Civil news: improving the Client and Cost Management System
Changes reflecting your feedback are being made to the Client and Cost Management System.
From 11 December 2014, advocates who do civil (non-family) work are notified when they can submit bills.
If you’re an advocate using Client and Cost Management System (CCMS), a notification will be automatically sent to you by the system as soon as the acting solicitor has submitted their bill. So, you won’t be dependent on the provider notifying you.
A quick guide explaining the process is on our CCMS website – see link below.
Bulk bill upload
We’ve now published information on our pilot to test the bulk uploading of bills from providers’ and chambers’ case management systems to CCMS – see link below.
Bulk uploading will mean that you will be able to upload billing information from your internal billing software and won’t have to input billing data line-by-line, saving time.
An improvement is also in the pipeline that will allow you to request a copy of your bill and review it before pressing the submit button. The copy of the bill will be sent through CCMS to you as a notification.
Related to this, we recommend that you speak to your software vendor to get an update on when your case management system will be compatible with CCMS. The software community has been working closely with us to ensure the future compatibility of systems.
Introducing a forward button
Many users of the system have requested a change that would allow them to skip pages.
In January, we will introduce a forward button that will allow you to more easily navigate the system. We will provide details about how this will work next month.
More improvements scheduled for 2015
In January, we will publish a new list of improvements that we plan to make in 2015 as part of our continuous improvement programme for CCMS.
We will also continue to obtain your feedback through surveys, your representative bodies and our CCMS user forum.