One of the biggest challenges that law companies face is missing billable hours. In fact, the larger the company the stronger the losses. Lawyers have to work on multiple matters often for multiple clients, which makes manual time logging a burden. That’s why many lawyers resort to a time-consuming and challenging habit that costs their law firms thousands of dollars monthly – they reconstruct their daily activities and time expenditures at the end of the day.
Many of our clients confessed that before they switched to law firm time tracking software, they used to recreate their activities using different apps and law practice management software. For example, most of them checked their calendars to review them for meetings, calls, court dates to recall what’s been accomplished throughout the day; or looked through their emails to remember which matters they’ve worked for and when. If they’d postponed time logging for a few days, their recollections became less precise, which brought inaccurate data and led to losses in company revenues and misunderstandings with clients.
Let us show you how actiTIME can eliminate these time tracking and task management challenges.
Law Firm Time Tracking with actiTIME
Time Tracking
Some lawyers and attorneys charge by the hour, while some bill in increments of .10, .20, .25., .30 etc, of an hour. So, it’s essential that all billable hours should be registered so that your clients do not underpay or overpay for your services and you maintain a relationship of trust.
In actiTIME, you can record billable and non-billable hours in 4 different ways:
- Fill out your online timesheet
- Specify start and end times of tasks on the weekly calendar view interface
- Capture hours across the websites automatically by using Chrome extension
- Or track time on the go with mobile apps.
Timesheet
In actiTIME, you can use weekly timesheets to record your time. All you need is to create tasks, add them to the timesheet and fill it in manually as you go through the day.
Online timesheet interface in actiTIME where every user can select task parameters
they want to see in their timesheets
Add comments to your time entries to record particular activities inside the tasks and use them when building reports and invoices.
Calendar view
To see you work during the week visualized in time blocks, you can always switch to the Calendar interface.
Weekly calendar interface is a weekly timeline where your work is displayed in time blocks. Create new time blocks by entering start and end times of the tasks, adjust their duration by dragging their top and bottom borders or drag them to another time or day with a single mouse click. Choose a task parameter to be displayed in time blocks, whether its estimates, deadlines, time periods or custom fields, like litigation codes, for example.
Calendar view interface in actiTIME where you can track time by entering start and end times of tasks, manage and review time blocks across the week
Speaking of the reports, time tracking using the Calendar view interface allows you to generate special data reports, displaying activities and their time intervals across users, clients and projects. Our users from different countries claim that these reports help them to comply with local and state laws requiring detailed records of accomplished work.
Weekly calendar is a great interface for those who enjoy visualizing their work or is required to provide detailed reports of the task periods. Otherwise, you can hide this interface in the settings.
Chrome Extension
If you work behind your desk most of the day, you’ll enjoy a handy browser extension with a stopwatch. Use it to capture hours directly from your web browser, or integrate actiTIME with other popular applications.
Mobile App
actiTIME easily integrates into the active legal lifestyle. Whether you have a client meeting, a court representation or a business trip, you can capture hours from the mobile app even if you are offline. As soon as you restore the connection, actiTIME will sync the data with your account and fill in your weekly timesheet. actiTIME mobile is available for iOS and Android devices.
Custom Work Scope
In actiTIME, you can set up custom names for the work structure of a maximum of 3 levels. For example, instead of the default “Customers - Project - Tasks” structure you may want to use “Client - Case - Task”. This allows you to sort your projects, cases or matters in a convenient way and use this division to review tasks, build reports and invoices.
Custom Fields for Tasks
Law Firms can also benefit from assigning additional fields to their tasks. For example, you can add Litigation Codes (UTBMS codes) and Practice Areas fields to review case profitability by areas or communicate codes for invoicing.
After you set up custom fields, you can assign their values to individual tasks. In the Custom Field report, you can see these values, sort the data according to them, choose which fields to display in the report and save this report as a CSV file.
Billable & Non-billable Work
Lawyers and attorneys do a lot of work that is billed to the client, and a lot of work that is not billed to the client. For example, conference meetings hours are not billable to the client and are paid by the law firm, while client meetings are billable hours that should be further invoiced.
In actiTIME, you can define Types of Work for tracking billable vs. non-billable hours, calculating billable amounts and comparing them to project costs. Use this data to run reports and generate invoices.
Reports & Summaries
Lawyers and attorneys usually bill their clients for the amount of time spent on their matters. To gain more trust and eliminate possible payment-related quarrels and misunderstandings, you can provide them with reports on what you’ve been working on and how much time it took you to accomplish it.
In actiTIME, if you set up billable and non-billable work types and define the pay rates, you can generate reports and time-track summaries. Let’s take a closer look at which reports might be the most helpful for lawyers and attorneys.
Reports dashboard in actiTIME – set up real-time data widgets
and add report shortcuts for quick access
Time-Track In Detail Report
With the Time-Track In Detail report, you can gain an insight into what your team has been working on and for how long. You can group the data by the employees, date range, customers, matters and tasks.
actiTIME timesheet supports time entry comments that your lawyers can use to back up their logged time or leave messages to their superiors. You can see these comments in the Time-Track In Detail and other reports.
Billing Summary Report
To review your time logs and billable amounts for different types of work, you can use the Billing Summary report. You can adjust the data display settings and set a date range, group the data by customers and projects.
Billing Summary report in actiTIME – set up work rates
and get the software to calculate the billable amounts
Invoicing
If you set up hourly pay rates for your team members to calculate the cost of work, then actiTIME can use your data to create bills and invoices. Use our customizable ready-to-go templates, add some branding, taxes and discounts.
When you are ready, download the invoice as a PDF file and send it to your client.
Integrations
One of the issues that many lawyers face daily is an enormous amount of documents, software, and emails that pull their attention in many directions. Modern law firm time tracking software support app integrations and allow you to automate most of your daily routine tasks. For example, the same minute you create a new case in the law practice management software, you may want your time tracker to automatically create a new task and start recording time against it. actiTIME supports Zappier or API integrations that allow you to connect your time tracker with more than 2.000 apps and industry-specific software.
If your law firm needs a leave time management solution to control your corporate work schedule and manage remote team availability, you can use actiPLANS integration.
Leave management in actiPLANS – create an unlimited number of leave types, get your team to request and plan their time off and review employee availability
To level up your invoicing, you might want to connect with QuickBooks - one of the most popular accounting systems for small businesses. This integration allows you to import your timesheet data and use it for invoicing, tax calculations and payroll.
If you are not sure if actiTIME is a good fit for your law firm, you can start a 30-day trial (no credit card required).
