Some of the biggest improvements in this version are:

• Payments can now be applied directly to a bill instead of just to a client’s account
• Payments can be “split” among several bills
• Bills now have both an “amount” (the total of the bill) and a “balance” (how much is due on the bill)
• New bill templates that can show how much of a bill has been paid, and how much remains due
• You can now see all the matters for all of your clients in the main Time and Billing window
• Matters now show both “unbilled” and “unpaid” sub-totals, specific to that matter
• Bills are automatically closed once they have been paid in full
• New statement templates that “group” items by matter for better organization

We’ve also made a host of other small improvements, such as changing the icons for bills so that you can see, based on the icon, whether a bill is open, closed, or voided.

We’ve also simplified the way a bill’s status is displayed – instead of saying “UNPAID/OPEN” and “PAID/CLOSED,” we just display either “Open” or “Closed.” Not only is this simpler, but by not being in ALL CAPS it’s a bit easier on the eyes as well.

Additionally, we’ve tweaked some of the default bill templates so that the client’s address will show through when the bill is folded and put in a standard window envelope.

As always, this update – even though it is a major new version – is available right now to all our current subscribers. TurboLaw Time and Billing will download this new update automatically, and when it is ready you’ll see the notification at the bottom of your screen.

This message lets you know a new update is available.

You can then either click to install the update, or wait, and the next time you open the program, the update will be installed automatically.

We’re very excited (and proud!) to bring you this new major version of TurboLaw Time and Billing, and we hope you enjoy it.

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In the next version of TurboLaw Time and Billing, we’ve made a number of little changes that we think you’ll really appreciate.

One of these changes is to the icons used for bills – we’ve added a different icon for a bill when it’s paid (closed), as well as for when a bill has been voided.

New icons for bills

These new icons make it even easier to tell bills apart with a quick glance.

Another change we made that isn’t quite as easy to see is that we’ve revised many of the standard bill templates so that the client’s address will line up with a standard #10 window envelope – saving you the trouble of having to either re-position it yourself, or use normal envelopes with the address printed on the outside.

Again, these are just little changes, but they add up to make TurboLaw Time and Billing even easier to use, and we think you’ll really appreciate them.

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TurboLaw Version 3.04

This new version of TurboLaw includes additional options for entering a “Personal Representative” and “Special Personal Representative” when creating a Massachusetts Probate case.

Concurrent with this new version, we’ve also released new Massachusetts Probate Estates forms – all of which begin with the prefix “MPC.” You can see a full list of all the forms in our TurboLaw Massachusetts Probate Law edition page.

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Payments can now be applied to bills, or even split among bills.

This change has some other consequences which might not be obvious at first glance.

Bills can now show amount paid and remaining balance.

Because payments and bills are linked, it is now possible for a bill to display how much of the bill has been paid off, and how much remains due.

Also, payments can now be “split” among multiple bills. This allows several bills to be paid at once, and it also allows payments entered in advance (as a “retainer”) to be credited towards new bills.

In the new version of the program you’ll see these bill balances everywhere, so it’s easy to see how much of a particular bill has been paid at a glance, without having to dig deeper.

The new version of the program will also contain new bill templates which take advantage of this new feature, so you can show how much of a bill has been paid – and how much is left to pay – when you print out your bills.

Allowing payments to be applied to bills opens up some powerful options for managing your billing, and we’re very excited to bring this new feature to you. You can expect to see this new feature – along with many more – in the next version of TurboLaw Time and Billing, due out this spring.

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1. Because Matters… Matter!
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Matters have traditionally been a sort of “second-class citizen” in the world of TurboLaw Time and Billing – in order to even see matters, you had to open up a client first. This was a bit cumbersome, and we don’t like cumbersome things here at TurboLaw software, so we set out to make matters more of a “first-class citizen” and to improve the experience of using and working with matters in general.

To make this happen, we realized we’d need to make a few specific changes:

• Make it easier to get to matters in the first place
• Streamline the process of creating matters and entering time, expenses, and bills for matters
• Make it possible to assign payments to a matter

With those goals in mind, we set about making it happen, and now we’re very nearly done – and we think you’ll be very pleased with the results.

Matters in the Main Window

Matters in the main window? Oh my!

You read that right – the most visible change we’ve made is to make matters appear in the main window of TurboLaw Time and Billing, right alongside clients, bills, and staff members. This way, you can see all of your matters at a glance, and quickly access matters when you need to.

Gone is the awkward process of opening a client, clicking on the matters button, choosing “View Matters,” then double-clicking on your desired matter. Instead, you can now just click on “Matters” from the left-hand navigation bar and double-click on your desired matter. (You can also right-click on a matter and choose from a number of common actions.)

Simple and easy – just the way we like it!

Receive Payments for a Matter

Although you’ve always been able to create a bill and file it under a matter, until now there’s never been a way to enter a payment and have it be assigned to that same matter. Because of this, matters couldn’t display any sort of “balance” or “amount due” (on a per-matter basis).

You can now assign a payment to a matter

Naturally, this is not going to be the case any longer, because we’ve added the ability to assign payments to matters.

When entering a payment, you can now file that payment under any matter for that client – just like you would when entering anything else.

Show “How Much You Owe” for Matters

Matters now show "unpaid" and "unbilled" amounts

To make matters even more useful, you need to be able to see at a glance how much is owed for that matter – and since you can now assign payments to a matter, we can display that information!

Matters now display the total amount that is currently “unpaid” (or owed) for that matter, as well as the total amount of time and expenses you haven’t yet billed for that matter.

Show Matters on Statements

Showing matters on statements is nothing new – if you created a bill for a matter, when you printed a statement, that matter’s name would appear next to that bill. However, we’ve taken it even further, by allowing you to “group” items on a statement by matter, making it even easier for your clients to see and understand activity on their account.

Sample statement showing "matter grouping" – click the image above to see it full-size.

We’ve introduced new statement templates which use this new feature, so you can just pick one of those if you want – or if you’d prefer not to have this grouping, the old statement templates (without the grouping) are still there as well.

These are just a few of the most significant changes we’ve made to make matters even easier to work with in TurboLaw Time and Billing. All these changes (and more!) are coming in the next major update – stay tuned to our blog and our twitter for more!

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One major new change in this version is the ability to use a different file format for the TurboLaw Time and Billing database file. This new “.db3″ file format is based on the SQLite database engine, and features a much smaller file size as well as improved performance for some types of actions (especially reports, graphs, and statements).

TurboLaw Time and Billing does not use this new format by default, but if you’d like to use it, you can choose this new format when you create a new database by clicking File > New. Of course, if you already have data in a previous file, you can merge that existing data into your new file by choosing File > Import > Merge data from TurboLaw Time and Billing.

Some of the other new features and improvements in this version are:

• Improved importing of clients from TurboLaw Document Software
• Added Remote Support option to the Help menu
• Added “item_matter” as an available merge field when customizing bill templates
• Fixed some text alignment issues in some of the built-in bill templates
• Printing a client’s information now shows the default ID or the custom ID you’ve entered
• Voided bills now appear as “(VOID)” in the list of bills to distinguish them more clearly from other bills
• Now possible to add a new matter directly in the Enter Custom Billing Rate window
• When entering a new staff member, the drop-down list containing titles is now sorted alphabetically

We hope you enjoy this new version of TurboLaw Time and Billing – and be sure to stay tuned for more updates and improvements, as we are always working hard to make TurboLaw Time and Billing even better!

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TurboLaw Document Software version 3.03

As usual, this new version includes a number of small tweaks and fixes – for example, there were some drop-down boxes for choosing states (e.g., the state parties were married in, or the state a child was born in) which, instead of containing a list of state abbreviations, were empty! Although you could still type the state abbreviation in and everything would work and save correctly, this was an oversight on our part which has now been corrected.

The biggest change in this version is the replacement of the old Dock/Undock feature with the newer Work Offline feature.

The new Work Offline feature allows you to disconnect your TurboLaw from a network or “shared” database, while still allowing you to work on your cases. This is especially useful if you have a laptop which you often take out of the office with you.

The old Dock/Undock feature synchronized your changes while you were out of the office, but like most database synchronization systems, it took more than a little bit of effort to deal with any conflicting changes.

This is why the new Work Offline feature allows you to take your files offline (out of the office), but does away with headache-inducing side of database synchronization.

When you choose to “Work Offline” in TurboLaw, you can still work on your cases, create new documents, and work on documents you’ve already created, but you can’t add new cases or edit the details of cases already in the system. This way, you can do the things you want & need to do (work on your cases while not in the office) without dealing with the things you don’t care about (synchronizing database changes).

You can find the new Work Offline feature in TurboLaw under the File menu – and of course, as always, a full list of changes can be viewed by clicking Help > What’s New.

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This version of TurboLaw contains the following changes:

• Prevents possible document corruption if you click on a document at exactly the right time before it is done filling out
• Prevents accidental canceling of the update installation once it has begun (which can leave TurboLaw in an unusable state, since it is half-updated)
• Tabs in Case Interview Wizards now appear as bold when the tab is active, to help distinguish which tab is active.

In addition, this version includes support for our newest area of law, Corporate Filings. If you have our Massachusetts General Practitioner’s Suite, you will need to install the update for this version before you can use this new area of law. (If you have any other TurboLaw package, then this does not apply to you.)

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This area of law includes 46 new documents for both for-profit and non-profit Massachusetts corporations.

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In particular, the new features are:

• When using the Stopwatch window, there is now a drop-down box so you can select the client you are recording time for. (When you click Stop and Save, the selected client will carry over to the Enter Time window as well.)
• New Report: we’ve added a new report to the Reports window, called “All Bills.” This report (as its name suggests) shows you all bills, both paid and unpaid.
• The list of reports is now sorted alphabetically by name.
• The Account History window will now remember if you maximized it previously, and open that way again in the future.
• The Enter Time and Enter Expense windows can now be opened independently from the Home screen or from the left-hand nav bar. (Previously, once these windows were opened, you would have to close the window before you could do anything else with the program; now you can open other windows and switch back and forth as desired.)
• If you have time or expense entries which have no category (perhaps because you deleted that category), these items will now appear in lists as “Uncategorized” instead of the more generic labels of “Time” or “Work.”

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