What’s new in LeanLaw this month?
Weekly and daily recurring fixed fees
Recurring fixed fees have always been a great way to automate persistent charges to your clients. For years now, you've been able to create a fixed fee with "Monthly" selected as the recurrence period, and see the charge ready to go in the Ready to Bill page at the same time every month.
By popular request, we've implemented the ability to set recurring fixed fees with more frequency. You can now select weekly or daily fixed fees for all of those projects that operate in more frequent iterations.
Trust Report period filter
If your firm uses trust accounting, and you have clients who've been with your firm for years, you've probably experienced the pain of scrolling through a very long trust transaction list to find transactions from a certain period. Now, while you're viewing a client or matter's trust transactions on the Trust Report, you can narrow your view down to a desired time period for easier reconciliation!
We're not done here--next, we'll be adding an "As of" filter to the main page of the Trust Report. This filter will let you look back in time to view what an account's trust balance was, as of a desired time period!
Revisions to the Billing navigation bar
This month, we made some minor changes to our Billing navigation bar based on feedback from users like you:
The side navigation bar has received some minor reordering to better represent the order in which users tend to follow-up on their invoices.
The names of some of the links on the side navigation bar have been simplified. For example, we've renamed the QuickBooks link to Manage Invoices because it's more intuitive for new users and it reflects what you're doing when you're on that page.
More unassigned rows in reports
Have you ever opened the Productivity by Client and Matter report, seen that one of your clients has $300 in expenses, clicked on that client, and then been unable to reconcile the expenses among the listed users? The reason is that this report, among others, didn't have an "Unassigned" row to show expenses and fixed fees which do not have a user assigned--until now!
This month, we've added Unassigned to more reports where unassigned fixed fees and expenses can be shown.
This small change helps you reconcile one level of a report with another, and helps you to locate any fixed fees or expenses may have been unintentionally left unassigned.
Update history
As always, we’ve also been hard at work to squash bugs and improve the user experience. Here are the patch notes for our development.
May 25, 2023
Added a date filter to the client (or matter) level of the Trust Report. This report allows users to get a more granular look at the trust transactions made during a given term for more precise reconciliation.
Fixed an issue that prevented trust requests from being made for new matters set to matter-accounting.
Fixed an issue where the Amount total on the Time Entries page wasn't accurate.
May 23, 2023
Fixed an issue where payments from trust didn't affect Gravity Legal payment links.
Fixed an issue with the Timekeeper Detail in Attachment setting that caused expenses to be excluded when creating an invoice through step-by-step invoicing.
May 17, 2023
Added Daily and Weekly options to the Recurrence period on fixed fees. This feature is for the multiple firms that operate with weekly fixed fees and have been asking us for a way to help automate their fixed fees.
Renamed the Reports settings page to Compensation Tracking to more accurately reflect what it controls.
Fixed an issue that caused some trust requests to fail.
Fixed an issue where the Notes field on any client's Info tab would not show a Save or Cancel button while the user was editing it.
May 11, 2023
Fixed an error that prevented users from sending Trust Deposit Requests to clients.
Fixed an issue where invoices wouldn't appear in a matter's Billing Activity tab unless the user was assigned to the matter.
May 10, 2023
Fixed an issue that prevented some users from submitting invoices.
Fixed an issue Report issue whereby the collected by responsible showed different values on the second level.
Revised the Billing page to be more intuitive to users. Some tabs have been renamed to reflect what they represent--for example, the QuickBooks tab is now named Manage Invoices. The flow of the side navbar has also been reordered to reflect the typical lifecycle of an invoice.
May 9, 2023
Fixed an issue where expenses created in QuickBooks would always use LeanLaw's expense product/service, even if the expense was set in QuickBooks with a different product/service.
Fixed an issue where "placeholder" would appear in the memo of Gravity Legal payment links.
Fixed an issue where "Clear" options in step-by-step invoicing wouldn't set a time entry's state to Billed.
May 4, 2023
Added an Unassigned row to the WIP, Billed Collected by Client report. This row is visible after clicking into a client or matter to view all contributing users, and helps users to identify fixed fees and expenses that may have been unintentionally left unassigned.
Fixed an issue where Timekeeper Detail in Attachment would only work when used with step-by-step invoicing. This setting now also works when Quick Create is used.
May 3, 2023
Added an Unassigned row to the WIP, Billed Collected by user report and the Billable by User report. This row helps users to identify fixed fees and expenses that may have been unintentionally left unassigned, in addition to adding more data to our reports.
Fixed an issue where multimatter invoices could fail to be created into drafts due to memo length.
Fixed an issue when creating a time entry within a draft invoice where the calendar dropdown showed "null" values.
May 2, 2023
Trust memos will now recalculate after taxes are added to an invoice. This allows users in Canada and other places where legal services are taxed to use trust retainer memos.
Fixed an issue where the Include Hours Summary checkbox on draft invoices would do nothing.
Fixed an issue where the Practice Area filter could carry over from one report to another without showing the user that it was still applied. This filter will now be cleared when switching reports.
Fixed an issue where the Practice Area filter did nothing on the Receivables page.
Fixed an issue where firms with tax enabled but without Gravity Legal enabled would fail to create invoices for matters with trust accounts.
May 1, 2023
Fixed an issue where draft invoices couldn't be created through the step-by-step method if the matter had any nonbillable time entries.
Fixed an issue in the Matter Activity report where changing the user filter could cause the time period filter to be ignored.
Looking for more changes? You can find last month's release notes here.