Time Tracking
In order to bill for their activities, lawyers must track their time and be able to connect it to Matters they worked on. The time that isn’t being tracked will result in missed billings, and that’s never a good thing. For that reason, the time tracking stopwatch is available everywhere throughout Matter365. In the top right corner of all Matter365 pages, you will find a stopwatch ready to track time for your activities.
Matter365 also offers an Add-in for time tracking in Office applications. Read more about it here.
Matter365 also offers an Add-in for time tracking in Outlook. Read more about it here.
Play icon is a shortcut for starting a timer, pause icon will pause the time, and X icon will cancel the time that is currently being tracked. After stopping the timer for the first time, a dialog will appear asking for more details about the time that’s currently being tracked.
In this dialog, you need to select any of the existing Matters that you will tie this activity to, enter a billing rate for this activity, select a litigation (activity) code from a list, choose a date for the activity, and choose to enter the time as duration or as a timespan (setting start time and end time), manually change the amount of time if needed, and add a description of the activity.
If there was a default billing rate set for you on the Matter in question, the billing rate field will be pre-populated. You can of course change it if you’d like.
You can learn more about Billing Rates here.
Learn how to edit the Activity Codes list here.
You can also add time trackings on behalf of other users. In order to have this option enabled you to have Docket Manager permission enabled.
Go to Settings > Permissions to enable it ( to learn more about Roles and Permissions visit: Roles and Permissions).
The user you are adding the time tracking for needs to be an Owner or a Member of the Matter.
Click on "+" and Create a Time Tracking:
Add Activity window will pop up.
Select the Matter you wish to add the time tracking for. Delete your name from the User field and select a different user from the drop-down menu.
Populate all the fields marked and click Save. Fields marked with " * " have to be populated.
To see all of your recent time trackings choose the Time Tracking option on the left-hand side main menu.
All of your time trackings can also be viewed from the Matter365 Office add-in and Matter365 Outlook add-in.
If you are an owner or a member of a Matter, you can open the Matter related to the Time Tracking by clicking on the Matter name in the Time Trackings list:
If you only have permission to see other user's Time Trackings but you are not a member/owner of those matters you won't be able to click on the Matter name.
At the bottom of this page, you will see Summed up total for Duration and Amount for the Time Trackings displayed on the page.
You can choose to round up items to 0.1 hours while calculating Duration and Amount totals, to do this toggle the "Round up" button.
Add activity button will open a dialog for creating a new time tracking record in a table. All of the created records can be sorted by any of the columns, searched by Matter or user that created them, and filtered by their billing status, start date and end date.
If you restart a same time tracking activity by clicking the play icon in its row, that will create a new subitem under it, and add its time to a main time tracking record. Records with this option disabled are already added to an invoice, so they cannot be changed.
To expand a time tracking activity and show its subitems, click on the arrow icon in the beginning of the row.
You can manually add a description for every subitem, to have more detailed insights about how you spent the time that you recorded. To do this, use the pencil icon on the right side of the time tracking record or any of its subitems. To delete the time tracking record or any of its subitems, use the trash can icon displayed next to them.
If you have a QuickBooks account set up, you can quickly generate a QuickBooks invoice out of previously tracked activities by using Create Invoice button. If there is an existing invoice for a time tracking activity you created, the column Invoice number in this table will be filled in. That’s how you will be
sure not to forget to invoice something, and prevent invoicing something multiple
times.
In case you don’t use QuickBooks, you can still export selected time trackings in CSV format. Possible separator values for your CSV are semicolon or comma, and you can choose to display the times in the document in hours or minutes.
If you're just beginning to work with Matter365, and you have some unbilled time trackings from your past law cases, that's not a problem, you can easily import them. You should create all of the Matters that you want to import time trackings for, and add people working on those Matters as Matter members. Then you can click on Import button to download an Excel importing template.
In sample Excel file, for every time tracking record you want to import, you should provide:
- Date of the time tracking
- Matter for which the time tracking occurred (this will be a dropdown menu with all of your Matters existing in Matter365 as options to choose from)
- User (this will be a dropdown menu with all of the members of a Matter you selected in previous column, as options to choose from)
- Description of the activity
- Litigation code (optional field, you can either choose one of the values from a dropdown list, or type your own custom litigation code)
- Duration (value in hours, with maximum one decimal place)
- Billing rate (enter this as a number, with no currency signs, and maximum of two decimal places)
Additionally, this file will show Amount column for your reference, although this column isn't taken into account while you're doing the import. All of the amounts will be calculated in Matter365 once the time tracking records are imported.
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