Office Tools Professional 2009

Office Tools Professional 2009 is the latest version of this vendor's practice management system, which is offered in industry-specific versions for CPAs, tax practices and other types of professional service providers. The program provides a wealth of features, including full contact management with Outlook and Quick-Books integration, call and email tracking, scheduling, time tracking, billing, document and project management, notes and to-do lists. Office Tools Professional now also offers client web portals that enable secure document sharing between firm staff and clients. Pricing for the base program starts at about $300 for a single user, plus $250 for additional timekeepers. It is more then worthwhile to add all available modules for an additional $100, plus the client portals for $20 per month for unlimited clients.

Ease of Use/Flexibility
The recently redesigned interface for Office Tools Pro was developed using .NET technology, enabling it to offer great customization options and features, in particular the dashboards, which give quick access to information often in one click. The home screen opens within an attractive screen that houses traditional pull-down menus across the top, as well as main feature icons across the top that make it easy to jump to contacts, notes, to-do items, the scheduling system, prospect tracking options, time and billing functions, and document management.
A client/contact selection menu with search functions is located on the left of the screen pretty much at all times when within the program, with contact detail information provided on intuitive screens that include selection lists and smart entry features, and even a built-in MapQuest function for the contact's address. For time and expense data, Office Tools Professional offers an at-a-glance spreadsheet view that can show all time logged toward a client or project, or by a specific staff member, over a selected time period. During entry of the time information, the system offers graphically appealing calendars, summary data and selection lists for client, projects, activity, expenses, mileage and other data, along with the ability to add notes or quickly generate a timesheet report, output the data to QuickBooks, or use the included Microsoft Office add-in, which allows the creation of timecards using Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. A timer tool is also available.
The system's billing management console provides similarly intuitive functionality, enabling management or AR staff a convenient overview of all timecards, with multiple search and filter options, and the ability to mark up or down, change billing codes, cite as un-billable or otherwise edit, with the resulting balances automatically updated and displayed.

Productivity Tools/Features
The program's key features of contact management and time and billing are exceptionally easy to use, with intuitive and intelligent data-entry screens. Office Tools Professional 2009 also includes several great tools for the small practice, including built-in scheduling, notes, to-do lists and records management. The call tracking system is also noteworthy, allowing users to easily track what contact/client called in, the amount of time spent on the call, the subject and whether it was billable time, and then quickly makes a timesheet for the event. Also, the program's recent additions of integration with QuickBooks, Microsoft Office and one-click printing of mailing labels using the DYMO button will be valuable to many users.
Office Tools Professional's project management feature enables firms to track projects and engagements and monitor due dates. It also provides detailed summaries and overviews of estimated versus actual costs, along with other key information. The system includes functions for paperless document management, as well as paper-based records management. The option to use secure client portals was recently added to Office Tools Professional. The DropFolder.net add-on, developed by parent company North 40 Systems, provides a portal that lets firms securely share documents with their clients, allowing the client anytime access to selected files.

Reporting
The program's reporting options are located within key areas, allowing users to quickly generate more than 80 standard reports, including client lists, AR, expenses, WIPs, budgets, schedules, and time and billing summaries by client, staff or project. All reports can be customized and saved for future use, as can the program's collection of pre-written client communication form letters. Reports can also be output to PDF, Excel and Word.

Integration
Office Tools Pro recently announce the addition of its client portal options via DropFolder.net and its Microsoft Office toolbar that allows any Word, Excel or Outlook file to be quickly stored within the program's document management system. Additionally, it enables the creation of time cards in these Microsoft programs. Other integration options allow two-way data flow with QuickBooks, contact data and calendaring integration with Outlook, and the inclusion of the MapQuest link on client contact sheets.

Support/Help/Updates
The new design of Office Tools Professional has enhanced its usability, with client, billing and time data always easily available, while assistance functions like Help bubbles, right-click menus and links to online support give a little more help to those who may need it. The vendor's online support center offers a knowledgebase, tips, user guides and phone-based, web-based and live training options. Office Tools Professional also hosts an annual conference.

Relative Value
Office Tools Professional 2009 is a great option for smaller firms looking to move up from basic time and billing into a system that offers more capable practice management functions that enable them to better manage clients, staff, projects and productivity. The program is exceptionally easy to use and sports an attractive and intuitive new interface, making it a quick learn. Pricing is affordable, particularly for practices with 10 or fewer timekeepers, although the system is capable of handling larger staff sizes, as well.

Office Tools Professional does staff scheduling, and handles client contact management, document and records management, staff scheduling and due dates, and simple time & billing. All of these are available in the $400 (sole proprietor) Professional edition. The vendor also offers other services such as remote data backup, secure file transfer and DVD training sets.

Even with all of these capabilities, Office Tools Professional is fairly simple to navigate. Choosing the desired overall function from a ribbon bar on the top of the screen brings up most of the screens pertaining to that function. This results in a rather busy screen, with different tasks for a particular function shown in separate panes. In many screens, you will need to select a particular subtask, and possibly scroll down a pane to find the data that you need or a place to enter new data. This sounds more complex than it actually is.

Installation is simple, and while the software uses MS SQL 2005 Express as the underlying database, the install routine handled the entire install with no input from us other than hitting the "Next" button. Reports are attractive and well laid out. While you can't create custom reports, you can apply filters to many of the numerous reports supplied.

One thing to keep in mind is that while Office Tools Professional provides a lot of functions, most of them aren't as full-featured as stand-alone applications. For example, the document and records management is pretty much an electronic filing cabinet, rather than a full-blown document management system such as Microsoft SharePoint.

But Office Tools Professional is neither as expensive as SharePoint, nor as complex to set up and use. For a smaller practice that can use its cornucopia of features, Office Tools Professional is a very good value.

Office Tools Pro (OTP) is in a class of its own because of the nature of the integrated suite of applications that are bundled into one complete package. In addition to basic document storage capability, OTP provides the following applications: contact manager, calendar, project management, time tracking and billing. You can use OTP document storage features on a stand-alone basis, but the real value of this application is the integrated bundle of applications. See the review of this product in the practice management review on page 14 of this issue.

User Interface
The nature of the OTP interface is a comprehensive dashboard that provides direct access to all of the integrated applications. The toolbar displayed along the top provides one-button access to the desired application, i.e., contacts, time entry, etc. A contact/client list is displayed along the left side of the screen to pick the account with which you want to work. The bottom of the screen displays your task list. The center window displays the application view: calendar, timesheet, document storage, etc. for all of the functionality that is bundled into this application, the designers have done a very effective job of keeping the system easy to navigate.

Document/File Organization
The document storage interface is pretty simple and straightforward. As mentioned above, the client/contact list is displayed along the left side of the screen. Once you select the designated client, then the document management window displays a list of all of the files associated with that client. Each file is tagged with the file name, year, project, category and staff. Therefore, these are the parameters that you can use to find a particular file by sorting and/or filtering on the appropriate column.

Integration
The core strength of OTP's integration is within the applications that are bundled with the system. Beyond that, there is an MS Office add-in that lets you save files from MS Office applications directly into OTP. You'll also find a feature to create Office documents using Office templates directly from within OTP. Outlook messages are stored in the program as *.msg files, which allow you to interact with them as dynamic e-mail messages from within OTP. You can drag and drop files from Windows Explorer into OTP, and a profile window will open to populate the index tags.
Any document can be routed to another user along with a notification using OTP's review process. On the outbound side, you can send documents as e-mail attachments or as links to a portal site from within the program. The portal service is an additional cost and starts at $20 per month for 5GB of storage and no limits on the number of users or clients. There is no direct integration with tax software.

Overall Value
For firms that position themselves to take advantage of all or at least a majority of the integrated OTP functionality, the value proposition is compelling. If your intent is to use only the document storage feature, then you're forgoing a lot of the benefits. OTP continues to grow in its capabilities as a small enterprise solution. It is currently built on a SQL platform with an MS Access front-end interface. The vendor has announced its plans for a new release during the last half of 2009 that will be built on the .NET platform. The bottom line is that at a price point of $1,500 for a five-user license and $250 for each additional user, this is as good value if you take advantage of what it has to offer.

Application categories are a simple way to categorize software. The problem comes in when a vendor's application doesn't fit comfortably into a generic description like time and billing or practice management. Office Tools Professional is one such application. For one thing, it's a modular application, and depending on which modules you purchase, the software can be a time and billing application, a practice management application, a contact management application, a document/content management application, or a combination of some or all of these.

This year's offering is pretty similar to the application that we tested last year. The user interface has been tweaked, and there are a few updates here and there, but the software still is comprised of one or more of six core modules-Contact Management, Scheduling, Time and Billing, Project/Case Management, Records Management and Document File Cabinet. These Modules can interface with Microsoft Office applications such as Word, Excel, and Outlook, but you don't have to have Office installed to make good use of the software. You get to choose any three of these modules for the Standard Suite and all six in the Professional Suite. Pricing varies depending on the number of users.

The big news with the 2009 version is that the underlying database of Office Tools Professional has moved to Microsoft SQL Server. That's good news, and bad news all rolled into one. The software comes with a copy of Microsoft SQL Server Express 2005, which is the free version, and should you have a large number of transactions, upgrading to a paid version of MS SQL Server is a simple task.

Unfortunately, getting MS SQL Server Express 2005 working proved to be problematic, and we finally resorted to Office Tool's support, which got us up and running quickly. Our support rep told us that the SQL software sometimes doesn't install correctly on a single workstation install, but that they haven't encountered this problem client/server installations.

Once the install actually completed, it was smooth running. We like the Office Tools Professional's time and billing capabilities. They aren't overly fancy, but the screens are easy to navigate through and with a small but workable selection of invoices and other reports, get the job done efficiently.

Adding the other modules really ramps up the application's capabilities, especially with SQL Server underlying the entire collection. Since the difference in cost between the three-module "Standard Suite" and the complete six-module "Professional Suite" is only $100 at the single-user level, we would recommend going for the Professional Suite from the get-go.