What Orin is

Orin is your practice management system. It holds your clients, the work you have agreed to do for them, the time you spend on it, and the money you bill for it. This page explains how those pieces fit together, so the rest of the manual makes sense.

The shape of the firm's work

Everything in Orin hangs off four things, in this order:

1. A client

   A business or a person your firm acts for. Clients carry a jurisdiction, a currency and a manager. See Clients.

2. An engagement

   What you have agreed to do for that client, over a period. An engagement is where the scope, the fee and the letter live.

3. Tasks

   The individual pieces of work an engagement breaks down into, each with an owner and a due date. Tasks are what you actually see on your board every morning.

4. Time and fees

   Hours logged against tasks become work in progress, and work in progress becomes an invoice.

If you only remember one thing: a task always belongs to an engagement, and an engagement always belongs to a client. Almost every screen in Orin is a different view of that chain.

Where you will spend your time

The sidebar is ordered to match the firm's day rather than the order things were built: what is on you now, then who you serve, then money, then records, then reports over all of it.

Common questions

Do I need to set anything up before I start? No. Your firm's administrator has already done the setup. If a screen is empty, it usually means there is genuinely nothing there yet rather than that something is missing.

Why can I not see a screen a colleague can? Access in Orin is granted per area. If a menu item is missing for you, somebody at your firm has not granted you that area. Ask an administrator rather than looking for a setting.