Everyday User Guide

1 · Start here

What this system is for, and the one idea everything else hangs on.

The problem it solves

Some work is a single task: you do it, it's done. Other work is a long-running piece of business with many moving parts — it lasts weeks or years, several people touch it, documents pile up, deadlines matter, and someone will eventually ask you to prove what happened and when.

Handled the ordinary way, that work scatters. The emails are in one person's inbox. The letters are in a folder on a shared drive, or in a filing cabinet. The deadlines are in someone's head, or a spreadsheet, or a calendar reminder that left with them. Nobody can answer "where are we on this?" without ringing three people.

Case management is the discipline of keeping all of that in one place, and a case management system is the software that does it. CaseOnGo is one.

The one big idea: the case

Everything in CaseOnGo hangs off a single object called a case. A case is one piece of business, held as one record. Not a folder of files — a living record that holds:

• the facts — names, dates, amounts, reference numbers, statuses;
• the documents — everything you sent, everything you received;
• the people — who is involved, and in what role;
• the work outstanding — what must happen next, who owns it, when it's due;
• the history — a permanent, unalterable list of everything that has ever happened on it, with who did it and when.

Every single thing you do in CaseOnGo happens on a case. You don't send an email and then file it; you send it from the case and it is already filed. You don't finish a job and then note it down; finishing it is the note. That's the whole trick, and it's why the history can be trusted: there is no second step to forget.

Why not just use folders and a spreadsheet?

Because a folder doesn't know anything. It can't tell you that the limitation date is in eleven days, address a letter to the right insurer, notice that a medical report has come back, or prove who changed the settlement figure. A case can, because its contents are structured: the date of the accident isn't a sentence buried in a letter, it's a dated field that the system can read, check, compare and put into documents for you.

That structure is the price of admission. You'll type things into labelled boxes rather than free text, and pick people from a list rather than typing their names. In exchange, the system does a great deal of work for you — see section 23.

The second idea: the case type

Your organisation doesn't do one kind of work; it does several. A road traffic claim needs different information from a house purchase. So every case belongs to a case type — a template for a kind of work, built by whoever configures your system.

The case type decides what a case of that kind looks like: which information is collected, how it's laid out, which letters and emails exist, what happens automatically. You never have to build this. You open a case of the right type and the shape is already there.

Two ways to read this guide

2 · The words you'll meet

Fourteen terms. Learn these and the rest of the guide reads easily.

Every trade has its jargon and this one is worse than most, because it inherited words from paper filing, from law firms and from software, and they don't always agree. Here is the whole vocabulary in one place, in the order the ideas build. Each one is explained properly later — the section number tells you where.

Words other people use for the same things

If you've worked in this field before, or you're reading an old procedure document, you'll hit these. They mean what's in the right-hand column.

3 · One case, start to finish

Twenty minutes that will save you a fortnight. Read it once, even if you skip the rest.

Here is Ada Okonkwo's claim, from the day it arrives to the day it closes. Nothing below is a tutorial you have to follow — it's the shape of the thing, so that when you meet each part for real you already know what it's for. Every step links to the section that explains it properly.

Day 1 — the case opens

Ada rings in. You press + in the toolbar, pick Personal Injury, and that's it: the case exists, numbered 000123 from the organisation's one running sequence. You didn't choose a reference, a title or a folder. §6

Because it's a Personal Injury case it already has the right shape — the screens for this kind of work, the letters this kind of work sends, the checks this kind of work needs. Somebody built that once; you inherit it. §1

Day 1 — who's involved

On the Client details screen there's a Client block. Ada is new, so you press Add and enter her once — name, address, date of birth. She is now in the organisation's shared directory and this case points at her.

The other driver's insurer, Northgate, is already in the directory because three hundred other cases use them. You press Select on the Defendant's insurer block and pick them. You do not retype their address, and when they move office next year somebody will fix it once and every case will be right. §10

You press Save. Until you did, none of that was on the case. §8

Day 1 — the facts

You work through the screens: the date of the accident, where it happened, what was injured. As you leave the accident-date box, the limitation date three years later appears on its own. Nobody calculated that; the case type did. §23

The case title, which you never typed, now reads Injury claim - Okonkwo, because the case type builds titles from the client's surname and rebuilds them each time you save. §6

Day 2 — the first letter

You press Letter, pick Ada as the correspondent, and choose the Client care letter template. It's already addressed to her and already carries her reference — because the case knows who she is, which is the whole reason correspondents exist.

On the compose screen you tick Send via Outlook (letters don't go by email unless you say so), check the wording, and press Send. The history row says Sending…, then Sent. §12

The template had a follow-up attached, so a task has appeared, dated fourteen days out, assigned to whoever is the case worker. You didn't create it and you won't forget it. §15

Week 3 — the reply

Northgate reply by email. Because your original went out from the case, their reply carries the marker that brings it home: it appears in Triage Inbox under High-confidence, pointing at case 000123.

You click the suggested case, and the incoming-post dialog opens on the case with the email attached. You save it. Only now is it filed — clicking the suggestion alone wouldn't have done it. §16

Month 2 — the expert

You instruct a medical expert. Their report comes back as a Word document, which you drag straight onto the case — it records itself as incoming post and asks who it came from. You can read it in the browser without downloading it. §14

Ada's losses go into the Losses table on the Special damages screen — one row per item, with the receipt attached to the row that needs it. A total further down the screen adds them up by itself. §9

Month 6 — the picture from above

Your supervisor doesn't open cases one at a time. They run the Claims with no medical report after 60 days query, which asks for a date and returns forty-one cases, Ada's included until the report landed. They tick twelve of them and run a chase routine over the lot. §19

At month end the same information becomes an Report: grouped by fee earner, subtotalled, exported as a PDF for the partners' meeting. §20

Month 9 — someone asks "where are we?"

Ada rings while you're on leave. A colleague opens 000123 and the History tab answers in five seconds: every letter, every email, every call, who did it and when. Nobody wrote that list — it wrote itself as the work happened. That is the single biggest thing this system does. §17

Month 14 — the case closes

The claim settles. You mark the case dead, set the file close date, and the case turns read-only in place, keeping everything. If your organisation had attached a final check — money returned, documents filed — the close would have been refused until it passed. §26

The case is still there, still searchable, still complete. Three years later, if anyone asks what happened, it answers.

4 · Signing in

One address for your organisation, and one account that is yours.

Your workspace address

Each organisation using CaseOnGo gets its own private workspace at its own web address, built from a short code for the organisation:

https://<your-organisation>.caseongo.com

Everything in it — cases, documents, people, settings — belongs to that organisation alone and is invisible to every other. Bookmark that address; it is your front door, and because the code is in the address the sign-in page already knows which organisation you belong to and greets you by its name.

Signing in

Organisations are set up one of two ways, and you'll see whichever applies:

• Sign in with Microsoft — one button. You use your normal Microsoft work account, with the same password and the same multi-factor rules as the rest of your Microsoft sign-ins. There is no separate CaseOnGo password to remember or change, and password resets go through your IT department as usual.
• Email and password — a CaseOnGo account of its own, set up from an invitation.

The first time: your invitation

Four messages worth recognising

How long you stay signed in

Your session renews quietly while you work, so ordinary use never interrupts you. You are signed out only after four full days with no activity at all — no clicks, keys, scrolling or touches in any open CaseOnGo tab. It's a fixed period, the same for every organisation; there is no adjustable idle timeout.

Activity in any one tab counts for all of them, so a forgotten background tab will never sign out the tab you're typing in, and the count survives closing and reopening your browser.

Outside collaborators sign in somewhere else

If your organisation shares cases with people outside it, those people do not use your address. They sign in at a separate portal — <your-organisation>-collaborator.caseongo.com — with their own credentials, and they see only what was deliberately shared with them. See section 22.

5 · Home — your first screen

What needs you today, and the furniture around it.

Getting around

Navigation lives in a sidebar down the left-hand side. The everyday pages sit at the front:

Everything an administrator configures — correspondents, case types, screens, templates, users, settings — lives further along, in the lower groups of the sidebar, under headings like Contacts, Configuration and Administration.

The name and logo at the top are your organisation's, not the product's, so a workspace looks like itself. The Triage Inbox entry carries a live count of mail waiting for a decision.

The toolbar: three ways to reach a case

Beside the navigation sits a small toolbar that follows you everywhere:

• a box marked CASE REF… — type a reference, press Enter, the case opens;
• a magnifier — search for a case when you don't know the reference (§18);
• a + — start a new case;
• and, while you're timing something, a live timer pill.

The dashboard itself

Home opens with a greeting and then, down the page:

• Quick-create tiles — one tile per case type your organisation has chosen. See the warning below before you click one.
• Your tasks — open, overdue, due today, due this week, each a link into the full list. The strip is hidden entirely when you have nothing outstanding.
• Pinned tiles — any saved query or report you've pinned, showing a live count and its first few rows. These are yours alone; see below.
• Cases at a glance — totals for the organisation (total, open, closed, archived, and what you opened today), broken down by case type.
• Recent cases — up to eight cases you personally opened in the last week, to pick up where you stopped. Back from a fortnight's leave and it's empty; that's the week, not a fault.
• Favourites — cases you've marked, from the star on the case itself. There's no menu entry for them; this card is where they live.
• This week — cases you opened in the last seven days, grouped by day. The groups start closed; click a day to open it.

Open cases follow you

Cases you open stay listed as tabs until you close them, and the list survives a reload and a restart. Clicking Cases in the navigation takes you back to the case you were last on, if it is still open. Closing a tab isn't the same as closing the case — it just clears it off your strip. Close all appears once you have two or more.

If a tab has unsaved work, closing it asks first and tells you how many changes you'd lose. Choosing to discard really does discard them, including anything staged in a table.

Your account menu

Open your name at the bottom of the sidebar for your name and email, plus:

• My profile — four tabs: Identity & access (read-only: your role, security level and the permissions you actually hold — useful when you're wondering why you can't do something), Email & mailboxes, Signatures and Preferences. In practice the things you can change are all email-related; your name, role and permissions belong to an administrator, and your password belongs to Microsoft.
• Guided view, if your organisation has it — a calmer, step-by-step version of the same system (§24).
• Sign out.

6 · Finding & opening a case

References are the fast route; search covers the rest; queries go deepest.

Case references

Every case has a reference: a short unique code that identifies it forever. It never changes and no two cases share one.

• New cases take the next number in one sequence shared by the whole organisation — 000001, 000002, … — whatever their case type. Six digits minimum unless your administrator chooses another width, growing naturally past a million.
• You can type your own reference when you create a case. It's stored in capitals, and can be up to 60 characters.
• Cases in a family hang off their root: 000123.001, 000123.002, and so on.

Searching when you don't have the reference

Click the magnifier beside the reference box and type at least two characters. See section 18 for what is and isn't searched — it's worth knowing, because the answer is narrower than the box suggests.

Starting a new case

There is almost nothing to fill in. A case needs a case type, and that is the only thing you're ever asked for: the reference comes from the sequence and the title comes from the case type.

If the reference you typed is already taken, the dialog says so and offers Use the next number — one click, no retyping.

Case titles write themselves

You never type a case title. Each case type carries a title pattern — plain words plus fields from the case, such as Injury claim - {client_surname} — and the title is built from it when the case is created and rebuilt every time the case is saved. So the title keeps up with the case instead of freezing at whatever was known on day one.

A brand-new case has no data yet, so it starts as just Injury claim — the trailing dash is tidied away — and becomes Injury claim - Okonkwo as soon as you fill in the surname and save. If a pattern produces nothing at all, the title falls back to the case type's name, so a case is never nameless.

When you're not allowed to open something

Your organisation can decide, per case type, who may create cases of that type and who may open them. If you meet one you may not open, the case is replaced by a plain panel: "You cannot open {Type} cases", naming the type, with a way back.

7 · Inside a case

Everything about one piece of work, on one screen.

The case bar

Across the top of an open case sits one strip that tells you, at a glance, what you're looking at: the case type's icon, the reference, the title, and — when they apply — a padlock if the case is password protected, a status chip, a Since date if the case has been closed, and a chip counting the other cases in its family. Underneath: the case type, and when the case was last modified and by whom.

The buttons

The same strip carries everything you can do to the case:

The six views

A row of icons switches what fills the main area:

The Screens list

Beside the views sits the list of the case's screens — the pages of fields where the actual information lives (§8). It does more than list them:

• Search screens by name.
• Search by field — flip the toggle and type a field's name instead. Every screen holding a matching field surfaces with the match named on the row, so you never have to hunt screen by screen for "date of birth".
• Nested screens. A screen can have screens grouped beneath it. The chevron opens the group; the row itself opens the parent, which is a real screen you fill in like any other. Searching flattens the tree so every match shows.
• An "N unsaved" chip counts changes waiting to be saved anywhere in the case — including inside a collapsed group, so nothing pending can hide.

Quick View

A compact panel of the handful of fields that matter most on this kind of case, visible from every view so you don't lose the key facts while reading the history. It's configured per case type — there's nothing for you to set up.

Two people, one case

Only one person at a time can change a case. If a colleague is in it first you get a banner naming them, and you can read everything but change nothing until they leave. Try again re-checks.

Switching between open cases

Switching back to a case you've already opened this session is instant, because it's redrawn from what your browser still holds rather than re-fetched. That's normally exactly what you want.

One consequence worth knowing: a case type that greets you with a question when you open a case only does so on a real open. Clicking back to its tab won't re-ask. Close the tab and open the case again if you need it to run.

Dropping a file on a case

Drag a file from your computer anywhere onto an open case and a drop area appears. The file is attached and recorded as incoming post, and you're asked who it came from. See section 14.

8 · Screens & fields

Where the case's information actually lives — and the one rule about saving.

What you're looking at

A screen is a page of the case's information, laid out on purpose by whoever built the case type. A case type usually has several — Client details, The accident, Losses, Court — and you pick one from the Screens list to bring it up.

Each box on a screen is a field: one labelled piece of information. A field has a type, and the type is why a date gets a date picker, a money amount accepts decimals, and a status offers a fixed list rather than free text. Screens can also carry things that aren't fields at all — a correspondent block, a table, an image, a heading, a button that runs a routine.

The kinds of field you'll meet

Dates are UK format everywhere — dd/MM/yyyy — on screens, in tables, in query results and in generated documents.

Why some boxes won't let you type

There are five different reasons, and they look similar:

Saving — the one rule

Nothing you type is stored until you press Save.

Typing changes only a working copy held in your browser. Each field you've changed grows an amber stripe, each screen shows a count, and the top of the Screens list shows "N unsaved". Press Save and the whole lot commits together — fields, table rows and time entries in one go — and a line goes onto the history.

There's an asymmetry worth knowing: clicking away to another part of the app keeps your unsaved work quietly alive, but closing the case's tab asks first and tells you how many changes you'd lose.

When Save says no

Fields that react as you fill them in

A field can be set up to do something the moment you change it and move on — fill in a related box, look something up, or check the value. It fires when you leave the field, not on every keystroke.

If such a check rejects what you typed, the value stays on screen, the box is outlined red with the reason, and Save is refused until you change it. Nothing is silently reverted, so you never lose what you typed — but you do have to fix it.

Buttons on a screen

Some screens carry buttons that run one of your organisation's routines. A button saves the case first, automatically. If that save can't go through, the routine still runs — but against the last saved values, and you'll get a warning saying so. Worth reading rather than dismissing.

9 · Tables — lists inside a case

When one case needs many of something.

Most information on a case happens once: one date of birth, one settlement figure. Some happens many times — every payment, every appointment, every item of loss, every vehicle. That's a table: a small grid that belongs to this case and holds as many rows as the work needs.

Working a table

The table's header carries the label, a count of rows, and a row of buttons: add, edit, move up, move down, delete. The buttons act on the row you've selected — there's no menu on the rows themselves.

Selecting rows

In both flavours, clicking a row selects it and clicking it again lets it go. What differs is whether you can build up a set:

• Several at a time (the usual) — a slim tick-box column that appears as you hover, and stays visible once anything is ticked.
• One at a time — no tick boxes at all; picking a second row replaces the first.

Selecting is for two things: the header buttons, and the buttons on the screen — a routine can be handed exactly the rows you picked, so "produce a schedule for these four losses" is one click. Clicking anywhere outside the table clears the selection.

Columns that aren't just text

Documents on a row

Attach, replace and remove a row's document from the row dialog. Two details make this less surprising than it looks:

• Attaching works on a brand-new row you haven't saved yet — the file uploads straight away and attaches itself to the row when you save the case. Cancelling the dialog throws the upload away.
• Removing a document that's already saved doesn't delete it there and then. The cell reads "Removed — applies when you save", and the file goes when the case is saved. Until then you can still change your mind.

If the column was set up with a template document, rows don't start with a copy of it. Use Start from template in the row dialog to take one, and from then on that row's copy is its own — later changes to the template never rewrite rows already made from it.

Why a column might not be where you expect

Each column has two independent switches: whether it appears in the grid, and whether it's asked for in the row dialog. So a column can be captured but not displayed (keeping a wide grid readable), or displayed but not asked (because something else fills it in). A column can also be shown in the dialog but locked, so you can see the value without changing it.

A hidden column's stored value is never lost by saving a row — the row is merged, not replaced.

Time records

A time record table logs work time rather than data. Press Start, do the work, press Stop; each run becomes one entry with its start, end, duration and who recorded it, plus any extra columns your organisation added. While a timer is running a live pill sits in the toolbar so you can't forget it.

10 · Correspondents

The people and organisations a case deals with — stored once, used everywhere.

Where: correspondent blocks on a case screen · Contacts → Correspondents

This is the idea newcomers find hardest, and the one worth ten minutes. Understand it and half of CaseOnGo makes sense at once.

What a correspondent is

A correspondent is a person or an organisation your work deals with: your client, the other side's solicitor, an insurer, a hospital, a court, an expert. Anyone you might write to, or write about, on a case.

It is an address-book entry and nothing more. It is not a login and not a person who can see anything.

Why not just type the name in a box?

• You will need them again. The same insurer appears on four hundred cases. Typed four hundred times it is spelled four hundred ways, and when they move office you have four hundred wrong addresses. Stored once, it is corrected once.
• The system has to know who is who. A letter that opens "Dear Mrs Okonkwo" and carries her address at the top only writes itself if the case genuinely knows which record is the client. A name typed into a text box is just text; a correspondent is an identified party in a named role.

The two halves: the directory and the slot

Every correspondent exists in two places at once, and keeping them straight is the whole game.

Nothing about the correspondent is stored on the case — only a pointer. The boxes you see in a correspondent block are read live from the directory every time the page loads. Fix a postcode from case A, reopen case B, and case B is right too.

Correspondent types

Different parties need different details. A court needs a DX number; a client needs a date of birth; an insurer needs a policy reference. So every correspondent belongs to exactly one correspondent type, and the type decides what is kept for it.

Every type starts from the same seventeen built-in details — Reference, Forename, Surname, Company name, Contact person, Address lines 1–3, City, Region / County, Postcode, Country, Email, Phone, Mobile, Website, Notes — and your organisation can add up to thirty of its own on top, type by type. Built-in details that make no sense for a type can be hidden, so a Court record is not cluttered with boxes nobody fills in.

A correspondent's type cannot be changed later. If you put a record under the wrong type you have to create it again under the right one and re-point the cases that used it, so it is worth pausing on that dropdown.

The name writes itself

There is no "Name" box. The name you see in lists, pickers, letters and the history is worked out from what you filled in, in this order:

1. Forename + Surname, if either is filled in;
2. otherwise Company name;
3. otherwise Contact person;
4. otherwise Reference.

That order has a consequence worth knowing. A record created as Wellfield NHS Trust (company name only) lists under that name. Add the practice manager's forename and surname to the same record and it instantly relists as Susan Clarke — and nobody can find Wellfield any more. Put a person's name in Contact person instead, and the company name survives.

Each record also carries a small number — #118, #237 — allocated in order. It is the only thing that tells two identically-named records apart.

Correspondent blocks on a screen

On a case, a correspondent appears as a block: a small panel headed with the role (Client) showing that party's details, with buttons along the top.

The detail boxes in a block are read-only on purpose. You cannot type over the address in a Client block, because that address is not the case's to change. If you click into one and try to type, the button that would change it glows to point you at it.

Which buttons appear is decided per screen by whoever built it — a reference-only screen may show none at all, in which case the slot can only be changed by an automation. If a button you want is missing here, try another screen, or ask an administrator.

Searching the directory

Both the picker and the Correspondents page search on name, company name, email, city, postcode, phone and mobile. That is the whole list.

The directory page

Under Contacts → Correspondents you can search everyone, open a record to read or change it, and see which cases they appear on. Whether you may add or change entries depends on your permissions, and plenty of people are given the directory read-only — a sensible way to keep it clean. You can pick a correspondent into a case without that permission; you just can't create or edit one.

Deleting is refused outright if you have ever corresponded with them from a case, and the message names the cases. If you never have, the delete goes through, and any slot holding them goes blank — no warning, no undo, no placeholder name. There is no merge tool and no "inactive" state, so duplicates are best avoided rather than cleaned up.

Copy duplicates everything except the Reference. Because the name is derived, the copy's name is identical to the original and only the # number tells them apart — so rename it immediately.

Two things both called "group"

They are unrelated and never interact. The one you'll actually notice is the sharing group: if your organisation keeps Passenger 1 to Passenger 5 as separate types so each can have its own letters, putting them all in one sharing group means a person entered under Passenger 1 can be picked into a Passenger 4 slot. You'll experience it as "Select finds more than I expected" — that's it working.

On a case, a pooled person is the type of the slot they sit in. Picked into the Passenger 4 slot, they are Passenger 4 there — whatever type they were first entered under: the action dialog says so, offers Passenger 4's letters, and the history row records Passenger 4.

11 · How things join up

Links, not copies — and the one place that rule stops.

People call this "file linking" and it confuses everybody, because four different things get the same name. Here they are, separately. The pattern behind all of them is the same: the thing is stored once, and the case points at it.

1 · A document joins a case

Every document in CaseOnGo belongs to exactly one case. There is no shared drive and no loose folder. A document arrives on a case in one of four ways:

• you drag it in from your computer;
• the case generated it — a letter produced from a template;
• it came in — an email attachment, or a scan of incoming post;
• an automation put it there.

Whichever way, it lands on the history with a date and a name against it, and you can read it without downloading it (section 14).

2 · A person joins a case

People aren't typed onto a case; they're linked to it. Your organisation keeps one shared directory of everyone it deals with, and a case carries labelled slots — Client, Defendant's insurer, Treating GP — each pointing at one entry in that directory. That's what a correspondent is, and section 10 explains it properly.

The point of the link: correct the insurer's address once, in the directory, and every case that points at them is correct from that moment on.

3 · A case joins another case

Sometimes the thing a case needs to refer to is another whole case. There are two separate mechanisms, and they are not interchangeable.

4 · Where the link stops: documents are snapshots

Links keep things current — with one deliberate exception, and it's worth understanding because it sometimes looks like a bug.

When you produce a letter, the case's information is poured into the document at that moment and the result is saved as a real document. It does not keep updating. A letter you sent in March still shows the March address, because that is what you actually sent, and the history has to record what actually happened. The same goes for an email: what's stored is the message as it went.

12 · Letters, emails & calls

Five ways correspondence moves, all through one dialog.

Where: the buttons across the top of an open case

The five kinds

Whichever you press, you get the same dialog asking the same three things: who it's with, what it says, then check and send. Depending on a setting your organisation chose, that's either three numbered steps or one longer form; the questions are identical either way.

Step 1 — who

Pick the correspondent. The list opens by itself with the people already on this case; type a name to find anyone else in the directory (§10).

Step 2 — what

Either use a template — a pre-written letter or email that fills itself in from the case — or write a custom one-off for something that doesn't have a template.

For a phone call, the list is narrowed again by direction: a template marked for incoming calls only appears under Phone in. A call template you can't find is usually filed under the other button.

A custom one-off memo or letter asks what format you want — Word, Excel, PDF, or plain text for a memo — and lets you write it in Word or upload a file. A custom one-off email, call or incoming post is simpler: you just type it.

Step 3 — check, then send

The compose area is where the real work happens.

Actually emailing it

A Send via Outlook tick controls whether anything leaves the building. It's on by default for an email and off by default for a letter, so a letter is produced and filed unless you deliberately tick it.

• Ticking it reveals To (pre-filled from the correspondent, but editable), links to add Cc and Bcc, and a Send from chooser listing your mailbox and any shared mailboxes you may send from.
• The subject is prefixed with the case reference and carries a hidden marker, so replies come back to this case automatically.

Signatures

Your default signature drops into the body automatically; a Signature menu switches it, replacing the block rather than adding a second one. It's inserted into the visible body, so anything you type afterwards lands below your sign-off — write first, then check the bottom. Manage your signatures under My profile → Signatures; pasted logos are shrunk on the way in (to about 80 KB each, shown at a sensible size) and sent as proper inline images so they display in Outlook and Gmail. The editor shows the running size; a signature can be up to about 977 KB.

Letterheads

A Word letter or memo shows a Letterhead button that swaps your firm's masthead for this one send. Applying one takes over the document's page size, margins and headers — only the body text survives — which is normally exactly what you want from a letterhead.

Editing the document before it goes

For a Word or Excel template you can Open in Word, change the document, and send your edited version.

Sending documents with it

Two controls, both for this send only:

• Embeds into — which document slot on the case the produced file is filed into. A template can fix this, in which case the row is padlocked.
• Sends with — other documents to attach: document slots on the case, or anything already on the case's history. Attached copies are snapshots, so later changes to the original don't alter what you sent.

Booking the follow-up while you're there

Template-based actions carry a Diary follow-up section: due in N days, what kind of task, which template, who owns it, and a note. Many templates arrive with it already filled in — "chase in 14 days" — and you can adjust or switch it off for this send. It's the single most useful habit in the whole system: the chase is booked at the moment you create the reason for it, not later, from memory.

Recording what came in

Incoming records post, scans and forwarded files. The quickest route is to drag the files straight onto the case — a drop area appears, the files attach, and you're asked who they came from. Up to 20 files, 100 MB each. A dropped Outlook .msg or .eml is kept verbatim and its contents shown to you.

Bundling several documents into one PDF

Two related tools:

• A PDF bundle memo template writes nothing itself — on send it merges everything under Sends with, in that order, into a single PDF with a bookmark per document. Up to 60 documents. Anything that can't be converted is left out and named on the entry rather than blocking the send, so check the entry afterwards.
• Convert to PDF, on a history row's menu, merges that one entry's documents into a single PDF and files it as a new entry. The original is left exactly as it was.

Parking something half-finished

Every one of the five actions has Save as draft — see section 13.

What can happen around a send

A template can have work attached to it that runs just before the document is produced and just after it's recorded. You'll rarely notice it, but it's worth knowing it exists, because it explains things that otherwise look like magic or like faults:

• Before can fill in case data so it appears in the letter you're about to send, ask you a question, or refuse the send entirely — in which case nothing at all is recorded and you'll see the reason your organisation wrote.
• After can book tasks, update the case, notify someone, or send something else. It runs once the entry is committed, so cancelling anything it asks you does not undo the send — the letter is already recorded and, if you ticked Outlook, already on its way.

See section 23 for the bigger picture.

13 · Drafts

Park a half-written letter and come back to it.

Where: Save as draft in any action · the Drafts view on a case · the Drafts page

Any of the five correspondence actions can be parked with Save as draft and picked up later. It keeps essentially everything: the correspondent, the template, the letterhead, what it embeds into and sends with, the description, notes, subject and body — including your edits to a template's wording — the phone direction, any PDF form boxes you filled in, the follow-up settings, the To/Cc/Bcc and send-from, the signature you chose, files you'd uploaded, and a durable copy of any document you'd edited in Word.

Whose draft is it?

A draft belongs to the case. Everyone who can open the case sees it and can continue it, make adjustments, send it or discard it — so a colleague can write a letter and you can review it before it goes. Each draft shows who started it and who saved it last.

To keep a draft to yourself, tick Only I can see this draft beside Save as draft. Nobody else will know it exists. Only the person who started a draft can change that setting. Drafts saved before this option existed were kept private — re-save one with the box unticked to share it.

Closing a compose you've started

If you close a compose you've actually worked on — Cancel, Escape, or clicking outside it — you're asked whether to Save as draft or Close without saving. A template body you never touched counts as untouched, so it closes without nagging you.

Things that can go wrong, and what you'll see

Discarding

Discard is permanent, and it takes the draft's document edits and uploaded files with it. Sending a draft removes it automatically — but anything it had uploaded is kept, because it's now part of the recorded entry.

14 · Documents & attachments

Every file belongs to a case, and you can read most of them without downloading.

How a document gets onto a case

Whichever route, the case's history records it with a date and a name against it.

Document slots

Besides the history, a case type can carry named document slots — "the signed instruction", "the medical report" — so the current version of an important document has one predictable home rather than being somewhere in a long timeline. When you send a letter, Embeds into chooses which slot it's filed in (§12).

Reading a document

Click a history row and the document opens beside the timeline, so you can keep scrolling while you read. Drag the divider to resize; your choice is remembered. On a narrow screen it opens as a dialog instead.

When an entry carries several files, arrows in the preview header step through them with a counter, and a toggle flips between the document and the entry's own write-up.

Opening a document in Word or Excel

Two different things on a history row's menu, and the difference matters:

Removing files

• Remove attachments deletes the ride-along files under an entry. The entry and its own document survive, and an audit line names every file that went.
• Remove entry deletes the whole entry and its documents.

One safety net exists: if a file is still the document behind a slot on the case, removing the attachments is refused until you clear that slot first.

Notes

Notes are internal messages on the case — not correspondence, never sent anywhere. The Notes view is one running sheet: oldest at the top, newest at the bottom, and every note carries a stamp saying who wrote it and when — and, if someone changed the words later, who edited it. There is no form to fill in. Press New note and the whole sheet opens for writing: the cursor lands on a fresh entry at the end, and any earlier note can be corrected on the way. Save (or Ctrl+Enter) files everything at once; Cancel (or Esc) asks before throwing typed text away.

Each note has a small flag in the margin. Click it and it turns red — that is how you say "the team must not miss this". The Flagged switch above the sheet shows only those; All brings the rest back. A few older notes may be marked Must acknowledge: they stay flagged, a badge counts any you haven't acknowledged, and you can't leave the case until you have.

15 · Tasks & diaries

Deadlines as records, not memories.

Where: Tasks in the sidebar · the Tasks view on each case

A task is one piece of work that must happen on one case: a title, a due date, who owns it, and — this is the useful part — what doing it actually means. Press the button on a task and the right thing opens, already filled in.

The seven kinds

For the six that aren't plain to-dos, the task is only completed once the send succeeds. If you park it as a draft instead, the task stays open — which is correct, because the work isn't done.

The list

The same list appears in both places: the Tasks page shows yours across every case (with the case on each row), the case's Tasks view shows everything on that case (with the owner on each row).

• Rows are grouped onto shelves: Overdue, Due today, This week, Later, No date. Empty shelves aren't shown.
• Urgency is a small coloured dot and the colour of the due date — deliberately quiet, so a busy list stays readable. The only red fill is the count on the Overdue shelf.
• Due dates read the way people speak: Today, Tomorrow, Yesterday, a weekday name for the next few days, then a date. Hover for the exact date and time.
• Tick boxes and the secondary buttons appear as you hover — and every tick box appears as soon as you've ticked anything, so you can see your selection. On a touchscreen they're always visible.

Each row has its Action button always visible, plus Reschedule, Reassign and, if you may, Delete. Tick several rows and one bar offers Reschedule (tomorrow, next week, in 30 days, or pick a date), Reassign and Delete for the lot.

Creating one

The dialog asks for the action, the correspondent, the template, a title, when it's due, who owns it and an optional note. Two helpful touches: the title fills itself in from the template and correspondent until you type your own, and the due date can be set either as "in N days" or as an exact date, each keeping the other in step. A plain to-do can also name a correspondent, just to record who it's about.

Assigning to a role instead of a person

You can assign a task to whoever holds a role on the case — the case worker, the supervisor — rather than to a named individual. The task then follows the role: change who the case worker is and the task moves with the job. That's usually what you want for a workflow step.

Diaries — booking the follow-up as you go

A diary is a follow-up task created automatically at the moment you do something else: send the letter of claim today, and a chaser task appears dated twenty-one days out, assigned to the case worker, with the chaser letter already attached to it.

Templates carry their diary settings with them, so the follow-up is booked whether or not anyone remembers. You can adjust it — or switch it off — for one particular send, on the compose screen (§12).

Completing is final

Seeing a colleague's tasks

By default your Tasks page shows only yours. Seeing someone else's is not a permission you can be given in general — it's a list they are on. An administrator adds you under Sidebar → Administration → Users → that person → Task visibility, choosing whether you may view, action, reschedule or delete.

The daily digest

Your organisation can have CaseOnGo email you a daily digest of your open tasks, split into overdue, today, this week and later. Ask an administrator if you'd like one.

16 · Email in & out

Mail belongs on cases, not in personal inboxes.

Where: My profile → Email & mailboxes · Triage Inbox in the sidebar

Connecting your mailbox

Outbound email goes from your real address, and replies come back to the case, because you link your own Microsoft mailbox to CaseOnGo. It's per person — there is no organisation-wide mailbox — so everyone who sends case email connects their own, once.

How inbound mail finds its case

New mail is picked up automatically and queued in Triage Inbox, where the system has already had a go at working out which case it belongs to. In order of confidence:

1. It's a reply to something CaseOnGo sent from a case — certain.
2. A case reference appears in the subject — certain; in the body — nearly certain.
3. It quotes a value in one of the extra fields your administrator chose for that kind of case — a claim number, a policy number.
4. The sender is a correspondent on exactly one open case.

Working the queue

Triage Inbox has five tabs, each with a live count: High-confidence, Maybe, Other, Released and Archived. The badge on the Triage Inbox menu entry counts High-confidence only, so there can be more waiting than the badge suggests. A tab shows the newest fifty emails and loads the next fifty as you scroll (or press Load more) — there is no limit on how many a tab can hold. The search box and the mailbox chips search the whole tab, not just what is on screen; an email's full text loads the moment you open it.

You can also Archive what doesn't matter — immediate, with no confirmation — tick several rows to release them all to one case in turn, or drag a saved .msg/.eml straight from Outlook onto a case (§12).

On the Released tab each row offers Reply, which opens an email on the case with the sender filled in, the subject prefixed Re: and the original quoted — and it threads properly in Outlook.

Released and archived items are cleared out automatically after 90 days — by then everything that mattered is on a case. Anything still waiting is never swept.

Outbound

Sending is covered in section 12. Two things worth repeating: every case email carries the case reference in its subject and a hidden marker, so replies come back to the case by themselves; and the history row — not the toast — is what tells you whether it actually went (§17).

Invitations, password links and digests come from a separate branded address on your organisation's domain, not from your mailbox.

17 · History — the record

What happened, who did it, and when. Written by the system, not by you.

History is the first thing you see when a case opens, and it's the reason a case can answer "where are we?" without a phone call. Every entry is written at the same moment as the thing it describes, so the record and the case can never drift apart. Nobody types these lines.

Two tabs, and the difference matters

Reading the timeline

Entries are newest first, 50 at a time, with Load older entries at the bottom and a running "showing N of M". The columns are the date and time, what happened, any attachments, who did it, the correspondent, the template and the description.

• Sort by date, action, user, correspondent, template or description.
• Filter any column — the tick lists are built from everything in the case, not just what's on screen, and the filtering happens across the whole case.
• Search the tab, matching the text of entries, the person and the kind of action, across the whole case.
• A strip shows the filters you've got on, with a Clear to drop them all.

Dates are UK format throughout — dd/MM/yyyy with a 24-hour time beneath.

Did that email actually go?

An emailed entry carries its live status: Sending…, then Sent — or Not sent with the reason in plain words and a button to try again. An entry that was deliberately recorded without emailing shows no status at all, which is correct rather than worrying.

What you can do to a row

Right-click a row, or use its three-dots button:

What makes it trustworthy

• Entries are written by the system, in the same breath as the change.
• A person can only change five things about an entry — its description, its recorded user, its document, its attachments and whether it exists at all — and every one of those writes its own line on the audit trail, carrying what was there before.
• Removing an entry leaves a permanent audit line saying what was removed, who recorded it originally, when, and the names of the files that went. That line cannot itself be removed.

18 · Searching

Three different searches, for three different questions.

The case search box

It always searches the reference and the title, plus a handful of extra fields your organisation has chosen for each case type — a claim number, a client surname, a postcode. Exact reference matches come first.

The search returns at most 50 results. If you're getting 50 and not finding it, you're asking the wrong tool — that's a query.

Finding a field when you don't know its screen

Inside a case, the Screens list has a toggle that switches its search from screen names to field names. Type date of birth and every screen holding that field surfaces with the match named on the row. It saves a lot of hunting on an unfamiliar case type.

19 · Queries

Saved questions about the whole caseload — built once, run whenever.

Where: Queries in the sidebar

A query is a saved, named search across every case of one case type: "claims where no medical report has come back after 60 days", "files I'm the case worker on with something overdue", "cases closing this month". Somebody technical writes it once; everyone else picks it and presses play.

This is where the structure pays for itself. Because a date of accident is a real date field rather than a sentence in a letter, you can ask questions about it across ten thousand cases in a second.

The questions panel

Some queries ask you something first — a date range, a fee earner, a status.

• Only questions marked with a * have to be answered.
• Leaving a box blank doesn't mean "match nothing" — it means "don't filter on this at all". That's usually what you want, and it's how one query can serve several questions.
• A range where you fill in only one end becomes a one-sided test: give just the earliest date and you get everything from then on.

While a required question is unanswered the query waits, and the paging and sorting controls quietly do nothing. Fill it in and press Apply.

The results

Every query shows the case reference, title and status, then whatever columns its author chose. Click a column heading to sort; click again to reverse; a third time to go back to the query's own order. Choose how many rows per page at the bottom.

Tick rows one at a time, tick the header to take the visible page, or use Select all N matches to take everything the query found — not just what's on screen.

Exporting

Export gives you Excel or CSV, of everything or just your ticked rows. The file is named after the query and starts with the reference, title, status and last-modified date before the query's own columns. Dates come out UK style.

Acting on the results

Things that explain a surprising result

• A query returns open cases only, unless its author deliberately included closed ones — in which case archived cases come back too.
• Queries aren't personal. Every one on a case type is visible to everyone who can run queries; there's no "my queries".
• A query that's been switched off simply vanishes from the list, with nothing to say it ever existed.
• On a very large case type a query can refuse to run and ask to be narrowed down. That's a guard against one query slowing the system for everyone.

Building queries is a separate job on a separate page, and it's covered in the Technical Handbook.

20 · Reports

A query's answer, presented properly.

Where: Reports in the sidebar

A report sits on top of a saved query: same cases, same rules, but arranged for a human or a meeting rather than a spreadsheet. It adds grouping bands with subtotals, grand totals, a chart, and a properly laid-out PDF.

What comes out

• PDF — the report name, when it was generated, the parameters actually used, your organisation's header and footer, and page numbers. The chart prints as a table of categories and values rather than a picture.
• Excel — the rows and totals.
• CSV — the rows, but with group headings and subtotals interleaved as # lines. It reads well; it doesn't import well. If you're feeding another system, export from the query instead.

Every report has a maximum number of rows — 5,000 unless its author changed it — and rows beyond that are left out of both the preview and the file, quietly. For a report that's meant to be complete, it's worth checking that ceiling with whoever built it.

Reports that arrive by themselves

A report can be scheduled to run on its own and email the file to a list of people — a Monday morning caseload, a month-end position. An administrator sets that up.

Data Export Add-on

Different animal. Rather than producing a file, the Data Export add-on copies the whole workspace into your organisation's own SQL Server on a schedule, so Power BI and other tools can read it directly. If your organisation reports outside CaseOnGo, that's the route — ask an administrator.

21 · Related cases

Several pieces of work that belong together, numbered together.

Where: the ⋮ menu on a case → Create sibling case · View sibling cases

Sometimes one piece of business turns into several. A client has a second accident. A claim spawns a costs matter. Two passengers in one car each need their own file. Each of those is a case in its own right — but they belong together, and CaseOnGo keeps them in a family.

How a family is numbered

The first case keeps its reference. Everything added to the family hangs off it:

000123        the original
000123.001    the second member
000123.002    the third
…

Families are flat: creating one from a member still attaches it to the same original, so you get a root and its members, never a tree of grandchildren. A family can hold up to 999 members, and numbers are never reused.

Creating one

Seeing the family

View sibling cases lists the whole family — the original marked as the root, the one you're on marked as current, each with its reference, case type, title, status and when it was last touched. Click any row to open it. The case bar also carries a chip counting the other members, so you always know a case has relatives.

Related cases versus case links

Don't confuse a family with a case link — a field on one case pointing at another. A family is "these pieces of work belong to the same story"; a case link is "this case refers to that one for its details". See section 11.

22 · Sharing outside Add-on

Let an outsider see one case — and only what you chose.

Where: the Share button on a case

What a collaborator is

A collaborator is somebody outside your organisation — a client, an expert, a panel solicitor, a case manager — given a login to a separate website where they can see the individual cases you have deliberately shared with them. Nothing else.

A collaborator is also not a correspondent. Adding someone to the directory so you can write to them gives them no access at all; that's a separate invitation.

Sharing a case

How much history they see

Three choices, and the middle one is the default:

To show a collaborator a particular letter or email, flip its visibility button in the history's external column. Even on "All case history", collaborators only ever get the correspondence timeline — field changes, locks, task churn and internal notes are stripped out before anything reaches them.

Documents

Tick boxes control whether they may see attachments, upload files and download them.

You can also exchange documents with them in a simple back-and-forth conversation on the case's Collaborate view. Everything they do lands on the case history under their name.

Changing and ending a share

The Share dialog lists the shares already live on the case, with Edit (adjust the screens), Re-snapshot and Revoke.

Three things that end access without you doing anything

• The case is marked dead. Every share on it ends, except those explicitly marked to keep access after closing. Reviving the case does not bring them back — you have to share again, deliberately.
• The collaborator is suspended. That revokes every one of their shares across every case, and reactivating them restores none of it.
• The share expires, if you gave it an end date.

23 · What runs itself

The part of the system that does work for you — and why things sometimes happen on their own.

A great deal of what happens in CaseOnGo isn't done by anyone. Your organisation can teach the system a sequence of steps and attach it to a moment, and from then on it just happens — the same way, every time, on every case.

You don't set these up (that's the Technical Handbook), but knowing they exist is worth a lot. It explains why a field filled itself in, why a task appeared from nowhere, and why the system occasionally says no.

What it can actually do

The moments it can act

Each case type can attach work to seven moments in a case's life, plus a few more elsewhere:

And beyond the case type: before and after any letter, email or memo is sent (§12), when a particular field changes (§8), from a button on a screen, from the Automation button when you run one by hand, from a task, and on a schedule.

Running one yourself — the Automation button, a task that runs one, or Bulk actions → Run an automation — needs the Run automations permission. The ones attached to moments run for everyone who can work on the case.

Reading the signs

Two rules worth carrying

• Routines work on the saved case. Running one by hand saves your changes first. A button on a screen does the same. If a save can't go through, the routine runs against the last saved values and warns you — read that warning.
• Cancelling an "after" step does not undo the thing it followed. If a question appears after your letter was sent, the letter is already sent. Dismissing the question only skips the rest of the follow-up work.

The AI assistant Add-on

If your organisation has it, an AI button on the case answers questions about that case from its own data and history. It reads; it never changes anything, and it never acts on its own.

24 · Guided view Add-on

The same system, asked as a question instead of laid out as a menu.

If your organisation has the guided add-on, your account menu offers a switch into Guided view: a calmer version of CaseOnGo that starts by asking "What would you like to do?" and walks you to the answer.

Nothing underneath is different. Same cases, same tasks, same history, same letters — it is the same workspace seen through a simpler frame. Two people can work the same case, one in each view, all day.

What it offers

• Create case — pick what kind of work it is, and go.
• Open case — recent, Favourites, or search.
• My tasks — your list, the same one.
• Other — up to six more places you're allowed to go: run a query, look at reports, correspondents, accounts documents, collaborators, incoming mail.
• Inside a case: a hub with the case's screens, sending, history, tasks, notes, assignments, sharing, documents and related cases as separate, named steps rather than one dense workspace.

Press Ctrl+K (or Cmd+K) anywhere in it to jump straight to anything, cases included. That shortcut is unique to this view.

What it deliberately doesn't offer

Everything an administrator configures is hidden: screens, templates, queries and reports authoring, users, roles, Tenant settings, routines, drafts. That's the point — Guided view is for doing the work, not shaping the system. Editing a history entry also isn't available here; switch back for that.

Switching

Your account menu has the switch in both directions, and CaseOnGo remembers which view you were in, so signing in again puts you back where you were. Switching from a case lands you on the same case.

25 · Money on a case Add-on

Two separate things, and it matters which one your organisation has.

CaseOnGo doesn't do accounting on its own. It has two optional modules that put money beside the work, and they do different jobs. You'll see an CaseOnGo Accounts button, a Client ledger button, both, or neither.

CaseOnGo Accounts — invoicing through Xero

Raise an invoice, a bill or a credit note from the case itself, and it's pushed to Xero. Xero is the authority: the totals, the VAT and the paid status come back from there, so what you see on the case is what your accounts system says, not a second opinion. Payment coming in against an invoice flows back to the case on its own — and can trigger the next step in the work (§23).

Client ledger — money held for a client

For organisations that hold client money under the SRA's rules, this keeps a proper ledger card per matter: receipts in, payments out, transfers between client and office, and the balance held right now.

As an everyday user, three things are worth knowing:

• Money out is a two-person job. You request a payment; somebody with the authority approves it; then it's released. You can't approve your own request.
• Nothing is ever edited or deleted. A mistake is corrected by posting a reversal, so the record shows both the error and the correction. That's the point of it.
• A matter holding client money cannot be marked dead. The close is refused, naming the amount, until the balance is returned or otherwise dealt with (§26).

The full detail — how to post a receipt, run a reconciliation, produce the reports — is in the Technical Handbook.

26 · Access, locks & closing

Who can see what, and how a case ends.

Permissions, in one paragraph

What you can do is decided by your role, plus any teams you're in, plus anything granted or withdrawn for you personally. You don't manage any of it.

You can see your own access under My profile → Identity & access: your role, your security level and the permissions you actually hold.

Case types you may not open

Your organisation can restrict, per case type, who may create those cases and who may open them. If you meet one you may not open, you get a plain panel naming the type rather than an error.

Two people, one case

Only one person can change a case at a time. Arrive second and you get a banner naming the colleague who has it; you can read everything and change nothing until they leave.

Password-protected cases

An individual case can carry its own password — for the handful of cases that need to be closed even to colleagues who can otherwise see everything.

• Opening one shows a full-page lock panel, not a dialog. Type the password to go in.
• Everyone is asked, including whoever set it, and every single time. Switching to another tab and back asks again. There is no "remember this".
• A small padlock marks protected cases in lists and search results.
• The password is exactly what was typed — spaces included, and there are no rules about its shape.

Setting or removing one needs the Password-protect cases permission, from the case's ⋮ menu. A separate permission adds a Protected cases screen listing every protected case and letting a manager reveal or change a password — that is the route back from a forgotten one.

Marking a case dead

"Dead" is this product's word for closed. The work is finished; the case stays readable forever and stops accepting changes.

The case stays on your screen and turns read-only in place. The case bar grows a Dead chip and a Since date, and its tab is struck through. Every action button greys out.

Reviving

Revive case, on the same menu, reopens it. There's no confirmation prompt and no check to pass; the case becomes editable again, and the history keeps a record of both the closing and the revival.

You may notice the same case described as "Dead" inside the case and "Closed" on Home, in search results and in the family view. It's the same state, under two words.

Deleting

27 · When something looks wrong

The usual answers, in the order people usually need them.

Getting in

Finding things

Editing

Sending

Email coming in

Tasks and records

Reports and exports

Still stuck?

Two questions answer most of what's left. Is it a permission? — check My profile → Identity & access, and hover any greyed button for the tooltip that names what's missing. Is it configuration? — screens, templates, queries and automatic steps are all built by someone in your organisation, and they're the person to ask. The Technical Handbook is written for them.

28 · Cases that came from Proclaim

If your organisation moved from Proclaim, some cases were brought in rather than created here. Here's how to read them.

An imported case looks like any other, with three tells. Its first history entry says it was created by "Proclaim import" and names the Proclaim reference. Its history is dated as it happened in Proclaim — the emails, letters, memos and calls keep their original dates, times and the person who did them (a name that matches a user here shows as that user; otherwise it shows as the name itself). And a Memo called "Proclaim ledger at export" carries the matter's ledger report as it stood when the case left Proclaim, with the balances written out, so the money history is one click away even if you never open the accounts side.

• Emails open like any email: the message itself was kept, and the files that were attached to it are filed as documents on the same row. The little logos and spacers from email signatures were left inside the message rather than filed as documents.
• Letters and imported files are the documents Proclaim held, under their own names.
• Dead cases arrived dead, with Proclaim's file-closed date.
• The reference is either the Proclaim one or a new number — your administrator chose which at import time; the Proclaim reference is on the first history entry either way.

29 · Glossary

Every term in this guide, in one place.