What's New in our January 2020 Release
This article is intended to help you understand what is new in the January 2020 Centerbase release, and take advantage of these new features.
Major New Features in this Release Include:
- Project and Subscription Fee Arrangements
- Matter Metrics
- Time Entry Approval
- Account Number Segmentation
- General Ledger Budgeting
- Outlook Add-In MSG Save
- Credit Hours
- Chart of Accounts Import
- Tons of Other Enhancements and Improvements
Project and Subscription Fee Arrangements
We have added the ability to specify two specific new types of fee arrangements in addition to the default Hourly type; Project and Subscription. These new features allow easier bill generation, the ability to allocate payments to timekeepers over whatever period of time you choose, and to generate bills without a single time or expense entry needed.
Project Based Billing
This fee arrangement is designed to easily handle flat rate projects. Simply input the amount to be billed for the project, how many bills you want to spread the amount over, and Centerbase handles the rest.
Subscription Billing
This arrangement is designed to allow you to bill clients on a regular recurring basis for a specific amount. An example might be an in-house counsel arrangement where the clients pays a fixed amount each month regardless of how many hours you work on their matter.
Both of these new types provide mechanisms to allocate fees received over whatever time period you desire to allow even distribution of payments to timekeepers that work on the matter. Follow the links below to learn more about this exciting new capability!
Billing for Flat Fee Arrangements
Accounting and Allocations for Flat Fee Arrangements
Matter Metrics
Matter Metrics allows you to create budgets on matters and timekeepers for time, fees, and expenses. These budgets can be broken up by month, quarter, or year. When set on a matter, you budget total time, fees, and expenses or break it down base on any dropdown field on a timekeeper's record, like Reporting Catagory and LEDES Classification Code. When used for timekeepers you can set a budget for Billable Hours, Billable Value, Billed Hours, Billed Fees, and Fees Received. In both cases once you have set the budget you will be able to see actual versus budget for each time period. Click the link below for more details.
Time Entry Approval
This update is two-part, adding a page where you can now view, edit, and approve unposted time entries in one easy location, and second giving the option to require time entries to be approved before they can be billed for. On the new page, Timekeepers can view, edit, and approve their own entries while your billing personnel can be allowed to view and manage time entries from all timekeepers. You can also place a time entry on hold to prevent it from being billed.
When you turn on Time Entry Approval, time entries will have to be approved before a bill can be generated for them. It will also prevent a bill from being posted if a time entry on it had its approval revoked. There are new permissions to allow a user to bypass these requirements and get a warning message instead of an error message. Additionally, the generate bills page will be split into two tabs, one for matters whose time entries within the date range are approved and one for matters who have unapproved time. For more details on who to set this up click the link below.
Account Number Segmentation
We have added the ability to add account segment IDs to Income and Expense Accounts to make it easier to filter the Profit and Loss report by practice area, office location, or whatever else you would like to split your accounts by. There is a new page in the system setting that allows you to set up account segments which can then be added to income or expense accounts. Whether or not to use account segments is set on the individual account so you can leave unified accounts alone while segmenting other accounts. Check out the link below to get started.
General Ledger Budgeting
You now have the power to make and review budgets for your Income and Expense accounts within Centerbase. There is a new page that can be added to your Navigation Bar where you can build, manage, and view reports on your budgets. When you add a new budget you select what fiscal year it is for and whether it will be a monthly, quarterly, or annual budget. You have the option to populate the budget with the actual figures from previous years or to build one from scratch. You can make more than one budget for the same year if you want. Once you have built a budget you can view a report on the same page for budgeted versus actual money earned/spent. See the link below for more information.
Outlook Add-in Save as MGS Files and Web Opener
The new version of our Outlook Add-in saves emails in the native format of emails, .MSG. So instead of viewing a basic copy of the email you can now open and view your emails the same as if you had opened them from outlook. Including being able to replay or forward the message from Centerbase. That part only affects new emails saved to the system, existing emails will still be in the older .M16 format. But all of the emails will benefit from new fields that allow you to search, and report, In addition to the subject there are now fields for Sender, To, CC, BCC, Date Received, Date Sent, Has Attachments (true/false) Direction (Incoming/Outgoing), attachment names, and you can even search the body of the email. Click the link below for more information on the new features.
New Outlook Add-in, Now Saving as .MSG files
Click below to download the new Add-in.
Credit Hours
We have added an additional way for you to track your time in addition to working hours and billable hours you can now use credit hours also. To use credit hours you have to turn them on in system settings. You will only be able to enter and edit them on the billing entries dialog, they are not on the timesheet page. By default credit, hours will equal worked hours unless they are changed. The Time Entries Report and Timekeeper Analysis Report will both report on this new hour type.
Chart of Accounts Import
Users can now import their chart of accounts with a .csv file. If the account does not exist, it will be added and a journal entry will be made for its opening balance. If the account exists in Centerbase, it will update the account data, including updating the opening balance journal entry. This will help save a lot of time when setting up a new client on Centerbase. Click below to learn how to use this powerful tool.
Even More New Features!
Billing Entry Sorting
This is actually two features. You now have the power to decide how billing entries are sorted on a bill. Before entries were hard-coded to be sorted by entry date. Now you can sort by any field on a billing entry and have up to three levels of sorting.
The second part is the ability to manually sort billing entries on the pre-bills themselves. While editing a pre-bill you can select a billing entry and move them up or down in the list.
Note: The system still first sorts time entries above expense entries. even if you manually move an expense entry above a time entry when you save it will reorder them to have time entries above expenses.
Click below to find out who to set up your own custom sorting.
A Search Bar Has Been Added to the Chart of Accounts and the Account Register
There is now a search bar in the chart of accounts and the account registry pages. The search bar in the chart of accounts searches the Account Name and Account Number fields. The search bar in the Account Register searches the Reference Number and Memo fields.
Additional Enhancements and Improvements!
ITEM DETAIL SETTINGS ACTIONS: made the settings list on the item detail page alphabetical.
JOURNAL ENTRIES: added date control filtering to journal entries.
JOURNAL ENTRIES: removing the 'Find All' button.
NAVIGATION BAR: added ability to create "Users" navigation bar item. Added "Users" navigation bar icon.
ORIGINATIONS_TAB: Default Partners split will now have a default UserName and if the start date is null, then it won’t display the placeholder on the originations tab
ONLINE BANKING: added a field for the number of days to grab on initial update
ONLINE BANKING: add settings to online banking to reduce the number of transactions grabbed on update
VENDOR PAYMENTS: changed to allow payments from non bank/credit card accounts.
BILL ITEM DETAIL: changed how things were loading to do more concurrently or in batches.
INVOICE ITEM DETAIL: changed some blocking functions to be non-blocking for loading performance.
LOOKUPS: improvement to lookup speed
MATTER ITEM DETAIL: fixed numerous tabs on the matter item details page to only load when selected. Including: Rate Tables, Billing, Accounting, Trust, Chat, Origination, Workflow History
ORIGINATIONS STORED PROCEDURE: new stored procedure to help speed up origination tab
ORIGINATIONS TAB: changed billableid from parameter to string concat in GetBillableSplites to speed up originations tab.
PAYMENTS: reduced the duplicate work being done when saving Payments/Credits from the dialog.
PAYMENTS: consolidated SavePaymentDistributionAllocations into one function to reduce duplicate code. Slightly altered logic of the bulk saving to continue saving the rest of the allocations even if one of them cannot be saved.
PCTOOL: move logging to appconfig setting and remove release statements to improve performance
ROLLUP FORMULAS: added changes to cb_Find for faster processing of rollup formulas
2-FACTOR AUTHENTICATION: fixed issues that would double-send emails and cause errors on login.
AR REPORT: fixed an issue where the AR report sometimes could not be downloaded to Excel/CSV.
ACCOUNTING: fixing an issue that can occur when allocating payments to accounts.
CB WORD ADDIN: fix for existing documents save form dialog not loading the linked object.
CREATING BILLS: fixed an issue where creating Bills from the Plus icon would not load the billing entries grid.
EMAILS: fix for emails display issues when viewing them from Centerbase web.
EMAILS: fixed an issue with viewing attachments on e-mails sent from Centerbase
INVOICE WEB COPY: fixed issue where Credit card amount input had its '$' on the button instead of the input.
ISSUE FIX: fixed an issue when logging in to Android mobile client if someone chose the Appointment icon for a record.
ISSUE FIX: updated User Permissions constants to use a new key for permission to Set Default Grid Settings.
ISSUE FIX: removed redundant set default grid and related tab permissions.
LAWTOOLBOX: fixed for new trigger replacing previously clicked/opened trigger when saving.
NOTIFICATIONS: fixed issue where clicking chat notifications did not redirect the user to the chat tab
OUTLOOK ADDIN: small tweak to try to deal with issue when removing an added e-mail
OUTLOOK ADDIN: fix for out of sync email object
ONLINE BANKING: fixes for connecting account where holder not set
PAYMENT APPLY DIALOG: fixed an issue where changing the payment type would reset the account to its original value.
REPORTS: fixed issue where custom reports would not pass in TagManager type filters.
REPORTS: updated lookups and tagmanager to not add duplicates every time the report is refreshed
REPORTS: fix for large data with groups showing duplicate timekeeper names.
REPORTS: fixing an issue with missing originators not showing on P&O report
SECURITY PROFILES: fixed an issue where the admin setting was not setting all of the permissions correctly.
TASKFRAME: fixed an issue where the card editor save button would not be enabled after changing the description. Fixed an issue where an error could occur when reordering cards.
TASKS: fixed an issue for new events loading with wrong settings
TASKS: fixed an issue for all-day events showing the opposite type of time/date settings values on load.
UPLOAD DOCUMENT: fix for upload document dialog not working from matter actions.
ACCOUNTING REPORTS: updated AJAX to POST from GET. Updated logic to save accountids string as null when all accounts are selected.
INVOICE WEB VIEW: fixed an issue where web copies of bills could not be viewed after the database was restarted until an admin logged in to the system.
ISSUE FIX: changed class for the label for the expense billing code so it will not match the fees primary billing code, now defaults to Billing Code when on Expense Tab
ISSUE HANDLING: added redirects/nicer issue messages for unhandled exceptions in the endpoint or web. Handles: Web 503/404/other unhandled exceptions, SQL database down exceptions, Endpoint down exceptions.
NETDOCUMENTS: fixed an issue where having an invalid refresh token would cause the system settings to display the "connect" button when already connected to netdocuments. If this issue occurs your refresh token will now be removed so that you can connect with a valid one.
O365 LOOP: added new settings to throttle updates from 365 to Centerbase for a certain activity if we have received a large number of notifications in a small amount of time.
ONLINE BANKING: adding console logging with issue/metadata that ONLINE BANKING asks for when opening a support ticket.
ONLINE BANKING: on editing account, account subtype was not being grabbed, the name changed for the fix
ONLINE BANKING: force update lastdownloadedon on ONLINE BANKINGaccount table and handle time conversion
ONLINE BANKING: added a transaction name length maximum 255 to avoid sql truncate issue
VENDOR BILL PAYMENTS: updated to load accounts using cbGetAccountsLite and make ajax calls for balance.
INVOICE LEGAL: adding the ability to show payment notes and reference number separately as well as the ability to remove the pound sign
INVOICE LEGAL: adding a sort order to the list of invoices on consolidated bills
INVOICE LEGAL: adding base stored procedure for GetConsolidatedInvoices
INVOICE LEGAL: simplifying column headers code
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