Hello everyone,
We are excited to share our September update for PracticePanther, which features a number of bug fixes, performance improvements, and updates to some of our recent features including the Default Invoice Template and Additional Invoice Recipients.
Thank you for sharing your feedback with us. If you have any issues with PracticePanther, please reach out to our support team.
New & Exciting
Timekeeper Summaries
To provide additional flexibility, Timekeeper summaries can now be toggled between two modes: Include or Exclude Time Entry Write-Downs on timekeeper totals on invoices.
Users now have the option to exclude write-downs from total hours calculations, improving billing accuracy.
Write-downs are excluded by default, but users can control this on the invoice template to support their current practice.
Trust Accounting
To support trust accounting best practices, firms can now choose to prohibit trust balances from having a negative balance.
Creating a payment that would cause a contact or matter's trust balance to go below $0.00 will display an error to the user which must be corrected.
This option can be controlled in Firm Settings.
Invoices
Invoices now support quantities and hours exceeding 1,000 for Expenses, Time Entries, and Flat Fees.
Ex: 1,000 miles charged for travel or 1,000 pages copied.
General
Sorting by a column on a grid will now persist when the page is reloaded.
The Referral menu on the sidebar has been updated.
Addressed an issue which would periodically result in a 500 error when creating or editing records.
Addressed a sporadic issue where daily agenda emails could contain duplicate events and tasks.
Contacts
Contact type custom fields are now available on All Contacts and Primary Contacts grid views providing increased access to all relevant contact information.
Fixed an issue when creating a new contact through a custom field that would result in the recently added 'Invoice Recipient' field to be duplicated.
The ‘Assigned To’ field on Contacts is now exporting as expected.
Matters
Users can now clear their 'Originating Attorney' field on a matter if it had been previously populated.
Invoices
Default Invoice Template
An invoice with no default template for the matter, will now use the default template for the contact.
Addressed an issue that sometimes applied the wrong template when using the new Default Invoice Template feature for contacts and matters.
The Invoice Templates column on the invoices grid can now be sorted as expected.
Additional Invoice Recipients
A contact will now remain as an Additional Invoice Recipient, even if the Contact’s relationship to the invoice is no longer valid.
New contacts can now be created directly from the Default Invoice Recipient dropdown menu.
Invoice Categories (Flat Fees, Time Entries, and Expenses) will now pluralize or de-pluralize depending if there is only a single item available in that menu.
Corrected a rounding issue that caused the invoice total on LEDES exports to display differently than the total on the invoice.
Addressed a sporadic issue where the invoices edit screen would unexpectedly close if the Language Option was cleared in their settings.
Addressed an issue where the State field on invoices could not be modified if the Country was set to something other than 'US' in Company Logo & Info settings.
The Download LEDES option on the invoice details screens of multi-matter invoices is now available.
The "Deposit To" field on invoices is now displayed correctly depending upon a firm's use of PantherPayments.
Payments
Addressed an issue when filtering by matter and contact tags that would incorrectly display no results.
Settings
Fixed a bug that prevented "Personal Injury" from being saved as the firm's primary practice area in “Firm Logo & Info” settings.
Addressed an issue where custom fields for contacts and matters were not consistent with the the order defined in settings.
Business Text Messaging
A new signup flow is available for Sole Proprietor businesses that allows them to submit their data without needing corporate information they would not normally have available.
Workflows
Conditional tasks load as expected when opened from within a workflow.
Addressed an isolated issue where some workflows were not applying as expected.
eSignature
Address a random issue where eSignature emails could have an incorrect subject line.