If you’re a full-time neutral, chances are you don’t have to worry about capturing your time for billing purposes. But, if you’re providing hearing officer services on an ad hoc, billable hourly basis, keeping track of your hourlies is critical to your billing.
Before the advent of time and billing computer software, we kept track of our time using paper timesheets, assigning tasks to specific clients and then using them for preparing the monthly billing. Next came time and billing software for desktop computers, which could then be used for automatically generating bills. Keeping track of telephone conversations wasn’t any big deal when our telephones sat on our desks next to our keyboards.
Today, many of us almost exclusively use cell phones in our professional lives, most of the time away from our desks. As a result, capturing billable time on the move is far less than convenient.
Two companies FirmNexus, and ComServe Corporation, each take different approaches in addressing this challenge.
ComServe, a telecommunications company out of Yorktown, Virginia, has a service that works with any mobile phone and captures phone number information. Once you give them your mobile phone number, they get access to your detailed incoming and outgoing cell phone calls from your phone carrier. After you supply them with client and matter codes associated with particular phone numbers, they provide you with your phone bill with client and matter information all laid out for you. The service is encrypted with a 128 bit correction scheme and costs $24.95 per month per line with a one-year contract. (Discounts for longer contracts.) What’s lacking is the ability to provide detailed information about the telephone call in real time, so by the time you are ready to do your billing and you login and download the file from their web portal, you’ll have probably long forgotten what you discussed, and whom you discussed it with, especially if you’re on a multiparty telephone conference call. On the other hand, if youre constantly forgetting to keep notes on your telephone conference calls, then at least you will have something to jog your memory for billing purposes. Also, the company promises that for any month you’re unable to capture at least as much as the cost of that month’s bill, that month’s services are free.
FirmNexus’s service will only work on iPhone, Android, or Blackberry phones, and instead of client and matter information being handled on the backend (i.e., by the service provider) it’s created on the front end by the user. The Lexington, Kentucky company’s service comes with an app permitting the end user to create client and matter information, and allowing for typing detailed descriptions of the telephone conversations on the fly into the app (sorry, no ability at present to dictate the information– like one can with text messaging). When you’re ready to send your bill, you simply log into their web portal and download the client billing information. Like with ComServe’s files, the information is all encrypted while on their site, but when you download it, it’s unencrypted. You can even download it in a format that can be integrated into many of the popular time and billing programs. This service is $29 per month, with the first two months free for new subscribers.
| ComServe Cost: $24.99/mo Pros Cons Cons |
No consideration of any kind has been accepted for this review. The opinions expressed herein are solely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of NYSALJA.