helps lawyers increase their billable time and get paid faster. They are the most comprehensive, yet easy-to-use cloud legal billing software, proven since 1999 with over $5.2 billion billed. TimeSolv can be used offline and online. Compatible with PCs and Macs, iPad and other tablets, iPhones and Android app, TimeSolv also helps you get paid faster with LawPay and Client Portal. They offer a 30-day free trial.
Summary of Application Abilities:
• Effective Design: An elegant, user-centered design that allows you to get your work done faster and easier. Efficiency is the name of the game.
• Mobile Friendliness: Mobile app available for iOS and Android. When you’re on the go, it’s easy to make time entries. Never miss a billable hour!
• Customer Support: Always free. From learning TimeSolv, to migrating information, to the simplest questions, TimeSolv is always available.
• Quickbooks Sync: Doesn’t matter if you’re using QuickBooks desktop or online versions. TimeSolv syncs bi-directionally with both, so the days of double entry are over.
• Mac or Windows: The war is over and TimeSolv has declared both sides the winner! They’re in the cloud, so use whatever platform you’d like.
• Stellar Hosting: State-of-the-art development platform. Amazon AWS cloud computing infrastructure. ‘Nuff said.
actiTIME is a solution that provides a convenient way to manage project scope, assign tasks, track time, and analyze your business performance based on the collected data.
Summary of Application Abilities:
• Simple Time Tracking: actiTIME makes time tracking as simple as it can be. Record time spent on work assignments, leave comments or submit a day off in a weekly timesheet.
• Work Scope Management: Customize you work structure, create project scope faster than ever, add details to each task, assign tasks, make use of built-in reminders, lock completed work from changes, and keep projects on task with actiTime’s user-friendly database and applications.
• Reports and Data Analysis: Analyze team performance, compare estimates with actual project results, run cost and billing reports, create and edit PDF invoices, etc.
Tikit Carpe Diem is an easy to use, intuitive web-based timekeeping system that incorporates all the elements of timekeeping into a single solution. With exceptional functionality and ease of use, timekeeping is made easy, billing becomes timely, cash flow is improved and time is never lost as a result of clever ‘best match’ technology.
Summary of Application Abilities:
• Record time anywhere anytime – truly mobile time recording: The adaptability of Carpe Diem means you can capture and manage billable time across every platform consistently, whether you’re on a train, plane, in the office, online, or offline.
• Time recording made easy: Carpe Diem supplies a chronological view of each working day so that all billable time is all in one place.
• Time finder technology: What makes Carpe Diem unique is its ‘Time finder’ technology. Unlike all other timekeeping solutions on the market, users are not confronted with hundreds of possible missed-time entries, simply the ones that should be recorded. ‘Time finder’ also allows users to auto-populate timesheets based on their digital footprint, or to find missing time by responding to intelligent prompts.
• Predictive assistance and glossary: Predictive assistance auto-completes forms with predictive searches, and provides in-line spell checks, so the process of entering information is quick, easy and smooth. The powerful best match technology embeds activity data directly within the timekeeping workflow, automatically populating timesheets so you don’t start with a blank page to laboriously fill in. The glossary feature allows you to attach shorthand terms to words or phrases you use often, so instead of having to type everything over again, simply type your shorthand and the field will be populated.
• State of the art reporting: A powerful management console allows firms to effectively monitor and measure timekeeping performance and identify how much billable time is still available. Fully customizable metrics and dashboards supply actionable management information at the press of a button.
• Fully compliant: Integrated e-billing and ethical wall validation improve compliance, reduce risk and improve cash flow. Finance teams can track and reduce the lag between activity, time-capture, billing, and cash. This functionality also means firms can quickly generate real-time billing reports that give clients more confidence in the firm and enrich the client relationships.
With so many different billing applications on the market in 2018, we know it can be overwhelming to sift through all of them, especially when hopping from page to page on the Internet. That’s why Select wanted to provide you with a short, comprehensive list of some of the more well-known and widely used systems to eliminate time wasted on sites that may not suit you or your firm.
After all, time is money!
Wishing you the best of luck with your time keeping this year and the beyond!
—
Select Court Reporters is an Orlando court reporting firm providing exemplary services to attorneys and law firms throughout Central Florida. If you are looking for a Winter Springs court reporter, an Oviedo court reporter, a Winter Park court reporter, a Maitland court reporter, or if you need Orlando court reporting services, Apopka court reporting services, Altamonte Springs court reporting services, or Kissimmee court reporting services, Select has both the experience and the availability to meet your needs. We are currently expanding our client base in Seminole and Orange Counties and would love to connect with you.
Contact us today to discuss how we can help!
Phone: (407) 977 – 7725
Email: selectcourtreporters@gmail.com
“Select Court Reporters you can count on!”
