Thomson Reuters

Practice CS is the most advanced practice management system ever designed for accounting professionals. Much more than a time and billing system, Practice CS serves as a workflow hub for your firm, bringing together all of the key information and resources you need to manage your practice.

Most practice management software can't help manage your entire practice, but is typically limited to time and billing or common scheduling tasks. Setting a new standard for practice management systems, Practice CS offers a big-picture perspective that provides valuable insight into your business, guarantees unprecedented client service, and ensures that your firm runs at peak productivity.

Practice CS Receives 5 Stars!

"Companies working toward a paperless office will appreciate the dashboard functionality. Here, users can quickly find information regarding clients, staff, and time and billing. This provides current information in an easy-to-access format, which helps free up administrative time and encourages managers to actively monitor clients and engagements."

-- The CPA Technology Advisor, October 2006

With Practice CS, you can:

• Streamline your entire workflow and achieve maximum productivity by tracking all your project management and client management information in a single location.
• Serve clients more efficiently and effectively by quickly and easily creating a perfect record of all client communications -- whether by phone, by email, or face-to-face.
• Eliminate clutter and centralize all of your day-to-day processes to ensure that your most important tasks and information are always at your fingertips.
• Optimize resource allocation and maximize billable productivity by analyzing staff activity, balancing your firm's workload, and automatically tracking every moment of billable activity.

Why choose Practice CS?

• Customizable digital dashboards: With three digital dashboards that enable you to monitor key information specific to your staff, clients, and firm, Practice CS helps you streamline and manage workflow across all firm tasks -- from a single, convenient location.
• Powerful project management tools: Track firm projects and tasks from your desktop for complete control of workflow processes.
• Comprehensive client management features: Closely monitor all client activity, including phone calls, email messages, billing, projects, deadlines, etc.
• Seamless data sharing: Take advantage of the seamless integration with the CS Professional Suite and Microsoft Outlook® to ensure your firm operates at peak productivity.
• Easy time and billing tools: Quickly record time and expenses and create customized invoices and statements.

Single Platform, Multiple Tools: 

Practice CS brings together all of the information and tools that you use daily into one convenient location. The system is organized into three fully customizable digital dashboards -- Staff, Client, and Firm -- and each dashboard is a collection of real-time portlets containing current information. Each dashboard is fully customizable, so you and your staff can create the views that meet your unique needs.

The Staff Dashboard:

• Perform all day-to-day tasks from a single location.
• The Staff Dashboard is designed to work seamlessly with your Microsoft Outlook® Mail, Calendar, and Tasks to provide a convenient workflow hub for your staff. Used continuously throughout the day, the Staff Dashboard makes it easy for you and your staff to perform all of your daily tasks from one centralized location, rather than having to navigate multiple programs.
• When you use the Project Management module with Practice CS, you can further streamline workflow. From the Staff Dashboard, you can view up-to-the minute project information. For example, the Notifications window displays key information for staff, such as assignment changes, approaching deadlines, or when client information has been received.

The Client Dashboard:

• All client information at your fingertips.
• The Client Dashboard pulls together critical information about your clients, including contact information, demographic data, work in progress, billing activity, payment history, current balances, and more. The Client Dashboard also contains a Solutions portlet, which organizes all of the documents, applications, and links associated with specific clients.
• Using the Client Management module in combination with Practice CS, ensures that you have the most current client information at your fingertips -- enhancing your overall workflow. For example, from the Client Dashboard, you can display the Client Management module's Interactions portlet to create a comprehensive view of all interactions associated with a given client -- including phone messages, emails, and notes.

The Firm Dashboard:

• The Firm Dashboard provides a quick view of the state of your firm's production, billings, and staff productivity. The Firm Dashboard makes it easy for you to quickly assess the financial status of your firm without having to search in multiple locations. To maintain security, you can restrict this view to partners and/or other selected employees.
• Firm partners and other authorized staff can refer to the Firm Dashboard to review such items as key financial totals, recaps of work in process (WIP) and accounts receivable, and summaries of staff hours, billable time, and staff availability.

The Project Management Module:

• With the Project Management module, you can manage and track your firm's projects and tasks right from your own desktop -- giving you unprecedented control over the workflow in your office. It also gives your staff the tools necessary to efficiently manage their individual responsibilities.
• Set up notifications to inform staff members when client information for a project has been received, assignment changes are made, or when deadlines are approaching.
• Control how recurring projects should be generated with flexible project generation.
• Manage project responsibilities from the Staff Dashboard by viewing assigned projects and tasks.
• View Outlook appointments, Outlook tasks, projects, and project tasks in an Outlook-style calendar.
• Launch applications needed to complete projects from within Practice CS by simply clicking a project or task solution to have your work timed automatically.
• Track budget information to determine how your staff is progressing on a project.
• Use the Manage Projects screen to update project and task information, assign work, and review your own workload.

The Client Management Module:

• The powerful Client Management module enables you to record every detail of client activity --so you always have the most updated information at your fingertips. The Client Management module enables you to logically organize, store, and access all client interactions in a single location for quick and efficient review -- by anyone on your staff, at any time needed.
• Record notes of every client interaction, including phone calls, emails, billing, or face-to-face meetings.
• Synchronize contact information with Outlook, offering you the most up-to-date contact information in both applications.
• Automatically track time on phone calls, which can be invoiced with other billable time and record phone messages, providing a digital record of all phone messages.
• Record and track prospects won/lost information, which allows you to determine why you are winning or losing prospective clients.
• Track how new clients are referred to your firm. Generate virtually any report grouped by referral source, giving you a complete picture of referral activity.

Comprehensive Billing Capabilities:

• Select from four different billing methods depending on the level of detail required.
• Use the Smart Bill feature to bill multiple time and expense entries at one time with automatic allocation of billing and adjustment amounts.
• Bill clients at your convenience as often as you choose, by any method you prefer.
• Bill by project, activity, staff, or individual WIP item -- at the level of detail you prefer.
• Use the powerful filtering capabilities in the selection screen to easily select which clients to bill.

Custom Client Invoices and Reports:

• Quickly set up your invoices or statements using the easy-to-use formatting capabilities that are built into the program.
• Control the level of detail you show your clients using flexible grouping capabilities.
• Easily add A/R Aging, Ledger, and Recap sections as needed.
• Add dunning messages that allow you to display previous balance reminders to your clients based on the age of their outstanding balance.

Comprehensive Reporting:

• Use powerful filtering capabilities to identify clients and staff members based on any criteria.
• Select the detail and groupings for each analytic report, such as by client, engagement, staff member, activity, or other, with appropriate subtotals.
• Drill down within each report to view and even modify underlying sources of data.
• Output and email different types of files, such as Adobe PDF, HTML, Rich Text Format, Text, Tagged Image File, and Microsoft Excel.

Cash Flow Management:

• Enter receipts and apply them manually or automatically to outstanding balances.
• Enter different adjustment types, including credit memo, credit card return, debit memo, non-sufficient funds, and write-offs.
• Use the optional review process to require that all entries be approved and posted before inclusion in firm reporting, invoices, and statements.
• Create service charges for overdue accounts.

Credit Card Processing:

• The ability to process credit cards in Practice CS offers another convenient feature for processing client payments. Using an account with InterceptEFT, you can enter credit card information directly into the program.
• The system also includes credit card swiping functionality. Using a standard USB card reader, you will be able to swipe credit cards -- improving accuracy and reducing processing charges.
  

Multi-level Security:

• Set up multi-level security, with specific security groups such as staff, managers, partners -- or any designation you prefer.
• This security feature enables you to control the level of detail that is available to various groups on the Firm Dashboard.

Thomson Tax & Accounting products are designed for professional production work. Our system requirements are based on the assumption that professional accounting firms replace their computer hardware and operating systems approximately every three years.

While our products may operate on less powerful hardware and operating systems, we do not believe it will perform at a level suitable for production work in those environments. Of course, as processing speed and RAM are increased, software performance will also improve.

We recommend workstation class computers, which generally offer higher levels of performance than desktop models when running business applications.

For a complete listing of systems requirements for the CS Professional Suite, click here.

"The most beneficial aspect of the program [Practice CS] is the integration...Integration and sharing of data with other CS products like tax and accounting drove [my] firm to select Creative Solutions."
-- Paul Hayden, WI

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"I have been using Practice CS for almost a year now. I was able to set up our clients in a relatively short period of time, and technical support has always been helpful regarding any questions I had. The program is very user friendly and easy to use. This is the best practice management software I have ever used."
-- Deborah Mahoney, TN

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"Companies working toward a paperless office will appreciate the dashboard functionality. Here, users can quickly find information regarding clients, staff, and time and billing. This provides current information in an easy-to-access format, which helps free up administrative time and encourages managers to actively monitor clients and engagements."
-- The CPA Technology Advisor, October 2006