The heart of CostWare’s integrated expense management solution is the Expense and Cost Recovery System (ECRS), a powerful and flexible software application designed to improve the cash flow of your law, accounting or consulting firm by automating the movement of data between your billing system and CostWare’s cost collection devices.  Using an adaptive integration hub, ECRS may also be used to convert electronic bills into valid cost transactions that can be imported into the billing system.  As the central hub for the collection, validation and correction of all electronic cost transactions, ECRS greatly reduces the amount of manual and administrative effort required to exchange data, capture cost transactions, import electronic bills and process the transactions into the billing system.

In addition, ECRS includes a business rule engine to apply firm-specific business rules so that transactions are processed to reflect the firm’s policies and procedures.

ECRS receives and retains all transactions from the source system or electronic bills. This includes valid transactions where all data is correct and invalid transactions in which one or more data elements do not meet the validation criteria established by the firm.  Only transactions considered valid may be processed into the firm's billing system.

The Power Charge Review program permits users to display the transactions they are responsible for and to easily correct invalid transactions (e.g. invalid matter code) so they can be processed into the billing system.  The Power Charge Review program gives users one, easy-to-use application to correct all invalid transactions, no matter what the source (FedEx, Westlaw, calling card, etc.).

Security features are available to control access by the user to only those transactions they are directly responsible for, or to those transactions incurred by other users but for which they are responsible for correcting (e.g. a secretary responsible for several attorneys).

ECRS provides the bridge between major time and billing systems and CostWare’s cost collection devices.  ECRS may also serve as the central hub for the validation, correction and importing of transactions from a number of third parties, including FedEx, Westlaw, Lexis and many others.