Practice Pro + Accounting VS. Practice Pro + Accounting Classic

Overview

This article details the additional functions and features that will be available to an Actionstep system
that is using Practice Pro + Accounting Classic compared to a system that is using Practice Pro + Accounting. It will also give a detailed explanation of what those functions do.

In general, Practice Pro + Accounting classic offers the user the ability to customize accounting menu further and to be able to set aliases and date formats in Practice Pro + Accounting. The details of those changes are below.

 Video Overview

Aliases and Date Formats

Appearing on the General Settings screen (Admin > General Settings) will be three sections: ‘Regional date formats’, ‘Contact Type mappings’ and ‘Aliases / terminology’. Also on the General Settings screen, two extra fields available under the ‘Additional settings’ section.

Appearing on the Accounting preferences screen (Admin > Accounting > Accounting Preferences) will be two new fields under the Aliases / terminology section.

General Settings > Regional date formats

This section allows the admin user to be able to change how dates appear in the system. This will also affect the default format for dates that are used in merge fields. There is also a field to set what the default page size will be when printing.

Note: There are some exceptions where the date formats in Actionstep are still hard-coded and will not be affected by the following format options. 

User input date format	This will set the date format that users are expected to enter dates when typing them. The main purpose of this is to differentiate if the date will be entered in American date format (Month / Date / Year) or European format (Date / Month / Year). This field will be used in most parts of the system such as enter a date on a custom data field. The second ‘User input date’ field that you will see below is use in older forms in Actionstep, such as older reports like the Multi Matter Profitability report.
User input date format	This will set the date format that users are expected to enter dates when typing them. The main purpose of this is to differentiate if the date will be entered in American date format (Month / Date / Year) or European format (Date / Month / Year). There are two fields in this section with this name. This field will be used in older forms in Actionstep, such as older reports like the Multi Matter Profitability report.
Short style date format	This controls how dates will appear when they are in their short format.
Long style date format	This controls how the date will be formatted when the date appears in a long format.
Merge Field date format	Controls how dates will be formatted when used in a merge field. Note, that using the merge field option |fm=… can alter the format of a date in a merge field.
First day of the Week	This sets what the first day of the week will appear as in calendar and in the date select widget. Note: that there is a setting in the My Profile page that allows an individual to override this global setting.
Report page size	Set the size of PDF’s created by Actionstep and pages that are set to be printed.

The date fields above will use PHP formats for dates. For example ‘%d’ will display the day of the month as two digits “01” to “31”. You can read more on the various options by looking at the “fm” section of Merge Fields Options page on the Actionstep user guide.

You are able to check the resulting format of what you have entered into a field by hovering over the question mark icon beside each field.

General Settings > Contact type mapping

Actionstep has special participant types that affect how it deals with certain roles. Each will have its own default value but in this section you can change them to a specific participant type in your Actionstep.

Customer	Use this field set the participant type that bills will be made to when you bill a matter. For example, if you set this to “Accountant”, anytime you bill a matter, the contact that is loaded against the “Accountant” participant type will be billed. The default value for the customer is the “Client” participant type.
Bank	Use this field to set the participant type which can be assigned to bank records in Actionstep. Contacts who have this role or participant type set on them can be assigned as the bank contact when populating bank details on a business bank account or a trust bank account. For example, if you set this to “Financial Institution”, When you go to select a contact to be the ‘Bank contact record’ on your bank account on your Accounts list, you will only see contacts that have been marked as “Financial Institution”. The default value for Bank is the “Bank” Participant type.
Supplier	Use this to set which contacts in your system are suppliers or vendors. For example, if you set this to “Manager”, when you go to pay a supplier invoice/vendor invoice you will be prompted to choose if the payment is to the ‘Multiple Managers’, ‘Manager’, ‘Matter’ or ‘Manager Invoice’. The default value for the Supplier is the “Supplier” participant type.
Sales Person	This setting is only applicable to systems using non-enhanced billing. Use this to set which person on the matter will be loaded as the “Sales Person” on an invoice when you bill a matter. The Sales person on an invoice was used to report on the KPI function in Actionstep. KPI’s can be set to the number of actual hours, Billable hours and a sales amount. The amount would be calculated from the total invoice amount for a system user where they are sales person on an invoice. The default value for the Sales person is the “Salesperson” participant type.

General Settings > Aliases / terminology

In this section you could change how some items or menus are labeled in Actionstep.

Action Alias	Set this to what you would like your Matter’s or Action’s to be called. Changing this will change the word “Matter” in almost all places in Actionstep to the entered field. Note: This is the singular version a matter. For example, entering “Cases” in this field would change the menu in the navigation bar and other places. The default value for Action Alias is “Matter”.
Actions Alias	Set this to what you would like your Matter’s or Action’s to be called. Changing this will change the word “Matter” in almost all places in Actionstep to the entered field. This is the plural version a matter. The default value for Action Alias is “Matters”.
Participant Alias	Set this to change what participants records are called in the system. This will change menu item and the records themselves. This is the singular version of a participant. The default for Participant Alias is “Contact”. Note: Many instances have been hard coded to ignore this alias.
Participants Alias	Set this to change what participants records are called in the system. This will change menu item and the records themselves. This is the plural version of a participant. The default for Participants Alias is “Contacts” Note that many instances have been hard coded to ignore this alias.
Disbursements Alias	Set this to change what disbursements or expenses are called in the system. This will change what the disbursement record is called. The default for this is set regionally. In USA and Canadian systems, it is set to “Expenses”. In other systems it is set to “Disbursements”.

General Settings > Additional settings

In the additional settings section two new fields are available: “Missing Merge Fields” and “Contact lists”.

Missing Merge Fields

Set this to what will be displayed when a merge field in a document or email is generated for a field that has no value. For example, if set to “**MISSING**” document has a merge field that references the File reference on a matter and that document is generated for a mater with no file reference populated the result of that merge field in the document will display **MISSING**. The default for this is four stars: “****”.

Contact List

Set if the contacts that a user can see in a list of contacts will be limited to the users current division or for all contacts in the Actionstep system regardless of division. The default for this value is to show all contacts.

Accounting Preferences > Aliases / terminology

There are two new fields added to the Aliases / terminology section of the Accounting preferences
section to set what the tax alias is and what checks / cheques are called in the system.

Sales tax alias	Set this to what sales taxes are called within your region. The default for this will change regionally, GST for Australia and New Zealand, VAT for the UK.
Check Alias	Set this to what checks should be called in your system. The default for this will change regionally to match that regions spelling.

Accounting menu permissions

Menu permissions control what options are displayed in drop down menus and consequently restrict
users from accessing different parts of Acitonstep.

The Accounting menu in Actionstep has a number or menu permissions that can be applied to it but for the most part they give access to accounting functions that a law firm is very unlikely to ever need or use. In Practice Pro + Accounting, the Accounting menu is locked so that changes to the menu permissions for the accounting menu will not change the menu the users can see.

In Practice Pro + Accounting classic, that restriction is removed so that an administrator can set other options.

This is useful only if a firm will be using accounting functions that are not normal for a law firm such as sales orders, inventory or purchase quotes.