Time Matters, Billing Matters and Billing Matters Accounting are registered trademarks of LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.
Time Matters / Billing Matters and QuickBooks – The Good, The Bad, The Choices...
You want Practice Management that is highly customizable, including document management, events and to dos throughout the firm and more. You want to capture your time and generate bills. And of course you need accounting. Time Matters offers an ability to customize almost every field on every data entry form, and it offers the ability to setup security for users at the field level. While I wouldn’t necessarily recommend doing this, it is nice to have the options you need. Time Matters also does a good job of showing your data through the user of customizable column views and “power views” that let you view record information without opening the actual records.
Perhaps you have been using Time Matters / Billing Matters and Billing Matters Accounting and you are deciding what to do now that Billing Matters Accounting is being discontinued. Or maybe you are just beginning the search or implementation. Either way, Billing Matters linked to QuickBooks offers some advantages as an accounting solution working with Time Matters.
Time Matters links to QuickBooks with or without Billing Matters. The decision is really how much power do you want in your billing, where do you want to do your billing and where do you want to receive payments. We recommend Billing Matters, but present information to help you decide for yourself.
Time Matters Basic Billing lets you enter time and expenses and send them to QuickBooks for billing or create simple invoices in Time Matters and then send the resulting information to QuickBooks. All billing is tied to QuickBooks Sales Reps and you match the Time Matters Staff to the Sales Reps. You also match QuickBooks Items to Time Matters Billing Codes. This matching allows the information to fill in on the billing forms automatically and insures you won’t forget, which will cause problems with data transferring to QuickBooks. A nice feature of Time Matters Basic Billing is that you can run transaction inquiries from within Time Matters and see the invoices and the payments entered in QuickBooks.
If you are creating Invoices in Times Matters, then even with Basic Billing, Time Matters offers rate flexibility and flexibility in the design of the invoice including the ability to show timekeeper, hours, rates and amount and to automatically sub-total time and expenses. The payments are recorded in QuickBooks, so the issue of allocating partial payments is in play and there is no tracking of client funds in Time Matters with Basic Billing. Expenses will need to be entered into QuickBooks for payment.
Should you choose to send time and expenses to QuickBooks for billing purposes, then you must use the QuickBooks item prices. Once the information is transferred you can create invoices in QuickBooks. If you are creating the expenses in Time Matters and sending them to QuickBooks a bill for the vendor will be created.
For maximum billing capability you should use Time Matters with Billing Matters, a tightly integrated module that offers complete billing capabilities including AR and trust account tracking. Billing Matters becomes your Accounts Receivable module. While you can transfer invoices over to QuickBooks this is not recommended. Billing Matters gives flexibility in setting up rates and billing arrangements as well as bill layouts. It offers trust account tracking and will not allow you to overdraw a client trust account.
When using Billing Matters all payments are entered into Time Matters / Billing Matters and then sent to QuickBooks for deposit. Transactions in and out of the trust account are all sent to QuickBooks for deposit or payment. Expenses are entered in Billing Matters and can be sent to QuickBooks as bills to be paid, minimizing data entry and reducing the likelihood of forgetting to bill al client for the expense. It’s easy to setup reports in both systems that allow you to cross check trust balances so that you are sure that you are meeting state requirements, in duplicate!
So what’s the bad news? The entries sent from Time Matters / Billing Matters to QuickBooks are sent over as journal entries. This means that when you have to write a check, like for withdrawing money from trust or issuing a refund, you have to take some extra steps. It’s not difficult but you must have good practices to make sure that all steps are handled. I have a white paper on how to do this to make it easier to implement correctly. Another minor issue is that if you have QuickBooks open and want to switch company files or switch to single user mode, you need to close Time Matters before you can change QuickBooks. Then you must get QuickBooks back to the connecting company and in multi-user mode before you can re-connect the program. This is not unusual when linking but needs to be considered in each environment.
A unique offering from Time Matters is a free program called the QuickBooks Billing Server. With most programs the connectivity between the program and QuickBooks is limited to the number of QuickBooks licenses you own. That’s fine if you have only a few users but gets complicated if you have many users of your billing/practice management software. In some cases you end up restricting the ability of users to link to QuickBooks just because of licensing constraints. The QuickBooks Billing Server allows all of your Time Matters users (with permission) to link to QuickBooks, regardless of the number of QuickBooks licenses. This means you only need QuickBooks licenses for those users that have to actually open QuickBooks and do accounting work, a real plus on security and a cost savings.
Time Matters offers customization and flexibility in the use of the program as well as in the decision to link to QuickBooks. You can learn more about Time Matters and practice management capabilities it offers at http://www.lexisnexis.com/law-firm-practice-management/time-matters/. Or call me for a demo or discussion to help you get the right solution.
Caren
Time Matters, Billing Matters and Billing Matters Accounting are registered trademarks of LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.