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Amicus Attorney is a Registered Trademark of Gavel & Gown Software Inc., Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Amicus Attorney
When All You Need is Practice Management and Billing…Amicus Attorney.2 of 4
Amicus Attorney is a Registered Trademark of Gavel & Gown Software Inc., Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Amicus Calendar
The Calendar in Amicus Attorney provides comprehensive scheduling that works the way you do. Manage appointments, tasks, deadlines (and more) for yourself, everyone in your workgroup or your entire firm.
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Amicus Attorney is a Registered Trademark of Gavel & Gown Software Inc., Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Amicus Time Keeping
Bill more time, more easily. While you work, Amicus Attorney is in the background, keeping track of what you are doing. It will often present you with a time entry, completely filled in for you. Or you can create new time entries with handy shortcuts, far easier than scribbling them out on paper.
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Amicus Attorney is a Registered Trademark of Gavel & Gown Software Inc., Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Amicus QB Interface
Send time entries electronically to your accounting system, so that time gets to accounting faster, more accurately, and without anyone having to retype it. Of course you must first go through an extensive 'configuration' of the link between Amicus and QuickBooks.
In our last article we wrote about Timeslips billing software. If you have identified your needs and you want to use QuickBooks for your accounting but want billing and practice management, Amicus Attorney may be the answer.
Amicus Attorney comes in two “flavors”, Small Firm Edition and Premium Edition. Small Firm Edition is designed for firms with 5 or fewer users and Amicus Premium Edition is designed for larger firms. There is also Amicus Cloud. All the products have links with QuickBooks Desktop but in different ways.
First, let’s look at what Amicus Attorney software does. Then we’ll talk about the role of QuickBooks.
Amicus Attorney lets you view and manage all of your contacts and matters, as well as your calendar and more. (Slide 1) The core of the practice management system is your matters or cases. For each matter you will have at least one client and you may have multiple contacts. Some of these contacts may be related to multiple matters. You want to be able to see everything from the perspective of the matter or from any of the contacts. With Amicus Attorneys contacts can be assigned to multiple matters with appropriate roles. Contacts can also be related to one another, with assigned roles like Accountant, Employer, or anything you decide.
When you setup an 'appointment' or 'to do', make a phone call, or create a document you can relate it to one or more contacts and files. Amicus Attorney also lets you track time, store emails and take phone messages - no more pink message slips floating around the office. Amicus Attorney also offers the ability to create documents using information from within the Amicus records, basically a simple word merge template using Amicus Attorney fields. Both products also offer a time tracker to help you capture time for work done that you might have missed. (Slide 2) Just think of the extra revenue your firm could generate solely by capturing 10 extra billable minutes a day, every day, for every member of your firm.
While there are a number of differences between Amicus Attorney Small Firm Edition and Amicus Attorney Premium Edition, key benefits of Amicus Attorney Premium Edition include:
- Ability to setup security
- Login on any installed workstation. With Amicus Attorney Small Firm Edition the login is tied to the workstation.
- Link to Outlook or Google – contacts and/or calendar. With Amicus Attorney Small Firm Edition only an Outlook link is available. Both editions will synchronize email with Outlook.
- More customization
- Amicus Premium Billing
Both Amicus Attorney Small Firm Edition and Amicus Attorney Premium Edition can link to QuickBooks. This allows you to capture your time as you work and send your time over to QuickBooks for billing. Amicus Attorney Premium Edition offers a second option – Amicus Premium Billing linked to QuickBooks. With this combination billing is done in Amicus Premium Billing. This allows for mass billing, billing with flat fee arrangements and tracking of trusts with automatic apply to invoices as well as warnings when a client trust balance is low. When the billing is done and payments are received, the information is sent to QuickBooks. The Amicus Premium Billing link is setup on a cash basis. (Slide 3) Payments received to operating or trust and money withdrawn from trust are sent to QuickBooks as journal entries to allow complete tracking of the bank accounts.
The link is not perfect but does a good job of giving you more power for billing while reducing duplicate data entry. The limitations of the link include:
- You cannot create expense entries in Amicus from checks written in QuickBooks. Some firms view this as a plus as it offers a cross check - you can easily run reports to double check that all entries are in both systems.
- Any transactions that require a physical check require an extra step in QuickBooks to write the check since the entry that comes over is a check and you can’t write a check from a journal entry. This includes withdrawal from trust to pay the firm or a third party.
- There are easy work-arounds which are documented in materials available from this author.
Amicus Cloud also links to QuickBooks desktop edition.
Examine your firm needs:
- Manage cases and contacts
- Calendar management
- Time capture
- Billing requirements
- Number of users
- Tracking trust accounts
And then decide which solution will most benefit your firm. While it may sound like a lot to decide, there is a network of Amicus Certified Consultants that can help. If you want to see if there’s someone local, go to http://amicusattorney.com/consultants/find. Of course you may also obtain more information from Amicus at: http://amicusattorney.com/
Editor's Note: If you are in Connecticut, or willing to consider working with someone remotely, you may wish to contact Caren at 203-254-7736.
Amicus Attorney is a Registered Trademark of Gavel & Gown Software Inc., Toronto, Ontario, Canada.