Understanding User Permissions in Legal Accounting

There are a few things you can do to make sure user permissions to perform accounting transactions in both Practice Management and Legal Accounting are set up correctly.

Reviewing Workflow Details

Before you assign these permissions, it's good to review how the different elements of accounting (like contacts, matters, and timekeeping) are handled in both systems:

• Contacts and matters can be created or changed in Practice Management and synchronized with Legal Accounting (and vice versa). 
• When created, contacts and matters are automatically assigned IDs. 
• Time entries are recorded in Practice Management and sent to Legal Accounting for billing. (This workflow is one-directional.) 
• A status indicator appears on all contact and matter records to indicate whether the associated record is synchronized between both Legal Accounting and Practice Management. 
• Users can view Legal Accounting matter balances from the matter's Billing page in Practice Management.

To learn more, see the following articles:

• Working with Contacts in Actionstep Practice Management and Legal Accounting
• Working with Matters in Practice Management and Legal Accounting
• Recording Time in Practice Management for Billing Using Legal Accounting

Assigning Permissions

When working in both Legal Accounting and Practice Management, permissions must be set up to allow information to be synced correctly between the two systems. Please note the following:

• You must create users and assign permissions / ethical walls for creating, viewing, and editing data in both Practice Management and Legal Accounting separately.
  NOTE:  To learn more, see the following help articles:
  
  Practice Management:
  •  Adding and Removing System Users (Admin)
  •  Adding a Contact
  •  Configuring System Roles and Data Permissions
  •  Restricting Access to a Matter
  
  Legal Accounting:
  •  Setting Up an Ethical Wall in Legal Accounting (clicking this link will download a PDF with instructions to your browser's Downloads folder)
• Users' email addresses between Practice Management & Legal Accounting are validated when linking and accessing data in the two systems.
• If a user has security permissions to create a contact or matter in Practice Management, the contact/matter will be created in Legal Accounting regardless of whether the user has permissions in Legal Accounting. However, the matter may not sync if the user is assigned to it.
• If a user exists only in Practice Management and they record time for themselves, when that time is sent for billing in Legal Accounting, it will be rejected since the timekeeper does not exist in Legal Accounting. 
• To access Legal Accounting matter balances within Practice Management, the user must exist in both systems and have access to view the data on the matter's Billing page. They must also have access to the client ledger report in Legal Accounting.