Review of Practice Panther

Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. So for this week's video and accompanying post, it's going to be all about PracticePanther. So I thought what I would do in the next few weeks is I would go through and actually take the time to examine different applications that are out there. You know that from reading, if you've read any of my past posts, that I'm a big fan of LeanLaw and how it integrates with QuickBooks. Online. But there are other applications out there. And some attorneys and law firms do want to get an application that is A, cloud-based, and B, it's an application that works with QuickBooks. And maybe it's more of a practice management tool. So if you're looking for that, LeanLaw is just really billing. And I don't want to make it sound like it's not a lot because it actually is a lot when you pair it with QuickBooks and integrate it with QuickBooks, you get a very powerful tool. But it doesn't have like the case management. It doesn't have the document storage. Those are things you could add on with other apps. But a lot of attorneys want that one-stop shop. They don't want to add apps. They want to go to one place and have all the tools. So let's take a peek under the hood of PracticePanther and see what it does and what it can do for you and see the positives and the negatives, the pros and the cons of the product. So let me share my screen. We'll take a pop under the hood and see what it looks like. So here we are, and this is in the advertising part of the program. So before we even even jump into the program. This is just what it says on the advertisement. So you can see here it's trusted by thousands of attorneys, saves a lot of hours per month. You can work from anywhere and you can protect your data if you get into their enterprise, which is— it's just an expensive program. It is more than one app built into one product, but it does end up being a little bit more pricey, certainly more pricey than LeanLaw because it has other things to it. You can get the same results with LeanLaw and QuickBooks if you add like Dropbox, you add a Box.com, or you add another service. It's not all integrated integrated in as one, but you can add those layers and do an app stack where you get the same results. But this is that one-stop shop that a lot of attorneys really, really are looking for. They don't want to bother with all those pieces. They just want to have one place that they log into and they work from. It's a time and billing application as well. It's remote, so you can use it from any tool. You can log in by your iPad. You can log in by your, your iPhone. That's important in today's world of technology, right? Why not take advantage of technology. You can get it for 50% off for the first 3 months, very similar to QuickBooks. You can track your time, get paid faster. Whenever you implement an application like this, it becomes part of your day. You come in, you sit down at your desk, you pop open the app, and then, you know, as you take a phone call as an attorney, you take a phone call, you have a client come in, you start to populate the calendar and, you know, attorneys work with billable time. Someday that might change. The accounting industry is certainly an industry that used to do the same thing, and we've really moved away from that. We're more fixed fee or value-based pricing, but attorneys are stuck in some of the old school ways and they like to do the time, billable time. They're accustomed to it. They kind of cling to that. So you really want to be sure that you have an app that will handle doing the time and billing because it's crucial to the health of your business. We also have a way you can generate invoices in one click. And they're saying it saves you over 8 hours a month. So you can actually generate invoice payment reminders. So there's a way to really work in the product where you can start to have that integration, which QuickBooks Online Advanced has, where you've got the, you know, automatic follow-up if somebody doesn't pay their invoice, and the reminder if they didn't pay and they're late. And And then the warning once you've got all those levels. But this is actually built into PracticePanther itself. So it's inside of the, inside of the practice management piece of your, your firm. It integrates with a lot of apps. So it integrates with Google, Google Calendar, Google Mail, Box, Dropbox, Mailchimp, Zapier, LawPay, one of my favorite apps, Outlook, Office 365, and it does integrate with QuickBooks. Now, my experience with it integrating with QuickBooks, and we do have a client that uses PracticePanther, doesn't integrate very well. It breaks, it disconnects, you might not know it's disconnected. So be aware of that, that you should make it a best practice is to check to make sure that the application is linked. If you're doing your work on both sides of the product in QuickBooks and inside of— Inside of PracticePanther, you're going to know when it disconnects. But if you're only working in PracticePanther, you might not know that it's not working. So you really need to make sure that you see that. So let's take a moment and go in and log into PracticePanther and see all the pieces, all the shiny objects that are inside. We're in a file that I just signed up for. So it's a shell, it has nothing in it. But I wanted you to at least get a look at the dashboard here. So it's, it's pretty, it's pretty, it's lots of colors. You've got a little place here for a new contact. So I can actually come in and type the name, the address, the phone number, any custom fields, I could create a custom field and actually have that in here, which is nice. Your phone numbers, you can create a client portal, which is really important. So if you're sharing documents, if you're a divorce attorney or any kind of attorney where you need to share documents with the client, it's pretty crucial to have that way for the client to be able to connect with you and review documents. So that's ingrained inside of PracticePanther. We have a section for matters. So if you're doing matter-based You work with clients and then matters as your under, you know, the subaccount underneath. You can keep track of the matters. So if you have a client that maybe you're doing a will and trust for, and then you have a client that you're doing a divorce case for, you can have matters, 2 matters underneath that one client name, which I think is really important. I like that it has tags. So there are tags here that you can create your own tags and then tag the matters. So if there's specific things that you want to track, you have the ability to do that. QuickBooks has just started to get into tagging as well. But the tagging is not quite there yet. Because it's new, it's still in beta. It doesn't do a lot. You have to make— you have to make tagging groups. So tagging in here is probably a really good place to be able to extract some of that data that you're trying to track. Any data points that aren't typical, you can track there. There's a calendar in here, I can create my calendar, I can make user groups. So if you're a larger firm, and you want to have a calendar that's shared with somebody else, maybe your admin or your paralegal or something like that. You can have multiple calendars and you can have shared calendars in here. You have a place for activities. You can keep track of all your tasks, your events, your emails, your phone calls, your notes. You might even want to look at this on a daily basis. You can work through that and see if it's completed, not completed, in process, wherever the task is. A place for invoices. You can send an invoice in seconds. You can create a new invoice very simply once you've set the client up. Once you set the matter up, you can create the invoice for the client. If there's tax on it, you can create sales tax there. And of course, those will all be things you have to set up in settings. Working from time. So this is where you're going to do your time entries, whether you turn the clock on or you create the time entry. From here, you can just come over to the green button, pick the new time entry, you can start the clock, is it billable, tag it to the matter, all those things. So it's— that's another important piece that you'll probably want to have and know that it's there as you start to go through. Automation. So there's templates, there's intake forms. So workflows, you can create workflows. If you start to see patterns, it's a great place to start to put those workflows in place. But also you can start to do intake forms. So this is nice for the admin in your staff or whoever's working on the case to make sure that you set this up and you can do, you know, you can start to put your own template together. You can do the form title, you can put your checkboxes in, you can, you can really create your own form for your type of law that you practice. It's a really helpful piece that's not in LeanLaw. But it's something that you might want to have. And it's for your practice management. So it's really important to have that in here. I think it's great because it's everything's in one place. So you're able to access it no matter where you are. If you're in court, and you need to pick up your phone and look something up, it's here. And then the more you can do your payments, you can do your expenses. So your client payments, if they paid the bill, I like to use LawPay because LawPay is that app that you can attach to this PracticePanther and integrate it with PracticePanther so that you can record the payments in LawPay and then it will, it will integrate right into here to match up the payment. That way you're tracking it with perfection. You can create the client expenses here. So as you start to spend money, if you're, you know, a PI attorney or somebody that needs, that has a lot of expenses, a lot of law firms pay, you know, filing fees and things like that. It's nice to have that in here. If you bill flat fee, that's in here. So if you're an immigration firm and you sell packages, you can have flat fees. So it's not time-based. So you'll have that ability too. You can reach to your files, you can create items, you can have multiple bank accounts. Now one of the shortfalls in this product is the bank accounts. You're only allowed an operating or trust. You can have multiple operating, multiple trusts, but there's no way to synchronize a credit card in here. The only workaround I could come up with— and actually Sarah and I thought of it— was to create an operating account and call it the credit card and then use that to separate the expenses. So now we can reconcile. Reconciliation in this product is a bit weird. You just check off and tick off the boxes. So you're reconciling in QuickBooks, and you're ticking off the boxes of the things that cleared. And then it shows the beginning balance and the ending balance. So that's— you can do it, but you want to have reconciliation process in place so you don't miss anything. You don't want to miss any of those client advanced costs, because you're going to bill them, bill them and get money back for that too. As part of the work that you do, you can have multiple users. This product's a bit more pricier. So you can have multiple users, but each user has a cost to it. There's reports, the reports, they're okay, they're basic, but they're not. They're not exactly, you can, you know, there's all invoices by the contact, all invoices by matter. And you can go through the different areas and check the, you know, the productivity report, bank account ledger by contact. So you're seeing the little ledger on each matter. So this is a product that when you work in this, in this particular application, it's similar to most outside apps that are completely segregated from, from QuickBooks. So instead of having the parent-level trust account like LeanLaw does with all the matters and And they're all part of the chart of accounts. They're all underneath as a sub. This is more one trust liability account parent, all the mapping and all the details of what's behind that number. Because don't forget, that trust money is not yours, not really relevant to your particular firm's books, except that you have to track it for compliance reasons. So you have this here to track it all. But there's just a number and you reconcile that number in QuickBooks to the bank. But the 3-way really happens in here. So you reconcile the bank in QuickBooks, you reconcile the trust liability accounts here in PracticePanther. And then of course, the 3rd piece of that is the bank statement. So that's how that 3-way comes together, where in LeanLaw, everything's inside what they call the source of truth. It's all inside of QuickBooks. This is a little bit different because it's that separation, that whole little separate place that everything is housed to do the trust account stuff. And any of the AR, all that's kind of out there, but the AR will get pushed into QuickBooks. So that piece gets pushed into QuickBooks. But the trust, anything to do with trust will just be that running balance. And you won't see the details behind that unless you run in and you log into PracticePanther. So I hope that's helpful. And I hope that kind of takes you through a little bit of the, the way this works with PracticePanther. And it's going to be, you'll see that in some of the other apps that I'm going to do little bit of reviews on. But at least you get a little peek at it, see what it looks like. Making your decision, if you need help with that, please reach out. I can certainly talk to you about the product. My biggest drawback is the way it disengages with QuickBooks. I'm not a big fan. I really like everything in QuickBooks because I like to be able to see the transfers and the money on one side and the money on the other, where this, you'll see it coming and going, coming out of Panther into QuickBooks as you recognize the revenue. It's, it's that way. So those are the pieces that I really like the other method, but it is an option and you will get used to it. The reporting is not that great. And I think when you start to look at the pieces, when you put the pieces together, it's really, do you want to have a full-blown one-place, one-stop shop for your practice? Do you want the ability to have a client portal? Do you want the ability to have the client files? Do you want to connect a box inside the product? Or maybe into Dropbox. Do you want that as part of your application that's all-inclusive? If you're looking for that one price, one, one place to log in, then Practice Panther might be your app. So on that note, I hope you have a wonderful day, and if you have any questions, please reach out. Thank you.