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Event Notification Management for Professional Services Firms
- Increases firm-wide efficiency and attention to detail
- Enables professional services teams to be proactive rather than reactive
- Reduces missed deadlines and opportunities
- Expedites critical decision making
Improve Performance with Time-Critical Notifications and Reports
Maintaining client satisfaction and sustaining profitable operations requires firm management
and professional services teams to stay on top of numerous deadlines while managing a wide range of functions and activities. An application that is fully integrated across Elite’s Enterprise client platform, Elite Extend provides users with time-critical information needed to manage workloads and improve performance. Elite Extend accomplishes this by providing email notifications and related reports when user-defined events take place.
Typical events include:
- Notifying billing timekeepers about clients with accounts receivable balances over a
predefined amount.
- Alerting timekeepers and/or supervisors when time cards are overdue.
- Providing management information regarding client deliverables or month-end report status.
Elite Extend Highlights
- Fully integrated into Elite Enterprise, Elite’s 32-bit client platform for professional
services financial and practice management.
- Includes predefined yet customizable events enabling users to define report settings
and event notification parameters that best suit their needs.
- Simple customization - users can adjust or modify the specifications of existing events
or create new events to meet the specific needs of the firm with minimal training.
- Unlimited scalability - supports large firms and small workgroups with ease.
- Global support - multi-language and multi-currency capabilities ensure usability for
multi-national firms.
Maximum Customization Delivers Optimal Control
Elite Extend provides users with customization features than can be used to generate the greatest value for professional services teams and firm management. A key component of the Elite Extend solution is a client-based application that system administrators can use to define events that trigger notifications when they take place or deadlines are missed.
Popular event definitions include:
- Accounts receivable range notifications
- Apex client, company and contact associations
- Apex deleted associations
- Cash receipt notifications
- Client credit limit alerts
- Engagement (matter) budget consumption
- Engagements (matters) not billed recently
- General ledger budget consumption
- Missing time entries
- Net investments
- New clients and engagements (matters)
- Open proforma alert
- Pending conflict-of-interest searches
- Related parties for new Engagements (matters)
- Trust receipt, balance and maturity date
- Work-in-progress reminders
When setting up events, administrators have two options: they can create a customized event and corresponding report or they can choose and modify an existing predefined event and report. An intuitive user interface presents a comprehensive set of event definition and notification options including scheduling, frequency, output format, event recipients and more. Administrators simply click on a specific event to view the properties for that event and make modifications as needed.
Simplified Reporting
Administrators can create the following two types of reports that provide information relating to event notifications:
- SQL reports - users can write SQL statements to generate custom events that select against any table in the database and/or make use of database views.
- Custom reports using the users’ own program - users can create new events using whatever programming language they wish.
- Elite data warehouse reports - takes advantage of the Elite standard reports that can be saved to a data warehouse. Users can select which fields and data within the data warehouse report to pull from and send that information to another individual.
- Database triggers - users who need to know when data such as client contact information changes can set up database triggers that will notify the appropriate party when such an action takes place.
Customized Formatting
Because Elite Extend delivers notifications in an HTML email format, report output can be extensively customized and include any combination of tables, bookmarks, hyperlinks and graphics as well as multiple formats necessary to communication the right information to the right people at the right time. Reports can provide data in single or multiple columns. A descriptive email format is also available for situations that demand a more conversational style of communication.
Flexible Scheduling and Notification Options
For added flexibility, Elite Extend also provides unparalleled scheduling options. Reports can be sent every n minutes, immediately after generation, on specific days or dates and can automatically exclude weekends. Separate schedules can be set for report generation and delivery. In addition, individual events and/or reports can be temporarily disabled, providing maximum system control.
Users also have maximum flexibility when specifying notification recipients. Aside from identifying individual timekeepers, users can choose to send notifications to predefined groups. And with Elite Extend, group notification is a dynamic function - users can include or exclude individuals as needed
on a per-event basis. Or they can select from a wide range of selection criteria that allows groups to be defined based upon pre-defined criteria. For example, a supervisor can be included in a group notification only when AR reaches a certain amount or timesheets are overdue by a predetermined number of days.
Seamless Integration Ensures System Performance
To ensure that event definitions result in appropriate notification criteria, easy-to-use testing capabilities allow the person setting up a new event to verify that the right data will be reported by running a preview against online data before going live to the firm. A similar test can be run to
preview the delivery of a sample email notification.
Elite Extend includes an integrated application service that runs on an existing Elite server to handle the bulk of the processing necessary to identify event notification requirements and generate event emails and reports. By constantly monitoring the entire Elite system, Elite Extend maintains accountability 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Your Partner for Financial and Practice Management Solutions
Elite Information Systems is a worldwide leader in enterprise software for the professional services industry. Elite provides solutions for professional services organizations in the accounting, IT and management consulting, legal, marketing services, technology, corporate, and government sectors. More than half of the Am Law 100, more than a third of the top 1,000 U.S. law firms, and over a third of the top 100 UK law firms turn to Elite for financial and practice management solutions. Contact Elite to put the power of Elite’s solutions to work in your organization today.
For more information on Thomson Elite, please complete our sales request form.
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