Contactually was a CRM for real estate agents and brokerages, that automatically prompted users to take action with the most important people to prevent things from falling through the cracks. Contactually was acquired by Compass in 2019, and is no longer available.
$69
per month
Rocket Matter
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Rocket Matter, now from ProfitSolv is legal practice management and time and billing software on the web, with apps for iPhone and Android. Rocket Matter integrates to email, and also includes document management and calendar features.
Contactually is a very powerful CRM, even though it is extremely simple to use. It is very intuitive and fun to use! Their templates for nurturing and follow-up are phenomenal, so if you have a sales cycle, this is the tool for you. I even use it to keep track of family and acquaintances' interactions, as Contactually can alert me when it's been 30 days since the last time I talked to person A. The only reason I don't give it a 10 is because price has been going up in recent years.
Rocket Matter offers many features useful to a law office of any size. Users can be added to the same subscription so that attorneys and paralegals can record their own billable and non-billable hours, costs, case notes, and tasks. I wish my current firm used Rocket Matter for the billing features alone. Generating invoices and creating a record of trust retainer transactions was easy and efficient. All payment and billing records were stored in one central system, which allowed me to look up a client's payment history, billing status and retainer balance in under 5 minutes.
Time capture - both via a timer and manual entry, makes sure you can get all the time entered on a regular basis in a quick and easy manner.
Decent mobile integration. iPhone and iPad app typically work well and allow you to input time and expenses away from the office.
Generating invoices and reminder statements is a snap, as are generating reports on income received and outstanding receivables as well as time worked.
Social tracking is really only through Twitter so though you can add LinkedIn, G+, and even AngelList social profiles, you don't get users' social posts from those
The feature that highlights opportunities to stay connected with "important" contacts COULD be incredible but it only reports to you when those users have birthdays or they tweet @ you. Rather worthless in that regard. Would be nice if Important contacts showed every time those people posted something on social media.
Becomes laborious when you have thousands of contacts and need to organize them and indicate their level of importance.
Time since last contacted only tracks email. You can't manually indicate that you've contacted them, it doesn't track your calendar to know if you had a meeting
While the Notes feature was immensely useful for keeping track of the last work completed on a matter or to keep a record of discussions with clients or relevant legal research, it could have been far more user-friendly. There is no way to export Notes saved to a .doc, .pdf, or any other format. To print or download Notes, I would have to painstakingly click on each entry and copy it into a word document, then go back to the previous page to click on the next entry to repeat the process as many times as there were notes. If printed directly from the website, the formatting spills off of the page.
I am pleased with the amount which can be customized in invoice templates in Rocket Matter. However, to create your own template you need to use fields recognized by the program. Rocket Matter provides a guide and a list of available fields, however, it is a fairly complex undertaking for anyone unfamiliar with using fields in Word documents or using other code, such as HTML. It would be more intuitive for users if Rocket Matter employed a template customizing feature similar to that of QuickBooks, where text boxes and fields can be inserted and manually dragged to the desire area of the template.
Rocket Matter can run very slowly and can slow down your computer quite a bit while it is running. I upgraded to a newer laptop with higher RAM after my first year of using Rocket Matter, and there was a noticeable difference in the speed and ease of use.
Just doesn't provide the sophistication that I seek. It's a simple solution with some innovation automation relatively speaking, but ideal for individuals and small businesses with basic CRM needs.
Generally, Rocket Matter is more efficient for invoicing than Quickbooks, and does much better reports and invoices. Rocket Matter is much more attuned to legal business needs, and is superior to Quickbooks for a lawyers' billing and time/project management needs in just about every way.
Rocket Matter has streamlined tracking billable time, tracking funds earned from trust retainers, invoicing, and maintaining a detailed transaction record for IOLTA trust accounting. As long as I regularly entered payment and billing information to keep the data current, I could quickly complete non-billable accounting and invoicing tasks. I know it can consume huge amounts of time trying to recreate payment and billing histories, so using Rocket Matter to centralize these records greatly increased the amount of time I had for billable work.
Using Rocket Matter to record upcoming tasks, deadlines and events provided a secondary system for calendar management. Using Rocket Matter with Google Calendar allowed me to easily keep track of how I should spend my time and reduced the possibility of missing a deadline.
All of the data recorded in Rocket Matter can be used to generate reports for accounting and for analyzing how time is spent. Reports made it easy and fast to identify clients who were far behind in payments or who had funds available to invoice, without needing to manually check each matter.
