I’ve been looking at cloud-based practice management systems for a while, and I’m pretty hard to impress.  I saw a demo of Rocket Matter years ago when they first exhibited at the ABA TechShow, and while they had the right idea, they seemed to be consistently overshadowed by Clio’s marketing might.  But times change, and I recently had the opportunity to see another demo of Rocket Matter. If you haven’t seen Rocket Matter in a while, or don’t know about the product, it is time to take another look because Rocket Matter has really upped their game.

For the last five years, Rocket Matter (www.rocketmatter.com) and Clio (www.goclio.com) have been the two big players on the cloud-based practice management market but recently, other options have entered the market. Unfortunately, many of the new systems (and some of the older cloud-based solutions) still have one big problem – they cannot satisfy all the time and billing needs of their law firm clients.  One area where all of these products have struggled has been seamless integration with a critical piece of software used by many small and medium-sized firms – QuickBooks.  While there have been syncs to QuickBooks and links to QuickBooks, true integration between a cloud system and this essential application did not exist:  Until now.

At the beginning of this year, Rocket Matter launched one-button integration with QuickBooks, and just let me say, “Wow.”  This new version of Rocket Matter solves many of the issues that cloud-based practice management systems have struggled with in terms of time and billing. With a required consultation, Rocket Matter will make sure that the Rocket Matter-QuickBooks connection is setup correctly and works as expected the first time.  From there, the time and bills that are easily entered into Rocket Matter can be accounted for correctly in QuickBooks. Accountants of law firms rejoice!  The accountants and bookkeepers can continue to enter their debits, credits and write checks in the correct client and matter in QuickBooks.  Everyone is happy. Problem solved.

If it has been a while since you have seen Rocket Matter, it is worth a new look.  The clean, intuitive interface coupled with the QuickBooks integration is impressive and the demo is worth your time.  In the end, this well-planned move of QuickBooks integration could blast Rocket Matter to the top.