CosmoLex

Practice Management and Accounting in One

Comments: One of the biggest things Cosmolex has done for us is allow us to bring out bookkeeping in-house. We went through 3 bookkeeping firms in 2 years and spent huge sums of money for our accountants to undo the mess they made. Our first year end with Cosmolex and in-house bookkeeping was a little rough but that was mostly cleaning up past mistakes.

Pros:

The product is generally pretty simple to use. Sometimes you will encounter a quirk that makes you wonder "why did they do it like this?" but once you understand the logic behind it you pick up quickly. The software is updated quite regularly.

Cons:

They were purchased by Tabs3 about a year ago and the fact that they are not independent is a little concerning.

I am glad I found CosmoLex, I could not get through a day without it.

Pros:

It's easy to use, intuitive, and the customer support is outstanding. I've occasionally contacted them with feature suggestions and they usually end up incorporating those suggestions - or they might show me how I missed something that accomplishes the same thing. The product works as advertised and I have no regrets.

Cons:

It had a little bit of a learning curve but I had nothing to compare it to. I now find it intuitive, so it's hard to say. Customer support is awesome, though, and they also have videos you can watch that explain most of the problems and issues I experienced along the way.

Great Program!

Comments: It's made reconciling accounts much easier and faster for me. I love the layout. It's also been a breeze to create invoices in (minus needing to edit them afterwards because the customization doesn't do what we'd like it to do).

Pros:

It's extremely user friendly! I love that I can print all the cheques I need on a file at the same time, or all the cheques I'm using to pay invoices at the same time.

Cons:

The invoice customization tool is the only non user thing about this program.

Time to Switch to a New Service

Comments: I regret everyday not simply using Quickbooks and Clio like a lot of other law firms do. We are going to try a demo with a few other products, Abacus and CaseManager, but I really don't think you can go wrong with Quickbooks especially if you want the payroll integrations. We're basically paying twice the price of Clio and other time-management options for accounting software that does not work.

Pros:

We liked that it appeared to have a bunch of services wrapped up into one--time-keeping for billing, accounting software similar to Quickbooks with an automatic feed into our accounts, and email archiving/practice management. The time-keeping component works well although you would think it would be easier to do mixed-fee or alternative fee arrangements given that these are the fastest growing in the legal industry.

Cons:

The accounting system is a joke. The bank-feed regularly just stops syncing with no notification. We have spent so much time reconciling our books this year as a result of issues that Cosmolex refuses to address claiming its the result of their third-party vendor. We recently needed to transfer a file, and in going to export the emails, we learned that we would need to go into each email, print to PDF, and manually save! When I asked why this wasn't explained in the marketing materials as we would never have used Cosmolex for email storage if we knew that it would require this much work to actually use or access the emails, I was given instructions for how to download the emails from my Outlook account directly. Then why am I paying to use Cosmolex? Lastly, the customer service has been consistently terrible. The chat function used to be helpful--but it appears they outsource it now, and it's no longer a benefit as the users can only refer you to articles. Additionally, we are constantly being told that they will make changes in response to our feedback (and presumably the feedback of others) but the only changes that have been made in the past few years have made the program less helpful. Where were the increased integrations we were promised? Why can't they figure out the syncing with their vendor?

Overall, I enjoy using Cosmolex.

Comments: Superb. I definitely have and will continue to recommend cosmolex to my colleagues.

Pros:

On a lighter note, aside from the very important features. I like the soft display interface. It is easy on the eyes, the monthly graph and pie chart is very great for keeping track of income.

Cons:

Accounting, but that was an issue with my personal knowledge rather than the software itself. Cosmolex care assisted.