Today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire covers a shared online contact management system (see article below), an accounting and billing application, an online tool for scheduling meetings, a hosted blogging service, and an iPhone time-tracking app. Don't miss the next issue.
Contact Management in the Cloud
Even if you work hard to keep all of your important contacts in Outlook (or whatever you use), invariably you'll need to contact someone whose information you lack — perhaps a new client or a client who usually works with a colleague of yours. Whatever the reason, a firm-wide address book would solve this problem — and you may as well make it accessible from anywhere while you're at it.
Customer Manager … in One Sentence
Many law firms find QuickBooks indispensable, but also frustrating because of all the client contact information locked inside.
Intuit's Customer Manager is a shared online contact management application.
The Killer Feature
Many law firms find QuickBooks indispensable, but also frustrating because of all the client contact information locked inside.
Customer Manager syncs with QuickBooks, enabling you and your colleagues to access and edit QuickBooks contact information from any Web browser — and also add new contacts.
Customer Manager also displays financial data for each client, including the current balance and open invoices. Given the sensitive nature of this financial information, Customer Manager will soon enable you to apply user permissions so that you can restrict access.
Other Notable Features
In addition to syncing with QuickBooks, you can import contacts into Customer Manager from Excel and Outlook. Customer Manager also has a search engine for finding contacts using any information such as a phone number. You can add custom fields to Customer Manager such as client and matter numbers.
In addition to managing your contacts, Customer Manager also provides a shared calendar, shared tasks, and groups. You can use the calendar to schedule team meetings, reserve conference rooms, etc. Shared tasks enable you to view work in progress, and assign tasks to subordinates. The groups tool can filter information. For example, you can view all clients with overdue invoices.
What Else Should You Know?
Customer Manager for Mobile is a free companion app for BlackBerry and iPhone. Customer Manager costs $9.95/month for up to five simultaneous users. Intuit sells customized plans if you have more than five users. Learn more about Customer Manager.
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So many products, so little time. In each issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, you'll learn about five new products for the legal profession. Pressed for time? The "In One Sentence" section describes each product in one sentence, and the "Killer Feature" section describes each product's most compelling feature. The TechnoLawyer NewsWire newsletter is free so don't miss the next issue. Please subscribe now.
