Task Management, Priorities & Workflows

Increase the productivity and overall performance of your law firm with easy to use task-management and workflow tools designed specifically for law firms

  • 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

Increase the productivity and overall performance of your law firm with easy to use task-management and workflow tools designed specifically for law firms

Features at a glance

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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
    Find out more about accounting>>

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
    Find out more about invoicing>>

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
    Find out more about mass-billing>>

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 ...the smart way

  • 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.

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 or 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
    Find out more about file-management>>

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!

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
    Find out more about task-management>>

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)
    Find out more about Time-recording>>

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 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!