Track Your Time – Without Notes or Timers

Last week, we co-hosted a webinar with our friends at Clio to demo our new automatic time capture integration.

Here’s the full webinar recording, for your viewing pleasure:

The New Chrometa-Clio Time Capture Integration

We’re excited to announce that we’ve partnered with Clio to deliver a seamless time capture and practice management experience for solo and small firm attorneys.

You can now let Chrometa capture and categorize your time automatically, and then port these time entries directly into Clio with a single click.

How to Enable the Clio Integration

Within Chrometa, go to the Account – Integrations tab, and select the Clio Integration option from the drop down menu.

Click Connect to hook up your Clio account with Chrometa.

You’ll be redirected over to Clio, where you can login and connect your account.

Select Yes, Let’s Connect:

Sync Up Your Clio Matter (Project) List

Next you’ll be redirected back to Chrometa, with a message that you’ve connected your Clio account, and that you’re ready to import your Matters from Clio via the Project tab in Chrometa (we call Matters “Projects” in Chrometa).

At the top of the page, you’ll see a new Sync With Clio button. Click this to import your clients and matters from Clio (they will be created as Clients and Projects in Chrometa).

Chrometa will pull in any Clio matters that are not yet present within Chrometa. No existing Chrometa projects will be overwritten – new projects are only appended – so you don’t need to worry about accidentally overwriting your existing Chrometa project list.

Use Chrometa to Capture, Categorize, and Annotate Your Time

Now you can use Chrometa to:

• Capture your time passively as you work
• Categorize these time entries to your Clio Matters
• Annotate (and combine) time entries (to provide additional details and combine like annotations)

Export Your Time Entries to Clio

Once you have your time entries categorized, you can send them across the wire to Clio from the Time – Summary view. First, select your project(s) to export:

Then click the Export to Clio button:

Some quick notes and tips:

• The time range selected using Chrometa’s date filter can be used to send multiple days’ worth of time entries across to Clio.
• Chrometa will group all time entries by annotation (like annotations will be combined into one entry), and will split the entries into a total by day (if multiple days are selected).
• Only time entries that have been categorized to a project will be sent across to Clio. Uncategorized time will not be sent.
• For entries that are not annotated, you can give them a default annotation before selecting Begin Export (see window below).
• Finally all time entries sent to Clio are appended to your list of Billable Activity for each matter. We do not replace any entries that already exist in Clio.

Feedback Welcome

We collaborated closely with our friends at Clio to deliver as seamless an integration as possible. We welcome and appreciate your feedback and suggestions on this process.

Had enough with QuickBooks? Check out Xero, the hottest new online accounting software package. You can create invoices directly in Xero by using this export from Chrometa.

1. Enable the Xero export within Chrometa by going to Account – Integrations, and clicking the Enable Xero Invoice Integration checkbox.

2. Create your Project in Chrometa to mirror your Xero Contact – specifically by name, and most importantly email address, which is how Chrometa looks for a match during export.

The quickest way to populate your Projects within Chrometa is via a bulk import of your list in CSV format.  Go to the Projects tab in Chrometa, and click the Import Clients button (upper-right) to access the bulk import feature.

3. Create a new invoice by going to the Invoices tab.  Select the New Invoice button.

4. Create a new invoice, save it, and export it to Xero. You can combine the Save and Export steps by taking advantage of the “And” menu located immediately below the Save button.

5. Authenticate the Chrometa connection within Xero (you’ll be prompted to do so), and then you’ll be able to view and edit your invoice within Xero!

If you’re not yet a Xero user, you can take their online accounting app for a free spin here.

To export your Chrometa time entries to Timeslips, you’ll first need to enable the Timeslips export – which you can do under Account – Integrations.

We have a couple of Timeslips TPL files available for the specific mapping from Chrometa to Timeslips – they are available on this page (use the 2011 version for everything prior as well).

Once you have enabled the export, you can tee up your time entries for export from our Invoices tab.  Once you pull your time for a given client and/or project, you can generate the file for Timeslips from the Invoices list view by clicking the Action drop down.

The data exports in CSV format, and it’s specifically formatted for Timeslips.

For Timeslips integration support, we’ve partnered with time and billing system guru Caren Schwartz, an excellent resource for anyone who needs a hand with a custom Timeslips setup.

Caren Schwartz
Time & Cents Consultants, LLC
caren@timeandcents.com
203-254-7736
www.timeandcents.com

Welcome, Basecamp users!

By popular request, we have developed an export that lets you capture and categorize your project time within Chrometa – and export these time entries over to Basecamp with the click of a button.

To enable the Basecamp export in Chrometa, go to Account – Integrations, and enter your Basecamp account info. Then the export will be available under the “More” menu from Reports – Summary.

Chrometa will take categorized project time and match it up with the corresponding project in Basecamp (the match is by project name).  If you have a project in Chrometa that is not yet created in Basecamp, we will automatically create that project for you within Basecamp when you send your time over.

PS – The quickest way to create your Basecamp projects within Chrometa is to use our Bulk Import tool, which you can find under the Projects tab.