What’s new in LeanLaw this month?
Performance improvement: Clients and Matters
As part of an ongoing performance upgrade, this month we focused on the Clients page and the Matters page.
Previously, the Clients and Matters pages would load and store all of your client and matter information upfront when you first loaded the page. This system worked well for firms with fewer clients and matters, because it meant users could wait through a single load time and then browse multiple pages of clients and matters without any load times after. However, this system could also cause firms with thousands of clients and matters to spend 5 seconds or more loading all of their information when all they really cared about was searching 1 client's name.
Now, the these pages will load information on a page-by-page basis. This means that when you first load the Clients page or the Matters page, only the 20 items visible on that page will be loaded. Then, clicking the right arrow will load the next 20 items, and so forth, according to the sorting you've applied.
The improvement of this change will be felt most by firms with thousands of matters, but even firms with just 3 pages of matters should see better performance on these pages.
Trust payment vendor
Many accountants have requested the ability to customize the payee in payments made from trust, and this can now be done. All you have to do is click the ⚙️ icon in the top right to open your Firm Settings, and then go to your Trust Account Settings to set your trust payment vendor.
If you already have a vendor in QuickBooks by your firm's name, you can select it from the dropdown. Otherwise, simple click the Create Vendor button to make a vendor by your firm's name and set it as the payee for trust payments.
What's next?
Syncing distributions to QuickBooks
Our Distribution page has always been a useful tool for cutting checks, but we want to take it a step further with a "Sync to QuickBooks" button on the distribution page. When pressed, this button will automatically create either a check or a bill (determined by a setting in your Firm Settings) in QuickBooks for each user in your firm to the amount of their distribution. This payroll tool will be ready for beta soon.
Public API
We’re always continuing to develop our public API that allows the retrieval of bulk information from firms, such as client contact information, client and matter lists, and more. Developers can use this to securely integrate LeanLaw with other programs, like Sharepoint. This feature is available upon request; please contact LeanLaw if you're interested in exploring our public API.
Update history
As always, we’ve also been hard at work to squash bugs and improve the user interface. Here are the patch notes for our development.
April 29, 2022
Fixed an issue where trust deposits would always be deposited in the trust account marked as Default, regardless of which account the user chose in the Record Deposit to Trust Account window.
April 28, 2022
Fixed a help link in the invoice workflow's settings page.
Fixed an issue where users without a Standard rate couldn't set their Standard rate through rate setter on the Billing page.
Fixed an issue that caused some users to encounter an error when creating a time entry from a timer.
Fixed an issue where very old accounts that had never changed their Billing Workflow settings could encounter errors on pages with the Reviewer filter.
April 25, 2022
Changed the Clients and Matters pages to use pagination when loading results. This should result in significant performance boosts for firms with many clients and matters.
Added a Rate column to the Time Entries page to allow users with the View Rates permission can easily determine the rate used in their time entries.
Added the Trust Payment Vendor feature, which allows users to assign a vendor for all of the firm's trust payments.
Fixed an issue that caused the Create Vendor button on the Trust Payment Vendor feature to error and not create a new vendor.
April 14, 2022
Fixed a graphical issue that prevented users from accessing the “Save changes to all matters for this client” function.
Fixed an issue where the product/service of some expenses made in LeanLaw were being switched to the product/service LeanLaw used to find expenses made in QuickBooks.
April 12, 2022
Fixed an issue that caused expense LEDES codes to not appear on some invoices.
Fixed some draft invoice composite time entry issues.
Fixed an issue where the fixed fee template page wouldn't load.
Tweaked some language in the QuickBooks Expense setup for more clarity.
April 1, 2022
Reverted the QuickBooks icon change.
Fixed an issue where unassigned quickbooks expenses were not appearing
Looking for more changes? You can find last month's release notes here.