Feature Article: Software Horror Stories

October 2016    Tags: Best Practices, Version 17, Version 18

It’s Friday the 13^th and, true to the superstition surrounding the date, nothing is going right today. You keep working but are amassing a list of things gone wrong.

You ran this month’s bills, finalized, and ran the Update Statements program a couple of weeks ago. Your boss wants to see productivity figures, but when you run Productivity reports, you realize you forgot to advance the current reporting month! None of the most recent figures are correct.

• Starting with Version 18, all period-based reports in Tabs3 Billing are now date based, which means they can be run for previous months and no longer rely on advancing the current reporting month. The following reports can now be run for any period:
  • Timekeeper Productivity Report
  • Category Productivity Report
  • Timekeeper Profitability Report
  • Productivity Report by Category for each Timekeeper
  • Productivity Report by Tcode for each Timekeeper

The temporary bookkeeper finalized last month’s reconciliation while you were away, but this month things don’t look right. You look a little closer and find a big mistake – the bookkeeper finalized without the reconciliation balancing! If you restore your data, you’ll lose a month’s worth of data. You’ll have to add manual journal entries to work around the temp’s errors.

• Starting with Version 18, reconciliations can be undone so that adjustments can more easily be made without restoring from a backup.

An attorney tells you to go ahead and split the fees and costs for a client. You run the utility, and ten minutes later he recants – the client just called to add an additional party to the split. This party needs to be added to the current bill, but the split’s already been made.

• Starting with Version 17, you can reverse the split billing process for individual clients (Maintenance | Transaction Related | Undo Split Billing). This allows you to easily reverse the split, make any necessary changes, and then split fees and costs again.

You just found out that your firm is getting audited, and you need financial information for the last several years. While opening each archived GLS Client to print out the necessary reports, you discover that there are a couple of years missing. This was before your time, but you’ll still need to talk to the boss and do the extra work.

• Starting with Version 17, you no longer have to archive clients and can store unlimited years of journal entries. This makes it easier to run the reports you need for internal purposes, or if you are audited. In addition, you no longer have to close the month or year in GLS, and you can use date restriction settings to ensure journal entries from prior periods cannot be edited.

You wake up, it’s still dark out, and your heart’s pounding. You look at the clock and it’s one in the morning. After some deep breaths, you lie down and close your eyes, falling back asleep almost effortlessly because you know you’re on the current version of Tabs3 and PracticeMaster, and you have every GLS Client archived back to inception, so these horror stories can’t happen to your firm. Besides, there isn’t even a Friday the 13^th in October this year.

Older software versions are sometimes a ghost of what could be. Ensure you stay current and get all of the latest updates. For steps to download and install the latest version of the software, visit Knowledge Base Article R10154, “How to Download Files from Software Technology, Inc.’s Download Pages.”