We’ve been working for months on a new improved version of our API.

This will make it even easier to integrate PracticePanther into any app of your choice.

This includes a full published integration with Zapier to allow you to connect on a deeper level with hundreds of apps worldwide.

The new API will be released slowly to a few beta testers, and we aim to release it into full production in early January 2018.

While everyone was out shopping and dining, we were releasing one of the most requested features of the year – multiple timers!

Now you can start a timer the same way as always (from the top left of every screen on the header menu bar), and you will see the timer on the right sidebar.

The timer on the right sidebar now has a box where you can add notes about what you’re working on. As soon as you finish typing the notes, it automatically saves the information, and you can continue moving to other screens while the timer is still running.

We changed the play button on top to say “Start Timer” to make it more intuitive for newer members.

To start a second timer (or more), click “Start Another Timer” on the right sidebar. Only 1 timer can run at the same time.

You can click on “Time Entries” on top to see all your recent time entries, and click the play button on the left side of each time entry to resume it.

You can have UNLIMITED number of timers loaded on the right sidebar, however we recommend saving the ones you finished with.

On this special day of Thanksgiving, we want to give thanks to all of our members who gave us input and made this feature possible. Enjoy!

If you have any invoices that are unpaid, or partially paid, and your client is not going to pay the remainder, you can write off the invoice for your records. This will remove the “Balance Due” from all of your reports so you can write off the bad debt.

In accounting terms, it will create a credit note for the amount due and apply it on the invoice.

Go to any invoice, click the green “Actions” button on the top right, and select “Write Off”. A popup box will appear asking you to confirm.

When you go to Contacts, Matters, Activities, Time Entries, or Invoices on the top of your screen, you will now see all your tags have been consolidated into one button called “Tags”.

When you click on the button, you can select a tag, then click on it again and select another tag, so you can filter as much as you want. For example, you can see all your active clients that came from Google AdWords to track your ROI.

We also added the ability to go to your Invoices or Activities page and select a Contact or Matter tag to filter the results even more. So you can filter your invoices to only show you all the clients that came from a certain marketing channel, or from a certain practice area, for example.

The possibilities are endless, so keep tagging, and running an unlimited number of custom reports!

You will now see a new button on the top right of your screen called Privacy Mode. When clicked, this will hide all the payment boxes at the top of every screen that has them. For example, if you go to your Dashboard, you will not see the payment numbers on top.

If you have someone sitting next to you, or you want to show someone some information, or you are working in a public area like a coffee shop or airport and you don’t want someone to see the payment information, this is the perfect solution.

To disable it, simply click the button again.

Many of you actually print checks to transfer money from your trust to operating account.

Now, you can filter the results to see all your transfers when you are printing checks or deposit slips.

To try it out, click More on top, select Bank Accounts, and then Print Checks. On the next screen, click the filter icon on top and you will have the option to print checks for either “Checks” or “Transfers”. Click here to try it now.

You can now add merge fields (for example #Contact.CustomField#) to invoice templates. These can either be added on individual invoices, or by setting the defaults in the settings screen. We modified the text fields to include a drop down with all the available options. This is enabled for both single and batch invoicing.

To see how it works, click on your name on the top right and select Settings. Then click “Invoice Options” on the left (or just click here). On the right you will now see the Default Terms & Conditions and Notes and you can click on “Add Fields” to add custom merge fields to each one that will now appear on every FUTURE invoice you generate.

On this page we have also added the ability to set your default notes for every invoice.

Many of you have asked to move the default position of Invoice Notes from the bottom of the invoice, to the top, and now you can!

To do this, click here, and change the “Notes Position on Invoice” from Bottom to Top. Don’t forget to scroll down and click Save on the bottom.

Due to popular demand, we’ve added a brand new report that shows how much money each client owes, and how long it’s been owed for.

This allows you to focus on collecting older outstanding debts first.

To see the new report, click on “More” on top, and select “Reports”. Click the first option for “Invoices”, and it’s the last report on the bottom that says “A/R Aging Report”. You can also click here.

Before, you could only generate an invoice for everything. Now, we’re giving you more flexibility so you can generate an invoice ONLY for time entries, or only for expenses, or flat fees, or even a combination.

To try it out, generate an invoice like you normally would. When the popup or next page opens, click on the new section called “Billable Items” and you will see the 3 new options.Now you can now pay all your invoices at once using any available credit or money in your trust account for each client or matter.

Now you can now pay all your invoices at once using any available credit or money in your trust account for each client or matter.

To see how it works, click “Invoices” on top. Select multiple invoices on the left using the checkboxes. Click the new blue settings icon on the top left and select “Pay Invoices”. A new popup will appear where you can pay all the invoices using the operating account or trust account balances.

Now you have even MORE batch actions so you can get more done in less time.

We’ve added the option to batch edit tags so you can quickly tag all of your leads, or active clients, or where they came from to run reports.

You can also batch edit who clients, matters, or activities are assigned to.

You can even batch edit time entries and expenses!

Lastly, you can batch restore items in the recycle bin as well.

You can now print your own deposit slips and bring them to the bank when making a new deposit.

When you add a payment for cash or check, it can go to a deposit slip queue. So when you go to the bank, you can print a deposit slip of everything you will be depositing into the bank. Easy!

Click on “More”, then “Bank Accounts”, and “Print Deposit Slips”or click here.

Learn more in this tutorial.

You asked for it, and we delivered! Thanks to your feedback, we’ve added more batch actions.

Now you can batch edit time entries to edit the hourly rates, dates, or other details. You can batch edit contacts to tag multiple contacts at once, or add task & event workflows in bulk.

Batch edit matters, tags, who something is assigned to, and much more.

We’ve also improved the speed of batch actions so you can batch delete multiple contacts, matters, or anything 5x faster!

There is also a new progress box that appears to show you what’s the status on the batch action.

Try it now by going to your Contacts page, Matters page, or any others and selecting the checkbox on the top left to select all rows. Then, you will see a new blue settings icon on the top left with the new batch actions.

Now you can select a row of multiple invoices and pay all of them in one click.

If your clients have any money in their trust or operating account, you can automatically apply all those payments to your outstanding invoices in 1 click.

To try it, go to your Invoices page, select the check-boxes on the left for multiple invoices, click the blue settings icon, and select “Pay Invoice”. A new box will popup asking you if you want to use either the operating or trust account to pay these invoices.

We are now preventing pop-up windows from closing when clicking out of the popup box, once data has been entered. If you’ve been working on creating a new contact, matter, or task for example, you will not lose the data anymore when you click out of the box.

If there are checks waiting to be printed, in the print que, you can now delete them if they’re no longer needed.

Deleting more than one item will not show you hundreds of notifications stating that multiple items were deleted.

Up until today, PracticePanther had the ability to add in soft cost expenses. Now, we are adding Hard Costs as well.

What are Soft VS Hard costs? Soft costs are intangible expenses for your clients (travel costs, envelopes, faxes, etc…). Hard costs are expenses that you need to pay a third-party vendor for (court filing fees, private investigators, mediators, etc…)

For all of those people who weren’t able to easily pay out expenses to third-party vendors (like mediators, private investigators, and more), now you can much more efficiently and accurately from an accounting perspective.

To learn more, click here for the tutorial.

Today we’re excited to announce a new way to automate your firm – calendar rules!

Never get a bar complaint or miss another deadline again.

In one click, you can add in court rules for almost any jurisdiction in the US.

Once the case is opened, simply go to your calendar to add in a court rule that automatically will put multiple reminders and deadlines in your calendar for you. Easy!

Now you can save time and never forget another court deadline again!

To try it for free, please go to your “Settings” and click on “Court Rules” on the bottom left in the Integrations section. Then, go to your Calendar and click on the “Court Rule” button on the top right.

We launched a new front-end website to make it easier to learn more about the great features we offer.

Navigate around, and let us know what you think or if you have any feedback for us, we want to hear from you!

Due to popular request, we’ve added custom calendar colors for every person in your firm.

Now you have the ability to select your own colors from a color wheel for your calendar.

Go to your Calendar, and click the settings icon on the bottom left next to each person’s name. Select your color, and click Save. Easy!

Added an option to click on “more” in the activities grid to view long descriptions.

When adding a new relationship, we now show a drop down list for relationship name instead of just a text box.

Small other fixes and updates.

Now you can track time, show it on an invoice, but make sure it doesn’t charge your clients for the hours worked.

This is handy if you want to show your client how much work you did that you will not be charging them for.

Thank you to our dedicated members for this excellent request!

Simply add a new time entry and select the item named “No charge”. It will automatically change your hourly rate to $0, and add the time entry to your future generated invoice.

If you have a client with multiple matters, and they have money in your trust account for multiple matters, you can now move money around between these accounts (with their permission of course). This is useful if their trust balance is getting depleted on one matter, but not another, and they simply want you to move more funds for use on another matter.

This does not actually move any money around in your bank account, it’s so you can keep track and a record of how much money you have in your trust account for every matter.

Get a confirmation before you send multiple invoices out to your clients by email.

Protect yourself from accidentally sending invoices out before you review them.

PracticePanther is one of the easiest, most user-friendly, and intuitive programs for lawyers worldwide, and it’s now getting ever easier.

Our mission and goal is to build the easiest software to help lawyers manage their firms so they can get more done in less time, with less clicks.

Today, that mission gets taken to a whole new level with our new walk-through flows to help on-board new members to PracticePanther.

When you login for the very first time, you will see easy tool-tips, guides, and videos to walk you through the software. Easy!

Sync your PracticePanther contacts and tags with Mailchimp.com’s email campaigns.

Now you can sync your tags in PracticePanther with lists in Mailchimp.

Automatically send emails from Mailchimp to your new leads, or existing customers.

Setup automated email campaigns with Mailchimp to send emails every few days and stay “top of mind”.

Click here to try it now. Keep in mind, if you sync over many contacts, you may increase your billing plan with Mailchimp.

View your trust account ledger by a certain date range.

Show only transactions and payments in and out of the trust account, or transfers to the operating account, from a certain date or range.

Now it’s even easier to reconcile your trust account by dates!

Now you can generate multiple invoices at once with the option of using filters to see which matters you want to bill for.

You can filter matters by who it’s assigned to, who it was originated by, the status, and even the tags.

Simply click “New” on top and select “Invoice”. Then select “Multiple Invoices”, and you will now see all the filters.

We’ve spent months revolutionizing the way PracticePanther handles accounting. For everyone who wanted more accounting features, better integration with QuickBooks Online, the ability to print checks, reconcile your accounts, and see more detailed reports, that day has finally arrived! Now you can spend less time on accounting, and more time making money.

Sync EVERYTHING with QuickBooks Online – We now sync over all Trust and Operating Payments, Expenses, Checks, Invoices, Items, and Contacts to QuickBooks Online. Learn more.

Multiple operating and trust accounts – Now you can add multiple bank accounts in PracticePanther and link them to the bank accounts in QuickBooks. Learn more.

Bank account reconciliation reports – Reconcile your operating and trust account with PracticePanther using our new built-in reports to make reconciliation faster and easier. Learn more.

Manage your trust account in QuickBooks – You can now see your trust account balance by contact and matter inside of QuickBooks Online!

Reconcile your trust account with QuickBooks – You can now reconcile your trust account in QuickBooks as it will match up the trust payments in PracticePanther with the trust payments from your bank account.

Get an accurate profit & loss report – You can now run an accurate P&L report in QuickBooks Online that will show you the trust account payments as well.

You can now write and print checks directly from PracticePanther, or send the check to be printed from QuickBooks Online.

Now it’s easier to pay legal vendors or refund any clients.

You can order QuickBooks Online approved checks, and print 3 checks per page or 1 per page as a check voucher.

Learn more.

Now you can select multiple invoices and download all of them in seconds to one zip file.

Select 50 invoices and download them all in under 10 seconds!

Go to your Invoices page, check all the invoices on the left (or select all), click the settings icon, and click Download. Easy!

Now you can hide the rate column and hours column for all time entries on your invoices.

You can also hide the quantity and price columns for expenses and other items.

You can also show payment notes on the invoice, to show your client any transfers from the trust account to pay the invoice.

When you create the invoice, you will still see the columns there, however when the clients views the invoice, they will not see it.

Click here to go to your Invoice Settings, then click “Show More Options” at the bottom, and scroll down to “Time Entries” and you can click on “SHOW HOURS COLUMN?” and “SHOW RATE COLUMN?”. You can then scroll down to “Expenses” and do the same.

The originating attorney report will first apply payments on all expenses, and only then on time entries, then it will be used to help calculate the total amount received per attorney.

Click here to try it now.

New feature: Carry forward balance for all invoices for the contact or matter – Now you can carry forward an invoice balance for all invoices for a certain contact, or all invoices for a certain matter. Summarize all invoices into one for each contact or matter to make it easier for your clients to see the total balance across all invoices.

Update: Activities full text search – Now you can use the search bar on the top left of the software to search through all the text in any activity including a task’s description, event description, emails, call logs, notes, and more. Search through the entire software in a matter of seconds for a full conflict search.

Update: Mailsync plain text – Now, your emails that get synced to PracticePanther will be in plain text so you can search through them even faster.

Update: Show 3 initials on the invoice instead of 2 – When viewing an invoice, the column showing who billed for the time entry or expense will now include all initials of the person’s name, including middle name.

When someone new joins your firm and you add them into PracticePanther as a new user, you can now add their home/mailing address in as well.

Thank you to everyone who requested this minor update.

Click here to add a new person to your firm.

Increase your firm’s transparency to your clients with time summaries on your invoices for each billing attorney or paralegal.

Cleanly displays total hours spent for each person who worked on the case.

Click here, click “Show More Options”, and select the box “Show summary by user?”

Now you can add interest to invoices.

First, set the invoice due date. Then, at the bottom of the invoice select “Add Interest”.

You will have a few options to add interest: You can add a single interest or compound interest. Single interest will just be on the original invoice amount. Compound interest will keep adding interest on top of the interest added from previous unpaid months.

You can add the APR (annual percentage rate) and define how often the interest should be added to the invoice (i.e. every 30 days).

Create a new invoice now to try it!

When adding or editing an activity (call log, note, task, event), you can now click on “Save and add time entry” to automatically add a time entry with the contact, matter, and description already filled out.

If adding a call log, the duration will also be added.

Now you can save an additional click and typing to work faster and get more done in less time!

When using Relationships to link a matter to an account, you only had the option to link it to the overall Company.

If there were more than 1 contact in the account, you would only link it to the account.

Now, you have the option of linking matters to individual contacts inside each account/company.

Go into any Matter, click on the Relationships tab, and add a new relationship to try it now.

For those who wish to create lists inside a Note, Task, or Event, you can now cross off these items by applying the strike-through text effect.

In the standard image editor, select the strike-through effect which will look like this example below:

Here is an example of text being striked off.

Even though it only takes around 10 seconds to search through 20,000 contacts or matters, it will now take 1-3 seconds, a 300% improvement!

Have less than 5,000 contacts? It should be instant!

Now you can work even faster and get more done in less time.

On the right sidebar, you see a mini calendar.

It will now show blue circles underneath the dates that have events scheduled on.

Now you can quickly see what dates you have scheduled, without having to go into your calendar, saving you even more time!

When adding an event, it will show you if there are any events currently scheduled for the same date and time.

It will search through ALL the assigned people to the event to search for conflicts across all of their calendars instantly.

You can then click on the links to open the events in a new tab to see what they are and if they need to be rescheduled.

Go to your Calendar now and add a new event to try it!

In the past, we’ve asked you to share your screen when needing more advanced support or troubleshooting.

Now, you can grant us technician access into your account AND share your screen instantly to show us what the issue or question is.

Click here to try it out now and click “Share Screen” to test it out. You can always go to your right sidebar to see it’s recording your screen for the next 15 minutes, and then turn it off anytime.

For everyone switching over to PracticePanther from other programs, or even just starting fresh, you can now import tens of thousands of contacts and matters 250x faster than previously.

Instead of waiting overnight to see the results, you will start seeing the contacts and matters getting imported within the hour.

Instead of sending us a ticket, and waiting for an email response, and going back and forth by email for days, you can now send us a message, and we will respond directly back into a chat box in PracticePanther.

Now, your questions can get solved up to 3x faster, as most questions are now handled within 1 day, instead of the average 3 days.

When we respond, you will get an email or a message in PracticePanther so you can respond right away and we can start having a live chat conversation. Nice!

Now you can import almost everything from your previous software into PracticePanther all by yourself!

The import wizard has been updated to include the ability to handle contacts, matters, events, expenses, notes, tasks, and time entries.

Simply go to the import page, click “Excel” and we will give you the excel spreadsheets in the correct formatting to import in.

If you need any help, please email or contact us anytime.

You’ve spoken, and we’ve listened. You wanted an easier way to see the Contact information about a specific Matter instead of having to open up a new tab for the Contact.

Now, we’ve added another tab inside the Matter page called “Contacts” which will show you all the information about the contact.

Thank you for the feedback, and keep it coming!

You’re already used to tagging your contacts and matters, now you can tag your activities too!

When you create a new task or event, you can now group them into tags or lists so they are easily searchable and neatly organized into categories.

To see all the tags and sort by tags, simply click the main “Activities” page on top, and you will see all your tags on top.

Click on a tag to show only Activities with that tag, and you can even click on multiple tags at once to break it down even further.

To increase the overall security of PracticePanther, we are now requiring all customers to have a minimum of 6 characters in their password. This will make it increasingly harder for anyone to simply guess your password.

We are now limiting all password attempts to a maximum of 6 tries within 15 minutes.

If anyone tries to guess your password, or use sophisticated tools to crack your password, they will be locked out after attempting only 6 passwords within a 15 minute window.

With our new app design, comes a new mobile design!

The iPhone, iPad, and Android apps have all been updated with the latest design so you can work even faster.

No need to re-download any apps, just refresh the app and you will see everything brand new as of today.

We’re excited to announce the beautiful re-design of PracticePanther coming!

The colors are simplified, and the pages are easier to navigate. All features and functionality are the same, just easier to use!

New header menu – We’ve freed up more space by replacing the left sidebar with a top header menu. Enjoy more room to focus on the important details of your firm

New “Trust” and “Paid” boxes – Instead of 1 box showing how much money was paid per contact or matter, there are now 2 boxes showing the total paid to your operating and trust accounts.

We’ve moved our Action and New buttons to the top right of each page.

We added another default column to show your Trust and Operating balances for each matter. If the operating balance is negative, your client owes you money from invoices.

Time Entries – The colored status labels make it easier to see which time entries still have not been billed for, and which invoices other time entries were already billed on.

Learn more here: https://www.practicepanther.com/new-design-interface-2017/

We’ve matched the exact same formula QuickBooks Online uses for rounding decimal points.

Now your accounting and reconciliation reports will be exactly the same as QuickBooks Online, down to the penny.

Now you can go into any contact or matter, click on the Activities tab, and only show the activities by a certain date range.

This is useful if you need to show your client or a judge all the activities by a certain date range.

You will also have the ability to export or print all the activities for any customer time period.

Now you can select more than 50 rows for batch processing.

For example, you can select 100 rows to delete, or 100 invoices to mark as sent, send to the customer, print, download, or delete.

Get more done faster!

When you sign up to PracticePanther, you can easily sign up for PantherPayments without having to leave the software.

Now you can process credit cards even easier and get approved faster.

Once your application is approved, your PracticePanther account will automatically be enabled and connected to LawPay to start accepting credit cards right away.

Click here to learn more, or click here to try it completely free.

When you create an invoice, we will automatically generate the PDF for you.

When it’s time to download the PDF, it will download instantly as it’s already been generated and saved.

Instead of taking 10 seconds to generate and download a PDF, it now happens in under 2 seconds!