Some nice updates with PcLaw 10

PcLaw 10 has now been released and it has some nice new features.

Firstly, there is the Safe Custody Manager to track physical property of your clients (e.g. wills, titles, deeds bonds etc.) but I’ll write more about this in an upcoming blog.

Time can now be tracked in hours and minutes instead of decimals e.g. 0.1 of an hour equates to 6 minutes. I find this more intuitive. The change is made in System Settings so once set, it affects all timewriters. That is, it can not be set individually by different timewriters.

A really nice feature for your admin staff (if you’re not doing the billing yourself) is the ability to refresh the on-screen PreBill without leaving the output screen. Just click the refresh button. Previously you had to rerun the PreBill.

Now, at the time of billing, you can apply Trust not only to pay off the current bill but also previous invoices. This is useful for a couple of reasons

While it shouldn’t matter whether older balances or recent balances are paid of firs (money is money), many clients think the older invoices should be paid off first. Keeping the client happy is the key to ongoing success

If the matter is finished and the trust balance exceeds the final invoice that you are raising, you can apply the excess trust to older invoices without going back to the apply trust to these in a separate transaction. A nice time saver.

One feature that may be interesting for some practices is the ability to prioritize time entries. Normally, they’d appear chronologically on the invoice but sometimes it may be useful to have the time entries appear in some other order that makes more sense to the client. Helping the client understand the invoice is vital to getting paid faster and promoting customer satisfaction.

PC Law 10 now comes with an automated back up feature. The issue with the manual PC Law backup feature is that everyone needs to be logged out (except the person running the backup) so if users start work early or work back late, it makes doing the backup inconvenient. Now a back up can be set for say, midnight, when staff are likely to be home dreaming of how they can service their clients better.

Just a word of caution on PC Law backups. Only the data is backed up and not the documents you’ve saved to PCLaw. You MUST have an expert doing regular full firm backups.

There are many other features but these are the ones I like the most.