Easy Collection Might Tempt You to Start a New Practice Area

by

Aaron P. Morris, J.D.

Easy Collection lives up to its name, and offers a very well implemented Windows program for managing a contingency fee collection practice. The program is designed primarily for collection attorneys, but it could also be used by anybody who needs to keep track of collection accounts or loans.

I have examined DOS based collection programs in the past, but always found them to be overly structured and difficult to learn. By contrast, I found Easy Collection to be exceptionally, well, easy. The on-line help is the best I have seen in any program of any type. Clicking on "help" yields the usual options to search for topics or key word, but also included is a selection entitled "Help for this Screen." Choosing this option produces extensive information on what to do, as well as a duplicate of the screen you were just using. You can then move through the simulated screen, and see samples of what is expected, and click on the entry fields for even more help. The publishers of Easy Collection are so (justifiably) confident that you will be able to get all the help you need from the help files, that no printed documentation is provided.

The foundation of Easy Collection is its ability to gather together all of the information involved in a collection practice. The initial screen prompts you to enter information on the debtors and creditors (your clients). Once entered, you should never need to go to your file drawer again. Every type of information you are likely to require as you go about your collection efforts is now available in Easy Collection, including information about the debtor, his employer, his bank, and any co-debtors, as well as the details of the case that lead to the judgment, such as the court, case number, and date judgment was entered.

On this same screen is the most important item of all -- the amount owed. Easy Collection automatically calculates the accrued interest on the account, the outstanding balance after each payment or cost, and how each payment is to be allocated between principal, interest and costs. If the account is being handled on a contingency fee basis, then once the contingency fee percentage is entered for a particular client, each payment is also allocated between the client's share and the attorney's contingency fee.

Easy Collection also provides a tickler system, allowing you to set a reminder for any date. Every time the program is run any ticklers scheduled for that day or any previous days are automatically displayed. Ticklers can be rescheduled on the fly or deleted when complete.

To keep your clients happy, Easy Collection produces a number of different detailed reports, including a "Monthly Client Report" which provides a detailed listing of all transactions during a specified period of time. By sending out these reports, you may keep the phone calls to a minimum.

Another very powerful feature is Easy Collection's ability to guard against bad checks. You can set Easy Collection to put a 10-day automatic hold on specified debtor payments. Payments received will not be reflected in the payment summary during that time, nor will they appear in the Monthly Client Report. Once the hold period has expired those payments will appear on all future reports.

Easy Collection can be run either on a standalone computer or on a network. It is available only in a Windows version. And while there is no 32 bit version for Windows 95 yet, it ran under that system with no difficulties.

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