You must have the current version of your practice management system installed. Older version of software may need to be upgraded prior to the transition. The LEAP Transitions team can confirm whether your software version is catered for.

Office Balances: The general rule of thumb is Unpaid bills / aged debtors + unbilled disbursements / costs = Office. The difference in features and functions may cause variances in these balances.

1. Variances in Unpaid bills / aged debtors are usually caused by neglecting to allocate monies received to the unpaid bills, causing unallocated office credits. 
2. Disbursements can be particularly tricky to transfer exactly. Software systems vary vastly, and it very much depends on how disbursements are recorded, e.g. one may reflect disbursement statuses such as unpaid unbilled or paid unbilled whereas another may not reflect these at all. In cases like these we may need to make certain deductions based on previous experience, e.g. if there is a bill present, it’s likely to be a billed disbursement, but if no bill is present, it is likely an unbilled disbursement.
3. Unallocated or incorrectly allocated receipts. Several software systems enable you to allocate funds received in office against specific bills/invoices or even disbursements. If the allocation isn’t done accurately, or when the system automatically assigns funds on an ‘oldest entry first’ basis, we may not transfer the balances you expect. LEAP will always migrate the balances as per the database. It is therefore recommended that you analyse your outstanding debtors before the data transition.

GST on Invoices / Fees: LEAP automatically calculates the amount of GST on time, fees and disbursements when it is recorded or invoiced, ensuring that you always charge your clients the correct amounts of GST. When we transition your data, we therefore, import the GST on outstanding invoices as a % of the time, fees or disbursements at the current GST rate. Some systems allow for GST Only invoices, or for GST to be receipted first on part paid invoices. We recommend that you clear any of these amounts before the transition. 

Draft Invoices/Bills: These are often memos or notational. The time, fee and disbursements entries assigned to draft bills are seldomly flagged correctly in databases e.g. the time and fees may be flagged as billed, but the disbursements as unbilled. Considering this, we do not import any draft invoices/bills as part of the transition and recommend that you clear, delete or bill all draft invoices/bills prior to the transition. 

Billed time not allocated to invoices: When bills are done either outside of the software or posted separately not linking the work in progress to the bill, there is no way for us to migrate only the “active” time accurately. Some data tidy up once LEAP is installed may be required in this instance.

Variances between reports caused by balances on closed matters: This is particularly visible in Debtors and WIP. Some reports will only reflect balances on live matters where other reports reflect all balances regardless of the matter status. A good exercise would be to clear the discrepancies before the data transition. If you have selected a Transaction Transition, we will import all balances, regardless of whether a file is archived or closed.

Bank reconciliations that are not up to date / not recording the last point of entry: You must have your bank reconciliation up to date. More importantly, you must have a clear record of the last point up to where you recorded entries from your bank statement. Not recording this point will make it very difficult to decipher which entries are still outstanding when you start using LEAP. 

Bespoke or custom data: Client details such as Title, Name, and Surname are included in the transition; however, you may have additional fields, e.g. visa reference number immigration files which is not a standard field. This will not form part of the data transition; however, you will be able to add it in LEAP.

Documents/correspondence (including forms, PDF’s, Word files, emails, pictures, and sound recordings) on Matters: This is not automatically included as part of the data transition for various reasons:

1. Server applications: Data, i.e. information such as client details, matter details, and financial transaction details are held in a database. Documents/correspondence are usually held outside of the database and only the document path, i.e. where it is held on your server, is available in the database. 
2. Cloud applications: Documents/correspondence is held by your cloud provider and would, therefore, need to be a) downloaded by yourself or b) extracted by your provider. 

Both options are resource-heavy and can be costly.