Contacts Management

Contact library that is integrated with your Accounting, Billing, CRM, Conflict Of Interests check, and so much more

Additionally, you can take annotations about each contact and use this Contacts library as a basic CRM.

Features at a glance

Automated Full Legal Accounting

Most Case Management Systems on the market have basic "Trust Accounting" features, but not a full Accounting system, and certainly not an automated one! In most cases their accounting solution rests on integration with 3rd party accounting providers like Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, etc, which in most cases are not a good fit as far as the nuances of Legal Accounting is concerned. fastMatter is a full Legal Accounting Software in itself, integrated with your case-management data - all in one place!
Transactions are created automatically while you deposit money into Client Acc, create Disbursements, create Bills and pay them, enter Expenses, etc
full Chart of Accounts with 86 default accounts
fully separate Trust Accounts (Client account, Deposit account, etc)
you can create as many separate Trust Accounts as you need
Multi-Currency (you can maintain accounts in any currency, and exchange rates are updated hourly)
easy bank reconciliation
Income & Expenditure
Expense tracking
Profit & Loss
Trial Balance
Balance Sheet
Year-End functionality
VAT calculation (Accrual & Cash methods)
Disbursements from Client and Office accounts
Re-chargeables
Client Interest calculation
SRA rules compliance
MTD - file your quarterly VAT return directly to HMRC

Billing / Invoicing

fastMatter offers the most user-friendly invoicing interface
you see the Bill while creating it
just a few seconds to create a beautiful invoice - everything has been thought through for user-friendly experience, to minimise your admin time and admin-related stress
add billable items, disbursements and discounts while creating the bill
email Bills directly to client
easily track unpaid Bills
pay the Bill from Client account
optional Bill-Approval workflow: fee-earners can create draft bills, while Cashiers or Practice Managers approve them
Huge time saving on bill-processing: creation, emailing, approval, tracking, paying, refunding and cancellation
Credit Notes

Mass-Billing

Create multiple bills from a single interactive screen
fastMatter calculates which ones are the most billable matters, and presents you with an interface where you can create multiple bills at once
All the options available in standard billing interface are preserved
fastMatter knows in real time what available financial resources each matter has, and allows you to pay the invoices while creating them. This saves a tremendous amount of time and avoids the possibility of human error, while creating complex (and compliant) transactions in the background

Accept online payments

Issue Money-Requests and have your clients pay straight into your Client account. You can then use these monies to pay interim bills.
Optionally, create Invoices/Bills that your clients can pay online directly into your Office account
fastMatter will process the payments and automatically record the transactions correctly
No Human-error
No more money going into the wrong type of account
It will cost your client 1.95% -- cheaper than any other payment gateway
No more need for bulky payment terminals!!! No more need for ~£20/month subscriptions.

Bank Reconciliation

fastMatter lets you connect your bank accounts to online-banking, and load your transactions.
Alternatively, you can also upload CSV files from any UK banks, as is - without any special formatting. fastMatter can "read" and make sense of CSV files from any UK bank.
It will then try to match the transactions from your bank with transactions inside fastMatter. All you have to do then is click the confirmation button.
If a match cannot be found inside fastMatter, it will allow you to easily categorise that transaction based on the patterns in your previous reconciliations.
Essentially, this means that 99% of your accounting can be conducted from this bank-reconciliation screen.
...and it works from your mobile too.
If you prefer the "old school" bank reconciliations (reconciling fastMatter's transactions with bank statements), you can do it that way too.

SRA Compliance

fastMatter helps you to stay compliant with SRA Accounts Rules. The smart system is aware of SRA rules and will warn and guide you if you try to make a transaction that breaks the rules.
Other forms of compliance include GDPR compliance, MTD (Making Tax Digital) compliance, and Automated Client-Care letters generation

Making Tax Digital READY

Submit your quarterly VAT returns from inside fastMatter
fastMatter does all calculations for you. Both Standard (accrual) and Cash Accounting methods.
fastMatter is one of the very few Legal Software providers listed on HMRC's approved suppliers list!

True Realtime collaboration

Your coworkers see the changes to matters in real-time (depending on roles and permissions, of course)
Constant connectivity
Creates incredible sense of teamwork!
Your screen becomes the virtual office - Depending on permissions, everyone can see who is working on what
Especially great when some are working remotely

Matter Templates

Huge time-saver!
Create matter-templates for recurring types of matters (e.g. Consultation, Litigation, Property Purchase, Divorce)
Customise everything from colour, to assignees, contacts, task-list, priorities, workflow, attached files, flat rates, hourly rates or even hourly rates per activity type etc
Next time you create a new matter from a template, all your presets will be automatically inherited, and you can further modify them as you wish

Cloud based File-manager

Drag&Drop files into your matter
Have constant access to all matter documents wherever you are
Create documents from templates
Email documents out
Create and edit .txt files
Manage files & folders

Document Automation

Choose from hundreds of tokens which you can insert into a Word document; and then put into your Templates Library
Next time you want to create that Customer Care letter, it will take just a couple of seconds.
Huge time saving on repeated Copy/Pasting (11 hours per Fee-Earner per week)
No human errors!
Especially great when some are working remotely

Tasks management & Workflows

Create tasks for each matter
Assign tasks by simply dragging a user onto that task
Dates: Deadlines, Key dates, Calendar
Attach files to tasks
Drag tasks to rearrange priorities

Calendar & Key Dates

Firm’s calendar of deadlines and Key-Dates
Personal user’s calendar
Easy drag-&-drop functionality

Time recording

You can use the Stopwatch Timer
Or you can add time-recordings manually
You can add 6-minute Units, or you can do it by whichever granularity that suits your law firm
Depending on permissions some users can add time on behalf of others (great for assistant/secretary workflow)

Reports & Visualisations

Who's working on what
Billing Targets
Fee-Earner Productivity
Expense tracking
Live Charts

Reminders & Notifications

Whenever changes happen to matters and tasks that a fee-earner is assigned to, he/she will be instantly notified. Apart from creating a trackable log of changes, this also helps all involved fee-earners stay up to date with the progress on each relevant matter and task.

Teams & Branches

Create Teams or Branches, and assign users to them.
When you create new Matters and all subsequent transactions can have Teams/Branches assigned to them.
Fee-earners and Team-leaders can have a filtered view of tasks pertaining to a particular team, which eases task-management tremendously.
As the number of matters grows this feature will allow your fee-earners to navigate between matters that pertain to their designated teams with much more ease.
Importantly, this feature will allow you, your practice managers and team leaders to have a much more granular view of each team's financial performance.

CRM for Law Firms

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to satisfy the needs of most law firms
Quick Intake - easily record where that new lead emerged from, what is his/her query and what would be that lead's Life Time Value (LTV) if he/she was to convert
Kanban-based Sales pipeline - easily drag&drop leads between pipelines as they progress from a lead into an instructing client
Campaigns & Sources - keep track of how your clients find you and which are your most cost efficient sources of clientele
ROI reports - record spending on campaigns, or link to a particular overhead account to track spending and ROI
... all tailored specifically for a the needs of a law firm

Attendance notes

Record at the speed of thought in real-time
Notes Dictation, to save time on typing.

Conflict of interests checker

fastMatter has one of the most thorough COI checks. That's because we use "layered-array" search, with 6 layers of searches, each of which runs in combination. This minimises the chance of COI tremendously.

Contacts & Relationships

It may look like just another library of contacts, but it's more nuanced than that and cleverly done. For one, you can search by a multitude of fields, not only names (useful for when you want to find out who that missed call came from).
Additionally, you can take annotations about each contact and use this Contacts library as a basic CRM.
Importantly, you can create named relationships between different contacts in your library (i.e. Mark Thomas is a sales manager at ABC Marketing Ltd and Jenny Thomas' son, while Jenny Thomas is Mark Thomas' mother). This allows for a much more in-depth knowledge about your current and future contacts. The benefits of this are too many to list: for one, think of a more expanded conflict of interests checks, etc.

Privacy & Permissions per matter

You can set up Roles and give permissions to users in that role, which will apply across all matters. But then you can also set up permissions and restrictions for individual matters themselves. This allows you to maintain a highly granulated control over privacy of some clients.

Complex Matters

Some matters can be more complex than the rest. Some matters can have several Clients and several Other-Parties, some of which might be organisations. Some clients might have several matters, and might move moneys between those matters. There are numerous other complications that might occur. We have thoroughly thought out all those possibilities in advance, while keeping in mind the necessity to keep it simple by default. fastMatter starts with ease-of-use and flexibility in mind, and precisely because of that it can progress from simplicity to complexity depending on your law firm's needs.

Inter-organisational Collaboration

A fastMatter user can be a member of several law firms or organisations simultaneously and have different roles and permissions in each of those organisations. For example one can be a cashier or a barrister or accountant for several law firms, which means that within each law firm he/she can have access to that information which was specified by a given law firm's director. While allowing for incredible boost in time-saving and productivity, this feature maintains a high-degree of privacy and data-security!

Security

We host in the UK - in the same space where RCJ and leading multinational banks host.
We ensure that your communications are secure using bank-grade 256-bit SSL encryption.
All of fastMatter’s infrastructure is hosted at physically secure location in the UK.
Managed data centres meet the rigid SSAE 16 specifications.
ISO27001
Backups are performed every hour!