Activities

Activities (also called timekeeping codes) describe the type of work a timekeeper performs, such as drafting, research, or attending a meeting. You can create multiple activities and link each one to one or more activity groups. Legalsense always has a default activity group to which all active activities are linked.

Adding an activity

Go to Settings → Lists → Activities to add or edit activities. All active activities are shown here. Click New activity to create one.

New activity button on the Activities list page.

When creating a new activity, fill in the form. The fields are explained below. Fields marked with an asterisk (*) are required.

Name (Dutch): the Dutch description of the activity.

Name (English): the English description of the activity, if needed. When a matter's language is set to English, the English name is shown in time entries and included on the invoice.

Number: a number you assign to the activity. If you leave this field empty, Legalsense assigns one automatically.

Default rate*: every activity must have a rate of at least €0. For activities you want to show separately on invoices, you can set a separate hourly rate. See the article ↪ Pricing schemes for more information on how these rates are used in pricing schemes.

Rate factor: a factor applied to the rate of time entries linked to this activity. For example, if you handle emergency work outside office hours, you could create an activity called Emergency outside office hours with a rate factor of 2.0. This doubles the rate for all time entries linked to that activity. A rate factor of 0.5 reduces the value of the time entry by 50%.

The rate factor doesn't have a date period attached, so any change to it affects all time entries that haven't been billed yet (work in progress, or WIP). When you change the rate factor, Legalsense recalculates the affected time entries during the nightly job, when you resave a time entry, or when you create a new draft invoice. Resaving an already-created draft invoice doesn't trigger recalculation of the time entries it already includes.

Separately on invoice: shows this activity's time entries separately on the invoice, valued at the activity's own rate instead of the timekeeper's (or their function's) rate. You can override this activity rate per client or matter.

Default activity: pre-selects this activity when entering time entries.

Availability: controls which matters this activity can be used on (for example, to prevent a non-billable activity from being used on a billable matter, or the reverse). The options are:

• Always available
• Billable matters only
• Non-billable matters only

Activity groups: if your environment has more than one activity group, link the activity to the desired group(s) here. Legalsense always has one default activity group to which all active activities are linked. For more detail on setting up and using activity groups, see the article ↪ Activity groups.

Editing an activity

Go to Settings → Lists → Activities and click the edit icon next to an activity to edit it.

Edit icon next to an activity in the Activities list.

This opens the same screen as creating a new activity, where you can make the desired changes.

Click the delete icon to remove an activity you no longer want to use. A deleted activity remains visible on any existing time entries that used it.

Delete icon next to an activity in the Activities list.