Bill4Time - Time Management and Billing Software

A firm's experiences with Bill4Time

It used to be all too common for me... I’d be out of the office going between clients or working remote for a day or so... between phone calls and e-mails with clients, court appearances, and the other things that occupy my legal profession, I’d be jotting down my billable time on whatever was handy - a post-it note, the back of an envelope, and sometimes (embarrassingly) a napkin from starbucks.

How many of those notes have I lost over the years and what did that cost me in lost hours? I don't want to know.

Since my firm switched to Bill4Time a few months ago, post-it's and napkins for billable time are a thing of the past. When I'm at a computer (be it in my home office or anywhere else) I access Bill4Time through the web and enter my time. When I'm not near a computer, I use Bill4Time mobile on my Blackberry to enter my time and expenses (they are wirelessly uploaded to the system in real-time). This has proven extremely useful as I can bill my time on the way out of a client's office - in the elevator ride down, on the way to my car, etc.

This alone - the ease of access to Bill4Time (from any PC or my Blackberry) makes it a great asset to my firm.

The other feature that I can't live without is the Efficiency report, which gives me a color-coded calendar view of how much time everyone in my firm is billing each day - this lets me see in one screen who is and isn't entering their time.

We still have our Timeslips database for looking up old cases and clients, and are slowly phasing it out. We still use Outlook for our individual calendaring, but are encouraging everyone to use Bill4Time's schedule because it lets us see the entire firm's calendar in one view.

Before we started on it (3 months ago) I was concerned about the performance of it, being that it's internet-based. We have a 1.1 mob SDSL line, and with 19 people in the office our internet typically gets bogged down. Surprisingly, Bill4Time has been very quick to load and operate, even with our slow connection - much faster that we're used to.

Having said all of this - Bill4Time isn't perfect. I would like to see some tighter Outlook integration (calendar syncing, ability to attach e-mails to cases, etc); and am waiting for it to be Safari compatible so I can use it from my Mac book. Their support has been amazing (they have answered the phone as late as 11:30 pm eastern time, and the support reps are all in the USA and very proficient), and they are constantly adding new features (www.bill4time.com/vhist).

While it's not perfect, they make me feel like a "big fish in a small pond" and meet all of my firm's needs, and that makes them a keeper for my firm.

"The Dog Ate My Time"

Contact