General Q&A

Hello, We have rebranded, could you please assist me with updating smokeball? I would like the new letterhead to replace the current one and if possible to include the new rebranding into the smokeball photo. 

I’m wondering how to best utilize Smokeball billing for differentiating between invoices that need to be paid by the clients within the specified due date, versus ones that we can’t collect for that are subject to petitioning for fees.  We currently have no way of tracking that in Smokeball from what I see.  We use matter tags “Pay Now” or “Petition for Fees” and run reports each cycle for all matters, separate which can be sent to clients to collect, and which cannot until court approved.  For invoice cover sheets, we also have resorted to using spreadsheets with manually entering customer addresses, as Smokeball does not allow us to choose between two separate billing cover sheets that would either request clients to pay now ,or let them know what they owe, but not until the court approves the fees.  Are there more intuitive, and less time consuming ways of doing this each monthly billing cycle? 

Hello, All my correspondence letters and precedents turn into the wrong font when I open them. They are the correct font in the template. How do I change the rules and fix the styling?

Hello, My trust isn’t balancing in Smokeball with my bank statement. My bank balance is $13,200 and the trust balance in Smokeball is $10,200. Any ideas on what I am missing?

One or two of our matters does not have the banner for Trust (transactions) appearing? Is this a set up issue? Has not happened with other files opened.

Any help on setting up “Chinese walls” within Smokeball? Chinese walls are policies within law firms which would prevent me or a certain administrator from viewing certain files, to protect against a conflict of interest. 

I entered the wrong date of a trust payment - if I reverse it, will it make the reconciliation difficult?

Any help on setting up “Chinese walls” within Smokeball? Chinese walls are policies within law firms which would prevent me or a certain administrator from viewing certain files, to protect against a conflict of interest. 

Hello, We need signatures added to the profiles for letters and other documents when we are the person responsible on a matter. I’ve had a look at the settings and can’t seem to find a way to do this ourselves?

Is there a way to set up monthly reminder for tasks like sending out bills? I have a list of tasks to do for just invoicing that I wish I could have a repeating reminder/task for. Is this already a feature?

I have changed my dashboard to be able to track my discovery due dates and my medical document requests. However, i have requested some medical records today on various files that would be due in the next 30 days. These are not showing up on my widget. I have refreshed the widget and even closed out of SB and opened it again. Am I doing something wrong? 

What do people label a lead where you decline representation?  “Canceled”?  “Closed”? 

Every time I open the Communicate app on my phone, it tells me that a new version of the app is available.  I click “update” and it just takes me back to the app store and gives me the choice to open the app, which takes me back to the same place.  Does anyone know another way to update? Also, if a person sends  you an SMS in Communicate, does your response automatically go back to their SMS, or do you have to toggle the SMS button on every response to have it go to as SMS rather than email?

Hello everyone! I am hoping someone may be able to help with this problem my staff and I keep running into. Initially, I had SB synced with my calendar, and as I hired a paralegal, I shared my calendar with our admin email. At first we had no problem both being able to create events on my calendar and assigning them to matters. One day events started popping up 3-4x on the calendar. Then somehow we fixed it (not sure how), but then soon after, only my paralegal was able to assign events on my calendar. Then today, I synced my calendar directly with SB again, and now events are popping up 4x. Does anyone know how to fix this? My staff and I both need to be able to access my calendar to create and assign events. Additionally, we tried putting events on the calendar in SB directly, and we found that my staff could see events on my calendar that were created in SB but I could not see them on my end. Anyone have any ideas??? Smokeball, please fix this integration so that bo

Hello,I am trying to work out if I can write one cheque that will take all the amounts for say for example 6 clients. Can I do that?

Hello, How do I get trust accounting and Billing to generate receipts?

I am new to Smokeball and I can’t seem to figure out how to undo my mistakes.  I apparently bulk finalized all the bills before I even reviewed them.  I need to undo them so I can make changes.  I can’t find anywhere that says how to do that.  I ended up reversing all the bulk payments assuming that would undo the final bills, but it did not.  I then voided the bills that were “unpaid” or “overdue” but it won’t let me void the bills that say “paid.”  Can anyone help me ASAP????  

Is there a way to customize Dashboard so I only see the files I am working on? As of now, in NEW MATTERS, I see files where I am not the assigned attorney. I would like to only see the files I am working on.Along these lines, on MATTERS WITH NO ACTIVITY, there are files here that have no activity for 2 years.  Two questions for this dashboard: 1. How do I view only the files assigned to me?; and 2. How do I remove these files that are over 2 years old?Thank you.

Does smokeball produce a statement of account with payments and balances

I accidently finalized but didn't use the “finalized with payments” tab to auto-allocate payments; then we tried doing the bulk trust payment, but didn't like the way it showed up on the invoices (invoices were still showing “Pay this amount” so we reversed the bulk payment,  however some invoices are still showing paid, when they actually aren’t paid.  We’ve already reversed the bulk payment so we can’t “reverse a payment on the individual invoice” so that we can just void it out and start over.  

Why can’t I open an a client’s information to add an email address?  I double click on it and I have right-clicked and chose open client - but nothing happens and some little white box shows up in the upper left hand corner - 

Hello, for some reason this morning, I am unable to open any of my SmokeBall matters, and I have shut everything down and restarted my desktop and there is no change.Is anyone else having this issue and/or does anyone know how to resolve it? Thanks very much.Still a new SB user in NMMartha Carpenter

Hi,We are a medium sized suburban law firm. We have just installed smokeball. We have an old legal accounting system called B&C Legal which is not compatible with smokeball. It has been suggested we move across to xero. So far we have moved our payroll to xero, super etc. Our trust account has moved to Smokeball however, apparently, we need a separate xero package for our general account banking and our service account banking. Is this correct? Can anyone steer us in the right direction as how we instigate this.   

Hi, I am fairly new to Smokeball.  I had a client text several photos to me via communicate, as attachments.  I want to save the attacments to the matter in a photo folder, but all it lets me do is open the photo on the internet, and there is no option to save to the file to Smokeball.  Do I have to save them locally and then drop and drag into Smokeball?  I know they are stored in the file through Communicate, but i want them saved as actual photos in a folder.