PRACTICE CS

Integrating client notes from CS Professional Suite Accounting Applications

If your firm is licensed for the Practice CS Client Management module, you can view client notes from CS Professional Suite Accounting Applications (CSA) in Practice CS. CSA client notes are displayed as interaction notes in Practice CS in the following locations:

• The Manage Clients screen (Clients and Interactions tabs)
• The Staff dashboard (Interactions portlet for the staff member who entered the client note)
• The Client dashboard (Interactions portlet for that client)

To view CSA client notes in Practice CS, you must format the notes appropriately in CSA, and perform some setup steps in Practice CS.

Setup in Practice CS

Mark the Integrate this Firm with other solutions checkbox on the Preferences tab of the Firm setup screen.

Setup in CSA

Before CSA client notes can be integrated with Practice CS, you must enter the path for Practice CS data in CSA.

1. In CSA, choose Setup > User Preferences and click the File Locations tab.
2. Click the More button next to the Practice CS data path field and browse to the data folder for Practice CS. Typically this folder is located in X:\WinCSI\Practice CS Data, with X representing the drive where your Practice CS data resides.

Entering a client note in CSA

For a CSA client note to display in Practice CS, the client ID and EIN must be identical in the two applications.

To enter a client note in CSA, follow these steps.

1. With the client open, choose Edit > Client Note.
2. In the Client Note dialog, format the note according to the following criteria:
   • The first line of the client note must begin with a date in mm/dd/yyyy format. The month and day can be one digit or two; the year can be two digits or four. Examples of proper format include 9/1/07, 09/01/07, 9/1/2007, and 09/01/2007.

     Note: The date will not appear in the client note when viewed in Practice CS.

   • There must be either a space or a tab between the end of the date and the beginning of the note text.

   Note: Many separate notes can be entered in the Client Note dialog in CSA. Some of these notes you may wish to integrate with Practice CS, and others you may wish to retain only within CSA. Whether a note is transmitted to Practice CS or not depends on how it is formatted in CSA. For more information on proper formatting of client notes, see Formatting client notes below.

3. Click OK to save the client note in CSA.

Formatting client notes

The formatting of client notes determines whether they are transmitted to Practice CS or retained only in CSA. By understanding a few formatting rules, you can control which text in the Client Notes dialog in CSA carries over to Practice CS.

The following guidelines will help you control client note integration

• Any time you begin a new line with a properly formatted date followed by a space or tab and then text, that text will appear in Practice CS as a CSA client note for the selected client. All text following the date is included, unless you conclude the note using one of the methods described below under the heading Concluding a client note.
• Any text at the top of the Client Notes dialog that is not preceded by a properly formatted date will be retained only in CSA and is not transmitted to Practice CS. For example, you could decide to keep all CSA-only text at the top of the text field, and put client notes that you want to appear in Practice CS below that text.
• Any text that is separated by two blank lines from the previous note, but that does not begin with a properly formatted date, is retained only in CSA and is not transmitted to Practice CS. In other words, integrated notes and non-integrated notes can follow each other in the Client Notes dialog, as long as these formatting rules are observed.
• If you add text to an existing integrated note, a new note will be sent to Practice CS including all of the text for that integrated note. The previous integrated note is retained in Practice CS, so you may want to delete it manually from Practice CS if it is no longer applicable.

Concluding a client note

There are two ways to conclude a client note.

• Add two blank lines at the end of the text.
• Begin another client note by adding a new line beginning with a date in the format described above.

Example

In this screenshot, note the following.

1. Two blank lines conclude the note.
2. No preceding date is used for notes that are for CSA use only.
3. The correctly formatted date ends the previous note and begins a new integrated note.
4. A single blank line between rows of text means that the text after the blank line will be included in the same note as the text above it.

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