Airtime
Airtime Mobile Billing
Airtime is a billing solution designed to scale from a single user (solo) up to large firms (Allen & Overy recently bought 2500 licenses). The company says that it is focused on the mobile billing market where it can add the most value. Diane Conde, Chief Operating Officer for Airtime, says the company’s target market, small to mid-sized firms is proving to be a challenge for the predicable reasons: resistance to new technology, cost, and the usual group-think that goes into firm-wide technology decisions. Competition is also a factor, and the mobile billing sector is heating up.
Feedback: If you’ve used Airtime or have an opinion, please share your experience in our comments section below or send them to yours truly, Hacker in Chief, at mhedayat@mha-law.com.
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I work for a Law Office in Silver Spring, MD and we have recently purchased several licenses for our attorneys here. It has been extremely helpful in capturing time while the attorneys are out of the office because anything they complete on their blackberries (calls/emails) is automatically prompted by airtime, so nothing is forgotten. It’s especially helpful to our attorneys while they are traveling and away from the conveniences of an office. They can send any billing entry to airtime and not have to think later about where they scribbled that note or put that piece of paper reminding them to enter such and such time. With a couple of captured entries that would have been lost otherwise, we more than make up for the cost each month.
I’m using Airtime in a pilot program for our firm, in conjunction with Rainmaker billing software. It did take a little tweaking to set up, mainly because of peculiarities in the way we had previously set up Rainmaker, but the Airtime staff was terrific and incredibly responsive in dealing with issues and we soon got it up and running and it has since exceeded expectations. It syncs and updates “favorites”, creates redundant logs of billing entries (in case something goes awry) and is generally a godsend to an attorney like myself who is Blackberry capable, but otherwise less than optimal so far as maintaining a daily routine of recording billing, I am using a Blackberry Bold (9000) and the keyboard and auto-text work so well that I can create detailed, complete draft billing entries faster on the PDA than I can on my desktop PC. You can associate email addresses or phone calls with certain clients or matters, but you can also quickly override that and just access the list of “favorite” (most recent) files. You can tweak Airtime so that it either aggressively tracks every email and/or telephone call, or operates more in the background, popping up only after an email is open for a specified length of time, or a telephone call runs so long. You can also except out certain contacts as “personal” so that all future emails and calls will not cause Airtime to register them. Airtime doesn’t have a lot of graphical flourishes or superfluous functions. Its not bloatware, so it doesn’t tax the Blackberry’s memory. I am always fiddling with my Blackberry Operating System and the fact that Airtime runs on all matter of OS versions speaks well of its stability.
I have been using Airtime on a Windows Mobile device both at a law firm and at a professional services firm. As a technology consultant working exclusively with law firms, I could not survive without a project such as Airtime. It captures the time spent on cell phone calls and email creation, as well as (with a little training) will differentiate between personal and business calls and email addresss. I particularly like the reporting function. It allows you to enter additional time on a web page and export all of your time to time accounting systems and to Excel for further analysis. It is a small program that works in big ways.
We implemented Airtime Manager at our medium-sized law firm. The instant return from billable hours captured out of the office exceeded everyone’s expectations. Attorneys are capable of recovering the cost of their device and service with a fraction of a billable hour being captured. After the pilot program, the firm made the investment to purchase Blackberry devices equipped with the Airtime solution for every attorney within the firm. The implementation process completed seamlessly with our Elite Enterprise billing software , and hours of previously lost time are now being captured and billed out within minutes! Airtime is the perfect product to extend any type of law firm into the next generation of billing.