Stanley’s idea was that we run a survey of our members as the end user of that software to find an honest opinion of what the software was like to use on a daily basis – an unbiased opinion of the most important part of any system – the user. The whole Council thought it was a good idea and had not heard of anything similar being run, so questions were agreed and our first survey was on our website in February 2006. Each year the Council discusses whether the survey should be run and have always thought it was a useful tool for our members as the results are published on the website and in our bi-monthly magazine giving a “league table” of software providers that can be used in conjunction with software guides and demonstrations when shortlisting possible candidates for purchase.

The Award for the first year was awarded to Alphalaw, in 2007 TFB plc (Technology for Business), 2008 saw Legato top the league and last year Solicitors Own Software were the Award recipients. The online survey is accessed through our website, and can be accessed by users who are not members of the ILCA too, submissions have grown each year so we have decided to run the survey again this year.

The sections of the survey include daily operation, monthly and periodical processes ie month end & year end, training, reporting, helplines, online help and updates.

There are no lists or initial entries of firms in the survey – a software provider is entered in the survey by a user logging on and completing the survey.

There must be a minimum of three complete entries for a software provider before they are included in the results.

Once the minimum entry level has been attained, as long as a section is completed in full, the scoring for that section is included in the final overall mark.

Checks are done and filters are in place to try and ensure that each person can only complete the survey once – duplicate entries are not included – and to highlight any surveys completed by the software providers themselves, although many software providers have members of the ILCA and these are checked against our membership database.

An average mark is calculated for every complete section and then an overall average mark is calculated to give us our winner.

The survey was designed to be as fair as possible with every software provider, no matter how big or small, having an equal chance to win based on their performance in the opinion of the end user and whether that end user is a part time cashier working one day a week for a sole practitioner or a high flying  financial director in a big city firm with a team of cashiers and an IT department – everybody’s vote is equal and every software manufacturer starts from the same place – no vote no entry!

Click here to take survey and make your opinion count!

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