Release 19.11 - November 2019

The Legalsense update of November 2019 has the version number 19.11 and includes the following changes: 

Reconciled status for credit and credited invoices

By crediting an invoice, the related credit and credited invoice get the status 'reconciled'. Each credit and credited invoice also has a small icon, indicating that it is a credit or credited invoice and links to its related, counterpart invoice. The status ‘reconciled’ replaces the more generic status ‘Final’ for credit and credited invoices. When searching for invoices in the invoice list, you can choose 'Reconciled’ to filter on all reconciled invoices. When exporting the invoice list to Excel, a separate column displays the status: Credit or Credited. Another column lists the invoice number of the credit or credited invoice.

Warning: the payment status of reconciled invoices is still automatically set to ‘Ignore payment status’: the invoices are not listed as unpaid. For firms using Legalsense with Twinfield accounting software and retrieving payments from Twinfield, we expect the firm to settle the invoices in Twinfield ('afletteren') and the invoices will still get the status ‘Paid’ because of this. For a future update of Legalsense, we are looking at automatically retrieving the information that an invoice is settled (reconciled) in Twinfield so that we can apply the ‘reconciled’ status to that invoice. For now, the reconciled status is not (fully) available for firms using Legalsense and Twinfield. The icons that indicate the credit or credited status and the extra information in the Excel export of invoices, are available.

Uncollectable amount of an invoice

For invoices that are not going to be paid in full (or not at all), a ‘Mark as uncollectable’ option is added with the payment options. The outstanding amount of an invoice can be marked as uncollectable, so that the invoice is no longer listed as unpaid. In the report builder, ‘uncollectable’ and ‘unpaid’ are available as a separate amount column. A filter is available for ‘Invoice payment status’ that has the choices ‘Paid’, ‘Unpaid’ and ‘Uncollectable’. In the invoice list, you can use the status field to search for uncollectable invoices. Columns for ‘Paid', ‘Outstanding’ and ‘Uncollectable’ are added to the Excel export of invoices. Please note that marking an invoice as (partly) uncollectable, does not affect your firms possible integration with accounting software. For example, when Legalsense is used together with Twinfield accounting software, nothing will be sent to Twinfield when an invoice is marked as partly uncollectable.

Overview of targets

We added an overview of all targets to the User section. You can search for targets in a specific period and also choose to include users without targets in the search result. The list of user targets can be exported to Excel. When adding a comment to a target, that comment is displayed in the list as well.

Billing workflow

• For each task in the list of invoice tasks, an icon with the available actions (e.g. ‘Approve’) is added to the end of the row.

• For each task in the list of invoice tasks, a checkbox is added to the beginning of the row. For selected invoice tasks, an Action button with multiple-select actions is added to the top of the table. Using these you can select multiple invoice tasks and perform actions (e.g. ‘Approve’) on them.

• When the billing workflow in Legalsense is configured to always have two responsible users to review the invoice (two steps), the ‘Set next task’ button now includes a ‘Check by a second responsible user’ choice.

Other changes

• When adding an attachment to a disbursement, files of type EML and MSG (for e-mail messages) are now supported. Other (already) supported file types are PDF, image files and Excel files. Only PDF and image files can be used when adding disbursements to a (sales) invoice PDF.

• The invoice list displays all matters for an invoice in the column ‘Matter’. When having multiple matters listed for one invoice, the text is truncated to 500 characters for improved readability.

• Earlier this year, we introduced quick matter selection using 'Recent Matters'. The Legalsense iOS (iPhone) app will soon support ‘Recent matters’ in the app as well. In order for the recent matters to be displayed in the app, your firm needs to be using this version (19.11) of Legalsense. If your firm uses the previous version of Legalsense (19.08) then the app will still work after updating, but will not display the recent matters.

• A reporting issue for a user that has a target, for example for a whole year, and who switches practice groups during the year (with a begin and end date), that lead to an incorrect target distribution over the two practice groups (and the selected period), is fixed.

• When searching for time entries ('Timesheet - Search') the field 'User' has been renamed to 'Timekeeper'.
• When searching for time entries ('Timesheet - Search') a field 'Timekeeper function' is added to the 'Advanced search'.

API changes