Creating special matter templates is very easy to do in Manor. Templates are handy if you work a lot with matters of the same type. A classic example is a law firm working with insurance claims and would like to add their own special fields to the matter that they could order by, search by and use to insert vital data to each claim such as lapse date.

But lets start by creating a template.

Create a template

Navigate to Administration and then Templates. There you will see the list of current templates. To add a new template press the New template button.

Then you will see a modal window where you can design your template.

Here you can add as many custom fields as you like. In the example above we are creating a template for insurance claims. We used the Add new custom field button to add more fields. For each field there are a few options.

• Name is the name of the field that best describes the data you will put into it later. Try to keep the names as short and sharp as possible.
  
  
• Type is what type of field you are creating.
  • Text is just plain text so you can write what ever you like into the field later.
  • Date is a single date stamp you can select in the field later. No text can be entered into a date field.
  • Number is a numerical value you can enter in to the field later. No text can be entered into a number field.
    
    
• Required means that this field has to be filled out in order to create a new matter with this template or edit the matter details later when using this template. This is to make sure data in this field is never omitted during the creation of a matter or any work on it later. If this is to strict - you can make the field not-required by leaving out the check mark.

Once you have added the custom fields you like - just hit Save template.

Now you have a new template in your list of templates.

Now lets create a matter using this new template!

Creating a matter using a template

Here we can just add a new matter like we always do. Select the blue Create new button in the top right corner and select Matter. Then you will see the add new matter modal window on your screen.  Now you can select a template for your new matter. Lets select the one we just created: Insurance Claim

Now you can see the fields you added earlier to the template are visible here in the template area. You can now add your matter details in general and add data to the template specific fields. Once we have added all we need we hit Save matter.

Now the new matter will show up and you can see the template data in a special area on the top right of the matter. There you can always edit the fields later to keep them up to date.

New lists of matters by template

You might have noticed that there is now a new sub-menu item in the main menu called Insurance Claim. All templates with matters using them will show up as a sub-menu item. This allows you to navigate to a list of matters in a specific template very fast and once there you can order by template fields. Lets say we wanted a list of all Insurance Claim matters and we want it ordered by lapse date.

Can I switch templates on a matter?

If you already created a matter and selected a template you can not change it to a new or another template. As a work around you could create a new matter in the desired template and copy our data into that matter by hand.

Can I have multiple templates on a single matter?

No that is not possible. Only one template is allowed per matter.