Steve Stockstill on Billing Matters

I’m happy to present another guest blog by Steve Stockstill. Steve was a core developer of Time Matters programs for 8 years, and had risen to the position of Director of Software Engineering for the Time Matters business unit before he left in August 2007. Steve’ s company, Data Equity, has offered enhancement products for Time Matters and Billing Matters for several years.

Dead Cat Bounce

I waited a few weeks to see how the news of the Billing Matters end of life cancellation would resonate. There was a brief flurry of positive conversation but a significant lack of details and no roadmap has deflated the hopes. Most of the Time Matters consultant community is cautiously optimistic and waiting to see how well Lexis can execute a third attempt at visioneering their acquisitions from the mid 2000’s. The corporate mantra has been that Billing Matters will not be sunset because …. “we are listening to our customers and consultants”. The reason is likely due to their inability to execute the strategies needed to end the life of Billing Matters.

Follow the Money

In the last few years the competition has caught and in a few cases surpassed Time Matters. In turn, Time Matters customers have been moving to other practice management products. In addition to losing customers, it would not be surprising that a loss of renewals for Billing Matters has further contributed to the revenue decline. In other words customers may continue to renew Time Matters but look elsewhere for a billing solution.

It’s no secret that when a company acquires multiple businesses in the same market space, the goal is to consolidate the resources and expand the individual markets into a greater whole. Case in point: Time/Billing Matters and PCLaw. For years Lexis appeared to ignore the community while at the same time failed to execute the product visions for both PCLaw and Time/Billing Matters.
In my estimation, the decision to sunset Billing Matters was dependent on executing a likely initial acquisition strategy: create a formidable combined product using the best resources from the Time Matters and PCLaw products and engineering teams. The resulting product could offer best of breed, perfectly integrated Practice Management, Advanced Billing and Accounting.

To Catch a Falling Knife

It’s clear the Lexis Nexis talking points on the resurrection are that they have “listened to the community” and decided not to sunset Billing Matters. Why weren’t they listening in the first place? Do they suddenly understand the significance of integrated billing?

There still remains the fact that Billing Matters has essentially been untouched for several years. Data Equity has provided advanced engineering services to the Billing Matters community for many years, having done so we have learned a great deal about many key data quality metrics. In fact we have reported this information to the Time Matters engineering team. Unfortunately they weren’t listening to us either. In general they have been unwilling to acknowledge potential defects in an open way.

Comments

[Bob Johnson]

TM lost me a long time ago and I think they priced themselves out of the market. I am a one man operation and for me to upgrade from TM5, the price was outrageous. TM5 works fine for me but if the pricing was more reasonable I would upgrade. TM is now $950 for a new license and to me, there are other programs out there that will work just as well for a fraction of the cost. For bigger companies, they can absorb the cost of such software.

The SQL database would be nice but for $950 Top Speed works very well thank you.

[David]

The word scathing comes to mind after reading this lol. However this is all very valid and it is a rather frustrating situation for customers and consultants alike. "they have been unwilling to acknowledge potential defects in an open way" that pretty much sums it up. From a programmers perspective there are so many minor modification that could be made particularly at the database level to get these application to a scalable functional level and every time a release comes out I think they will be accounted for and the database schema is exactly the same.