It is that time of year again; Halloween has passed and the holidays are upon us, and for many firms it is also upgrade or system change time as year-end is on fast approach.
One upgrade that your firm may be considering is upgrading to the new version 13 of Time Matters and Billing Matters. New features aside, there are several changes to support and system requirements that you should be aware of before your firm makes this change.
If you are a Billing Matters customer, you should be aware that the Accounting features of Billing Matters will be discontinued with version 13.
Time Matters Version 12 service pack 2 made several changes to compatibility, which also apply to Version 13. System requirements can be reviewed at this Time Matters v13 system requirements. It is also important to note changes in third Party software compatibility at the bottom of the article.
NOTE: On March 31, 2106 the partnership with WatchDox was discontinued, so we have removed the link.
The most anticipated new feature of v13 is the addition of a Document Sharing Portal through a partnership between PCLaw | Time Matters™ and WatchDox. Each user inside your Time Matters software can use their email address to create a WatchDox.com account. This allows the Time Matters user to share any document that is inside their Time Matters Document Management System (aka that has been saved using the TMSave macros inside Office products and Adobe Acrobat). The WatchDox account is not a replacement for the Time Matters DMS, as each firm is limited to 5 GBs total WatchDox storage for the firm – but it is quick way to share, monitor and facilitate collaboration of documents between your Time Matters system and outside contacts.
All the new features of Time Matters/Billing Matters v13 are discussed in this web presentation by PCLaw | Time Matters™, and the new document sharing portal is also demonstrated. (NOTE: Link has been removed. Due to the age of the presentation, it has been removed from the PCLaw | Time Matters™ website)
As with any upgrade, make sure you have proper backups, IT representatives and your Certified Independent Consultant included in your preparation and upgrade. New potential “gotchas” include not migrating your Accounting data BEFORE you upgrade to version 13 as well as not being aware of no longer supported environments and software.
For more information, contact Caren Schwartz at caren@timeandcents.com, Kelly Jones at kelly@btf-services.com or your personal CIC.
Kelly Jones Bosch is a contributing author to this blog and is based out of Phoenix, AZ. She provides onsite and remote access consulting and assistance to her nation-wide consultant base and is President of BTF Services. She is proud member of the Premier consulting group Circle Management Group Consultants, and has been hired by PCLaw | Time Matters™ on several occasions to speak on behalf of the Practice Management products and to train the technical support teams in Dayton, Toronto and Cary.