Thank you to Rocket Matter for sponsoring iPhone J.D. this month. I've heard great things about this company for longer than I can remember, and now they have an iPhone app to make it even easier to use their service when you are on the go.
Rocket Matter is an online time and billing service for small to mid-size firms that you pay for on a monthly basis. Their clients range from solo practitioners to law firms with more than 60 timekeepers. The core service that they provide is time and billing. You login to the Rocket Matter website in the morning, and then throughout the day you can add entries for your time. When it is time to prepare invoices, Rocket Matter does so quickly and easily so that you can concentrate on practicing law, not being an accountant.
Rocket Matter has lots of well-designed features that make it easy to enter your time. For example, Rocket Matter has a built-in calendar to help you keep track of your appointments, and then it makes it easy to convert calendar entries into billing entries. Likewise it includes a sophisticated task manager that can help your organize the work that you need to do, and then easily create time entries based upon those tasks. And because it is an online service, you can use it with a PC, a Mac, or just about anything else you have. The website is secure, fast, and easy to use. And earlier this year, Rocket Matter added sophisticated document assembly tools.
I see one sign of Rocket Matter's appeal when I attend the large ABA TECHSHOW conference in Chicago every Spring. The Rocket Matter booth is always full of attorneys talking about how much they love using the product — and suffice it to say that time and billing software is not normally a subject that invites such enthusiasm. Plus, Rocket Matter's CEO Larry Port always seems to have something interesting to say about the future of law practice management. It was no surprise to see him named one of the Fastcase 50 for 2012.
But that is the old news about Rocket Matter. The new news is that just a few weeks ago, Rocket Matter released an iPhone app. Rocket Matter was always an online service that could be used from an iPhone or iPad, but the new iPhone app makes it even easier to use the service from the device in your pocket to manage your contacts, calendar and tasks. Plus, easy access to Rocket Matter makes it even easier to enter your time contemporaneously, reducing the risk that you forget to keep track of your billable work.
The iPhone app makes it easy to create events on your calendar. Note that you can also choose to use the iPhone's built-in Calendar app, and if you sync that with Google you can then sync your Google account with Rocket Matter. But by creating an entry in the iPhone app, you can also add Rocket Matter details such as the client and matter. Just tap the plus sign at the top right, enter the event info, choose a matter from your list of matters, and you are done.
In addition to the month view, you can also view your calendar as a list or daily view.
Rocket Matter also keeps track of your clients and other contact and integrates that into the matter management. You can access your Rocket Matter contacts from the app.
You can also use the app to quickly enter expenses as they occur (e.g. parking at the courthouse) or as a timer for your billable tasks. Just start the timer, hit stop when you are done, and then select the matter and add a description. Just that quickly, you are done and your entry is sent to the online Rocket Matter billing system.
You can also access matter information from the app. Thus, if you want to know how much a client currently owes you, or if the client asks you how much billable work you've already done this month, the answer is at your fingertips.
Because Rocket Matter is an online service, one nice feature of the app is that it works even if you have no signal at all. But when you do have a signal, the data in the app is synced with your Rocket Matter online account. And if you ever want the full features of the Rocket Matter website, you can still access that from Safari on your iPhone, just like you can from your iPad or computer.
If you want more information on Rocket Matter and its iPhone app, click here or click on the ad on the left. And once you are a Rocket Matter customer, you can click below to download the free iPhone app. Thanks again to all the great folks at Rocket Matter for supporting iPhone J.D.