The Four Primary Databases

Abacus is powerful database software that can handle millions of records with ease. A database is a collection of similar records such as your address book, which has a name, address, city, and phone number for each person.

Abacus maintains the following four primary databases (and many supporting ones) to organize your office information.

Names

Think of names as the contacts in your address book. This includes every person with whom your firm has contact: Clients, prospects, vendors, defendants, judges, attorneys, expert witnesses, friends, relatives and anyone you might want on your mailing list. Abacus gives you fast and easy access to information on anyone in your Names database. Notes for names are kept in a linked database so you can keep essentially unlimited notes about your contacts.

Events

Events are any appointments, tasks, reminders or things-to-do that are scheduled for specific dates. Events can be entered into Abacus by many different methods. The Events window is the primary data window, while the Calendar gives you different views of your events.

Matters

Matters refer to any matter, case, file or project that you need to track. Once entered, matters can be attached to any number of names. Notes for matters are kept in a linked database so you can keep essentially unlimited notes about your files.

Documents

In Abacus, documents are any previously saved word processing files, scanned images, pleadings, correspondence or Internet Web pages. They can be files on disk or just printed documents stored in a box. Abacus keeps a list of these documents in a database so you can find or edit them right from the client's Name or Matter window.