Controlling the Behavior of Timeslips
Billing Assistant; Spelling & Grammar; Paths & Other
In our first article on Sage Timeslips preferences, we covered some settings that control how Timeslips behaves when being opened and closed. Part 2 of this series dealt with modifying settings relating to entering and viewing slips. In this final installment, we will touch briefly on a host of additional items that can be customized in Preferences. I hope this series will leave readers curious enough to take a look at their own Preferences settings to see if they could be better optimized.
Do you ever see an annoying message asking which Billing Assistant view to use? You can suppress this message by choosing one of the three options on the Billing Assistant Options page: List of ready-to-bill Clients, Single Client at a Time, or As Last Used. Most firms I work with use the middle option, but if you like to do your bills in batches it might be worth trying out the first one, which entails setting up a rule to define when a client is considered “ready to bill.” Also, the behavior of the large buttons at the bottom of the Billing Assistant screen on the Billing Assistant Buttons panel is user-definable. 
Sage Timeslips gives users lots of control over their interactions with the spelling and grammar checkers, starting at the Spelling/Grammar: General panel. Spelling can be checked on the fly (“As you type”) or manually as an option when running Pre-Bill Worksheets or Bills. The Spelling Dictionaries page lets users choose which resources should be consulted during spell-check. At a minimum, U.S. law firms will want to check off Legal American Dictionary along with the default American Dictionary. One often-overlooked item on this page is the Personal Dictionary. By default, words users add during spell-check are stored on their local drives, which means it’s easy to lose them during a machine replacement or software upgrade. Any path can be used to store the personal dictionary; if it does not already exist in that location, it will be created automatically. When installing Timeslips, I like to store the personal dictionaries on the server in a location where they will not only be preserved during a workstation replacement, but also get backed up on a regular basis along with the rest of the database.
On the Spelling Options and Grammar Options pages, you can have some fun trying out different settings to see what works with the style of writing you are checking. Most do fine with the default settings here, but these are not necessarily best for everyone.
If you use the built-in Timeslips Calendar, the Calendar Settings panel has some configurable settings. A few of our clients are starting to use this calendar to set up data entry and billing reminders, even if they use a different calendar for other office scheduling.
Note that in recent versions, the Database Paths page includes a place to designate the default path for backups made from that computer. This is useful because, even if you occasionally back up to a flash drive or other external device, the next backup you create will revert to the default location. You can also designate paths for temporary files, reports and other files on the Report paths and Other paths and pages.
Finally we should point out that it is possible to save and retrieve Preferences files just like documents, as long as users are careful to see that each user PC running Timeslips has a unique file. If one user likes the way Timeslips behaves on another machine, that person can use the “Retrieve” button at the bottom of the screen to open a copy of that file, and then use “Save As” to rename and capture another copy of the file.
While space does not permit us to tackle every available setting, there is admittedly a lot of information contained in our three articles on Timeslips Preferences. The point of these posts is to show that users need not tolerate settings that don’t conform to the way they work, or resort to the default settings whenever a PC is replaced. Be bold and make Timeslips work for you!
For personalized help taming these Timeslips settings, contact your favorite ELS consultant. You can also call 877-ELS.0555 or email us at [email protected]. Karen Easton, Andrea Prigot, Dana Riel, and Jack Schaller are all Timeslips Certified Consultants.
Jack Schaller has been active in the field of law office technology since 1989, and has worked with a variety of commercial accounting, legal billing, practice management, and document management software products during his twenty plus years in the software consulting field. During his tenure as a software consultant he has garnered many sales and service awards for his work with legal software products. Jack is a frequent presenter at legal conferences and seminars, and is a regular contributor to TechnoLawyer and other technology publications.