Release 20.03 - March 2020 – Legalsense

The Legalsense update of March 2020 has version number 20.03 and includes the following changes:

User management: adding non-fee-earners

When adding a user in Legalsense the new user is marked as fee earner by default. In order to change the user to non-fee earner, you had to contact Legalsense. With this update, you can mark the ‘fee earner’ status in Legalsense yourself. Please note that if you are out of licenses when adding a fee earner, this will automatically increase your license count.

Integration with financial accounting software: Exact Online

Legalsense now offers an integration with Exact Online (financial accounting software) as well. We will be adding documentation articles for this integration in the near future. If you are interested in using this integration, please contact Legalsense support.

Support for multiple firms/entities

Legalsense offers better support for handling multiple firms and/or entities within one Legalsense installation. This applies, for example, to firms that consist of two companies (entities) in two different countries (with different VAT (tax) rates). We will be adding documentation articles for this integration in the near future.

Clients / Contacts / Matters

In Legalsense you can add contacts as an “Organization” or as a “Natural person”. When adding a ‘Natural person’ as a ‘Debtor’ the BIC field (Bank Identifier Code) is available after the IBAN field. A BIC value is often required when adding a foreign IBAN and transferring the debtor to integrated financial accounting software;
When using submatters in Legalsense, you can make the submatter a required field for time entry by using the ‘toggle’ on the matter page and clicking on the link “Make required” or “Make optional”;
When using multiple currencies in Legalsense, you can set the currency on a matter as well as on a client. In this way, it is possible to have a client that will normally be billed in euro (EUR) but has a specific matter that needs to be billed in dollars (USD);
For firms that do not need the VAT number field for debtors because they are outside of Europe, we can optionally hide this field. Please contact Legalsense support if you want this field to be hidden;
When you are using subscriptions in Legalsense, you can set the price of the subscription on the matter. If the price is not specified, the subscription will use the default price from the product;
The name of the pricing scheme is added to the “Print infosheet” option for a matter.  
If you take into account a standard provision for work in progress in your financial reports, you can now set this provision as a percentage on the matter. Please contact Legalsense support if you want use this option.

Insolvency

The Insolvency report (for a matter) contains a worksheet “Time entries by users”. By default this worksheet is sorted by users and then by date. On request we can change the sorting to for example: by date only;
The formatting of the date, employee and columns with numbers in the Insolvency report are changed. The date and employee columns are now top-left aligned, and the number columns are top-right aligned. The height of the title-row at the top of the worksheet is improved.

Reporting

In the report-builder you can distinguish between ‘Natural persons’ and ‘Organizations’ with a new filter/grouping option called ‘Client is a natural person’ or ‘Debtor is a natural person’ (depending on what type of report you are viewing);
There are two new graphs available for the dashboards. These graphs show the ‘Revenue’ and ‘Cumulative revenue’ based on billed amounts and the date of billing (invoice date). If you are interested in displaying these graphs in your dashboard, please contact Legalsense support;
You can view other (leverage) team and/or practice group dashboards of which you are not part of yourself with the ‘View other …’ option at the right-hand top of these dashboards. There are new permissions available to configure which groups can use this option.

Time

When searching for time entries ('Timesheet - Search') a field ‘Client’ is added to the ‘Advanced search’;
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'.

Billing

The performance of the rendering and calculation of invoices is improved. Saving a draft or finalizing an invoice is takes less time than before;
You can choose the debtor when creating an invoice for a single matter which has multiple debtors and one debtor is set to 100%. In this way you can quickly create an invoice for a different debtor of the matter;
When searching for invoices ('Invoices – Debtor overview’) a field ‘Client’ is added to the ‘Advanced search’;
When creating a separate advance invoice with a negative amount, you get a warning that this is probably not what you want. When you want to settle an advance in Legalsense, the option ‘Settle outstanding advances’ should be used. Creating an advance invoice with a negative amount can be used for settling advances that were not initially created in Legalsense. Because this is relatively exceptional, we have added this warning.

Other changes

When selecting the matter field on a time entry form, a label ‘Recent matters’ is shown at the top of the list of recent matters to point out that you are viewing your recent matters;
There are multiple reasons why a user can be logged out of Legalsense. If you are logged out because of one of the following reasons, you will receive an email message explaining this. The possible reasons for logging out are: ‘You have been logged out as your IP address has changed.’, ‘You have been logged out as you have logged in elsewhere.’ or ‘You have been logged out as your session has expired.’. The security settings for your firm determine if you are being logged out because of these reasons;
When exporting disbursements to Excel (‘Disbursements – Search’) the column ‘Number of kilometers’ is added.

API

The accounting export in for example DATEV format can be made available in the APIv2 (Legalsense REST API). The API call returns a JSON result with an encoded CSV file;
The ‘created_by’ field is added to the time entries (logline) endpoint of the Legalsense REST API (APIv2);
A ‘branches’ field is added to the APIv1.