New in 6.1.6

1. Costs Budgets
a) New Simplified Costs Budget Templates (Precedents Z, RZ & TZ).
b) Costs Budget window has been reorganised into pages to allow the addition of new fields for the value of claim, counterclaim and additional claim, plus Hourly rate assumptions.
c) New properties for contingent phases to denote Contingent (default) or Interim Application.
d) New fields for opponent budgets to show incurred, anticipated and offered figures for Counsel. Note: These new columns will appear to the right of all standard columns when first opened. To get them in their proper places you can either right click and reset the grid or Alt+drag them to a sensible location.
e) New options to specify whether the main budget or which opponent budgets are included in any Budget Discussion Report. Note: This applies only when creating a standalone discussion report – the option to include the discussion report in the Precedent H will still include the own client budget details automatically.
f) Warnings are shown when exporting a Precedent RZ spreadsheet where there are phases being combined as interim applications or contingencies where the offers on some are made in respect of the total only and others in respect of individual elements. In such cases the spreadsheet cannot show both and the total offers will not be included.
g) New option in Costs Budget Settings window, on new Comparison page, to show Counsel fees and other disbursements separately in the Costs Budget Comparison.
h) Option to create an opponent budget from an Excel file removed.

2. Import Work
a) New fields added for imported attendances: Enhancement & LA Activity.
b) New fields added for imported disbursements: Disb Group, Disb Type, Expert Type.
c) The original description is now stored separately when imported and can be referred to subsequently. To do this, in the Edit Attendance and Edit Disbursement windows (and their pending equivalents) there is a button to the top right of the description box. If the description is changed from the original description as imported, the button will become enabled and when clicked, the description box will show this “Original Import Description” instead. This is read only but the text can be copied if desired.
d) New facility to import procedural steps. This is accessed via the import wizard and has a separate option when selecting the type of data to import. It will import from a CSV or Excel file, but for the former, the delimiter must be a comma and for the latter the data must be in the first worksheet. For either type, the date must be in the first column and the description in the second. A header is allowed provided the content of the first cell is “Date”. Lines with neither date nor description are omitted. There is an option to assign procedural steps to a part, which uses the part start and end dates in the same was as when importing attendances or disbursements.

3. Electronic Bills
a) New Option on Electronic Bill Settings window to use the Simplified budget.

4. Reports
a) New field in the Disbursement Report/Schedule to show the combined Total (Net + VAT). There are two versions of the field, one that will show a formula in the XLSX file where possible, but will also include a static figure where this is not possible (e.g. where both the Nat and VAT are not showing or in the RTF version). The formula allows the total column to update when the Net or VAT figures are altered.

5. Legal Aid Claims
a) New option on the Export Wizard to include the part narrative for CCMS claims (in the supporting documentation).

6. Documentation
a) User Guide and Help File updated.

7. Misc.
a) EULA moved from installer to program.

Bug Fixes

1. Legal Aid Claims
a) Exporting a CCMS file where a part that is set to “Not Exported” doesn’t have a valid aspect, still invokes the error about an aspect not being set.
b) Exporting a CLAIM1 where the first part is set to “not exported” but has a different aspect from the second part, results in no work from the second part being included.

2. Pending Work
a) The title of the Notes window when showing notes for items in pending work referred to the current part which doesn’t apply to pending items.

3. Presets
a) Tab order on the Counsel page of the Presets window was incorrect.

4. Exported Documents
a) Precision errors in various locations with very large amounts resulted in the pence values being truncated.

5. Abbreviations & Legal Aid Codes
a) When editing an Auto Code entry, the text for the item was labelled “code” rather than LA Activity as per the main grid.

6. N260
a) RTF reserved characters not being escaped for the schedule of documents.

7. Electronic Bills
a) Certificates on the COP-E had any text hidden that was longer than could be displayed on a single line.

8. Reports
a) RTF Disbursement Schedule missing Expert Fee Amount.

9. Categories
a) Mismatched Categories error when exporting a costs budget after merging two categories where the rates for the category remaining are zero and get replaced during the merge with the rates from one of the parts being merged. This error remained only until the file is reloaded.
b) After merging categories, if any of the merged categories were set to be the default category for a column bill or case plan, that reference was not updated to that of the remaining category.

10. Abbreviations
a) Creating a new Auto Code entry did not save the selected Legal Aid Activity.

11. Certificates
a) Default text for VAT Recovery certificate had a superfluous space included.

12. Fixed Recoverable Costs
a) VAT on Disbursements included twice in the subtotals in the RTF version of the Precedent U

13. Control Centre
a) VAT total included the Net Fixed Costs figure rather than the VAT.

14. Export & Preview
a) When previewing a spreadsheet when more than one is selected, the program now remembers the last spreadsheet selected for the duration of the current session.

15. Costs Budgets
a) Precedent T XLSX did not use a formula to link the Expert Fees disbursement amount in the Detail sheet to the total of the Expert Fee Summary. This is now included but any Counsel Fees or Expert disbursements are added to the formula as a fixed figure.

If you are using Network Product Keys, you will need to install this software on a non-virtual machine on the network.

CostsMaster Licence Server 1.5.1

The full user guide for CostsMaster version 6. This document covers both Draftsman and Quota.

CostsMaster v6 User Guide

The user guide for all forms of licensing.

CostsMaster Licensing User Guide

This updates Dinkey Server and Dinkey Change to the latest versions. These are compatible with all existing versions of CostsMaster and with all network dongles.

The Licensing User guide is also updated to the latest version.

CostsMaster Dongle Server 7.3.0