Keeping track of multiple deadlines is perhaps the most compelling reason for using practice management software. If you’re not using Amicus Attorney’s Dailies Module, perhaps you should be. Dailies are designed to provide a bird’s eye view of your practice by integrating all your records into a consolidated view, organized by today’s date.
The Dailies module provides two pre-defined Page Views – Today’s Practice Reminders and Today’s Overview.
You can access the Dailies by clicking the Dailies button in the navigation list at the left of your screen.
Today’s Practice Reminders
Today’s Practice Reminders provides a status summary of practice-related items, including To Dos and unposted time entries. This page focuses on docketing and billing, suggesting time entries for tasks performed. Especially useful for budget-sensitive matters is the Files section, which is designed to identify files where budgeted time has been exceeded, so you can take appropriate steps with the client. Clicking on the filename takes you directly to the file details.
Today’s Overview
The Today’s Overview page lists the day’s Appointments, outstanding To Do’s and outstanding Communications, including phone calls, phone messages and saved emails not marked done. This helps you visualize your day so you can readily prioritize your daily tasks. You’ll find this list below the “What’s Going On Today?” caption in the Dailies area at the left of your screen.
To help identify time sensitivity, To Do’s are colour-coded.
- To Do’s due in the future are displayed in Black
- To Do’s that are due today appear Red
- Overdue To Do’s are displayed in Purple
Boosting Your Productivity With Dailies Pages
You can initiate a number of activities directly from the Today’s Overview Page, saving you the distraction of moving through multiple views to create new records.
To create new Appointments, To Do’s or Communications, simply Right click on the appropriate list and click on ‘New’ in the context menu. Below is an example using the Outstanding To Dos list.
You can also reply or forward email messages directly from this view, again by right-clicking on the applicable list to bring up the context menu.
You can also perform other tasks such as creating a Follow Up To Do, Add to File, and Mark as Dealt With by using the context menu.
Creating a Time Entry
It’s easy to create a time entry right from the displayed lists.
To create a Time Entry for any To Do, simply right-click on the associated To Do to bring up the time entry.
To create a Time Entry for Outstanding Communications, select the Time Entry button at the right of the associated communication item.
The Dailies module makes it easy to stay on top of your day’s most pressing matters. In my next post, I’ll show you how to set the Dailies module to appear automatically when you logon to Amicus and how you can create a customized Dailies page to present relevant information.
