Changelog
Follow up on the latest improvements and updates.
RSS
This release has quite a few things under the hood, including:
- QuickBooks Online, allowing you to synchronize invoices, clients, and payments with your QuickBooks account.This is not on by default, and we’re looking for a couple firms that want to use it and provide feedback.If you’re interested, please contact support and request access.
- Cleaner Tables! We’ve streamlined the pages for People, Matters, Invoices, and Time to give you cleaner data and less left<->right scrolling. Matters with more than 2 clients, or more than 1 subcategory will have a hoverover that shows you all the details.
- Time charts for matters: You can now open a matter, go to Time, and see at a glance how much time has been billed vs not, as well as how much time is across different categories (billable, non billable, etc)
- Simpler balance card, which hides some of the rarer balances if they’re $0, like pending totals.
- When you’re editing an invoice, we now have a “Save and Approve” button to simplify your approval process. No more saving, going to the action … icon, and hitting approve!
- If trust accounts have $0 of trust, you won’t be prompted to apply funds when you’re approving invoices
- Fixes an annoying bug where you couldn’t view more than 25 invoices for a specific matter
- Invoices that have a trust transfer will only appear in the trust transfer workflow if they’ve been sent out, preventing you from rejecting an invoice but already having funds transferred
- It further finalizes our Client Portal, allowing registered clients to view their bills, make payments, and top off trust. We’re looking at a pilot with a few customers later in the month, so I’ll follow up later in the month to find any volunteers.
- Other minor fixes around punctuation in names, spelling fixes, and the standard security updates
This release adds a few small features and a bunch of fixes, including:
- Invoices will properly have the status of “Sent” when they are sent to the client, not when they have been exported. Unless you have the “3rd Party Export” feature turned on with Xero, invoices that are approved will show up in your “Print and Email Invoices” page
- If an invoice cannot be delivered by email, it will now show the status “Failed to Send” (in addition to the email to the primary attorney, which it already does)
- You can now tag people, much like how you can tag matters.
- Small improvements in how things look, including a lefthand tool bar that scrolls with the page and improved filter pane
- Your tabs/favorites/history in the browser will now have a better name for what page you were on, instead of just saying “Clever Case”
- Import instructions for people have better instructions for formatting phone numbers
- PDFs of invoices will show proper dates for when expenses were charged (instead of showing the date the invoice was made) and remove the date for additional line items
- Phone numbers will be formatted in USA format (XXX-XXX-XXXX) and be clickable to dial in Teams for more pages
- Password security is improved, requiring a 10 character password for all new passwords (old passwords will not be impacted)
- Improvements to the invoice search (under filters)
- You can now get a referral link if you want to tell other firms to use Clever Case
- Gravity Legal is now renamed to be Confido Legal
- Fixed numerous bugs around invoice due dates, emailing invoices with a manual PDF, roles now requiring a unique name, timecards not showing matters in the search if they’re consultation, and more
This smaller December release (Dec 13) is mostly focused on some bug fixes and minor enhancements, just to hold you over until our next major release. Specifically:
- Batch approval of invoices will apply trust if any exists
- You can now move expenses from one matter to another (if they’ve not been invoiced yet)
- Fixed a bug where a new timecard might not allow you to pick certain matters in the search
- If a new matter is created and there is not a consultation (and you choose existing client) the matter will default to Open. This will not change matters that were already created.
- In the Matters and Your Matters page, you can now filter for matters where “Batch Invoicing Disabled”. This will let you find matters that you might have disabled batch invoicing (thereby keeping it from generating new invoices each month).
- Expenses on a matter can now be exported into a CSV file
- Single history entries will now be formatted consistently, and buttons to load more history will not appear if there are not more history items to load
- The help and support button will now point to the new Clever Case support pages help.clevercase.com, going live soon
- Other performance and security updates
If an admin or finance user sends out an invoice via email, and that message “bounces back” from an invalid email address or a full mailbox, assigned attorneys and paralegals for that matter now get a new notification in your email!
If you receive this notification, your client or billing user did NOT receive their invoice. Please check their email address in Clever Case and see if it’s a simple typo, or reach out to the client for an updated email address. Once you update the email address, admins and finance users can resend the invoice from the "Print and Email Invoices" page.
Additionally, you’ll see a small triangle icon next to the email address in Clever Case if the email address experienced an error:
Alerts emails will look like this:
This release has really been focused on pain points we hear from staff. Changes to Clever Case include:
- Statements! You can now generate a statement for a specific matter, or for a client for all their matters, by going to the “Financial Transactions” option in the navigation and pressing Create Statement. Statements give a full summary of all work they’ve had with your firm, listing each invoice, payment, and trust transaction. Trust and Hold Accounts will also have their own table for clarity.
- Matters now have new statuses, and new abilities when you change between statuses! Matters will start as “Consultation” for new matters, and should be changed to “Open” once you’ve got that signed fee agreement. When you change a matter to “Open”, you will now have a screen pop up to confirm who’s assigned to the matter, categories, and billing preferences. There is also a “Pending Close” status for matters where work has completed, but the file has not been completely closed.
- New matters will now default to having Trust enabled, so you don’t manually need to set “Has Trust” to Yes. This is only for new matters. If you have a matter that should NOT have trust used, please make sure to uncheck the trust checkbox for the matter.
- The timecard widget in the upper right has received some TLC:
- My Timecards now prioritize sorting by newest first.
- Timecard Tracker now stickies the most recently stopped or started timecard.
- When more than one timecard is running, pausing will bring up all running timecards instead of pausing.
- Clicking the number of running timecards will now toggle through them.
- Added an unpin all button.
- When making a new person or entity, the role will not default to “Parties” anymore. Instead, you’ll have a simple list to pick a required role before saving the person/entity.
- Invoices printed and mailed to clients will now have a friendly message about talking to their attorney if they’re interested in receiving their bills electronically
- Consultation matters now have a button to make a consultation invoice, allowing you to collect payment for a consultation with just a couple clicks.
- A validator to make sure that email addresses are actual email addresses, to keep people from accidentally putting a phone number or other thing into Email. This prevents invoices from not being sent out because the email address is wrong.
- Organizations can now sign up for Clever Case on their own! If you know an attorney at another firm interested in using Clever Case, you can point them to our sign up page.
- The ability for users with admin or finance security to search for payments by transaction ID, Gravity Legal ID, or Xero ID in the Accounting Ledger
- Fixes to our invoice PDF, including alternating dark and light lines and column formatting
- An alert on the login page if your password is incorrect or your account hasn’t been confirmed on setup
- Clearer language on a rejected invoice to let you know time will not automatically appear on a future invoice unless you remove the entries
- Improvements to the history of matters and invoices, showing a clearer list and more details about changes
- Fixes to the count of pending invoices, counters of how many items you have selected, and count of invoices on a matter or person
- Improvements to sorting for time on Your Time and sorting for invoices
- Matters will now default to email billing, instead of being blank
- When taking some actions like cancelling or starting a timecard, you occasionally would get a message that say “Continue Anyways”, which is not correct to say. Now says “Anyway” – thank you Malia!
New enhancements to Clever Case include:
- A new “payment wizard” to streamline payments for invoices and trust into one process. This will be live for finance users for a few days, and will come out for the rest of the org in the coming weeks.
- A new billing preference called “Not Sent to Client”, which is used when the bills are sent to the court, an insurance, etc. Setting your matter’s billing preference to “Not Sent to Client” will prevent bills from accidentally being printed or emailed to the client.
- Adds ability for finance users to push an invoice from draft to sent, to reduce approval emails when not needed
- Finance users can now refund money that is on a client’s operating account without moving it to trust and then refunding it
- Payments via ACH and check will no longer show as “pending”, but will be applied to the account when inputted.
- Invoices that have not had payments applied to them, or all payments have been reverted, can now be voided or deleted by finance users
- Other fixes to our invoicing, including pagination fixes on print & email invoices page, batch invoicing process to properly filter out matters based on tags, payments syncing to Xero using local time instead of UTC, CSV imports now use US format dates
- New Dashboard Components! These will let you see:
- The five most recent payments have been received on matters where you are an assigned attorney or paralegal (over the last 7 days)
- Your time for the week, across all matters
- Speed improvements when searching by name for a person/entity
- Marking a matter as “Consult Held” now defaults to the date/time the consult was scheduled, not when you clicked the button (you can override if the consult was held at a different date/time)
- Voided invoices will show a strikethrough on the invoice list
- Approving an invoice when a matter is flagged as “Has Trust” will now take you straight to the alert, instead of asking you if you want to apply trust first. If you don’t want to apply trust, you can click “do not apply trust” in the lower left of the box
- Better message when an invoice has been rejected
- New consultation invoices will now appear in invoices list (and in the balances). This is already live, but we’ll start using it today.
- More bug fixes around invoice payments and invoice creation