By Niall Staward, Chief Technology Officer, Katchr.
2021 Improvements and Developments of our Software
Throughout 2021 Katchr software continues to go from strength to strength as new releases give clients even more of what they need. And, that has certainly kept their growing team of developers busy with no less than 7 releases. “Launch often” is the Katchr-way, now operating on a fixed 6-week cycle to help planning around testing, upgrades, and scheduling. As Katchr’s client base grows, so the product offerings evolve to reflect the subtle differences in how different law firms operate. This is designed to ensure that (for example) a conveyancing specialist has exactly the right desk-level information enabling even greater precision in real-time reporting. We are also continuing with development and roll out of Katchr Express.
System Designer
With the dashboard designer it has long been possible for end users to build their own dashboards or to re-configure existing dashboards using ‘drag and drop’ tools from a catalog of adjustable webparts.
Our goal has always been to allow customers more and more control over their own Katchr system and with the System Designer we are adding new ways for you to define new measures to include on those webparts, and to easily import user defined data from your PMS to feed into those measures.
Previously, use of any bespoke measure would require the design of completely bespoke webparts, usually by Katchr. Now they have made custom measures a first-class citizen in the Katchr world and these appear in the designer alongside ‘standard’ measures.
Secondly, the system designer allows simplified access to user defined Practice Management System (PMS) data. Most PMS software allows users to create custom fields, forms and workflows to help drive case progress and tracking. This data is often stored in a format which make it difficult to report on once collected. The system designer is able to extract and transform this data and make it easily available to include as part of a measure business rule or a detail data view. Katchr currently has connectors for Linetime Liberate and Eclipse Proclaim, with more in the pipeline.
These tools not only allow clients with the option of greater self-service, but also provide Katchr with the means to deliver changes quicker and cheaper than before.
System Designer is currently in beta and not on general release
Client Partner / Matter Supervisor Webparts
An area of analysis experiencing increasing demand is client partner and matter supervisor analysis.
Depending on how relationships and responsibilities are managed in the firm it may ultimately be the client partner (or supervisor) who monitors or chases debts, for example; A number of clients were spending significant time each month building up this view of their firm and this new suite of webparts makes viewing this ‘slice’ of data quick and simple.
Performance Comparison – Measure Detail Data
The performance comparison webpart was introduced last year and has proved extremely popular, allowing firms to re-create many of the monthly ‘performance’ report that almost everyone has but is usually different in every firm. It allows a quick view of lots of measures across many or all fee earners in one screen.
This webpart has been extended to allow direct drill down to bill, matter and time posting level detail data from that same report view, making it quick and easy to go all the way from a firm level overview to an individual time posting in a double-click.
Month End ETL self-service/Notifications System
A number of Katchr’s clients have specific requirements around month end which require them to extract a snapshot of their PMS data at a certain point throughout the day (e.g. to capture WIP balances as the period is closed). In this scenario they are required to call in to the Katchr support team to begin and validate that process.
Tooling has now been added to allow Katchr to provide a way for clients to manage this process themselves through the maintenance screens. This gives their finance team back control and allows them to close their period quicker without depending on anyone else being available at a specific time.
As part of this improvement, Katchr also introduced a new notifications system which allows messages to be proactively displayed on a user’s dashboard. In this case, they are notified that updates are in progress or have completed. Katchr will also be able to use the same mechanism in other ways in future
Initial Katchr configuration of this tool is required.
Find out more about our CTO, Niall by reading his story here: The Changing Face of the CTO