Dashboard

The dashboard is the home screen — the first destination in the sidebar (⌘1). It’s a single-page read-out of what’s happening in the firm right now: who’s instructing, what’s due, what your team’s been touching in Notion, how long the courts and the LRS are taking. It’s a viewing surface — you don’t fill anything in here, you scan it and decide what to open.

This page walks the dashboard top-to-bottom and explains what each panel is for.

Greeting and weather

The first thing you see is a time-aware greeting — “Good morning, Rodney.” in the morning, “Good evening” after 5pm. Underneath sits a one-line subtitle: a short tagline (“Dedicated to the cause.”) and, when WeatherKit is configured and has data, the current temperature and condition for your location (“It’s 18° and drizzling”).

The greeting and subtitle rotate through small pools of phrases keyed to time-of-day buckets (morning, early afternoon, afternoon, evening). It’s flavour, not signal — the dashboard re-picks on every appearance so you never see the same line for long.

Note

Weather only renders when WeatherKit has location permission and a current reading. If you’ve declined location access, or you’re offline, the temperature line is simply omitted — the greeting still works. WeatherKit configuration lives in Settings.

What’s New and the update badge

Beside the greeting, the header carries two quiet indicators:

• What’s New — a small pill that opens a popover with the release notes for the last two versions. After an update it shows a coloured dot until you’ve opened it once; otherwise it sits quietly. The notes are bundled with the app, so they always match the version you’re running.
• Update badge — appears when a newer version of Certum Draft is available. Click it to read the full release notes and install the update.

Toolbar, search and the command palette

The window toolbar holds three actions: New Matter (⌘N), New Document (⌘⇧D) and Open (⌘O). Open is search-first — it shows your recent matters and lets you type a matter number or surname, with a “Choose folder…” fallback if you need to browse Finder.

The dashboard’s own search field sits under the greeting. It searches every matter on file by number, client, matter type or property address — accents and capitals don’t matter (“renee” finds “Renée”). Results appear in a floating list as you type; use the arrow keys and Return, or click, to open one. While the index builds on a cold launch the field says “Indexing matters…” — that’s normal.

If your firm uses Leads, a New Lead button (⌘⇧P) sits beside the search field so you can log an enquiry while the caller is still on the phone. See Potential New Matters.

Tip

Press ⌘ + K anywhere to open the command palette — a Spotlight-style box that searches matters and actions (New Matter, New Document, New Lead, Check for Updates, Settings, jumping to any sidebar destination) in one place. Press ⌘Return on a matter to open it in a new window.

Key Dates

A full-width morning briefing answering “what does the calendar demand?”. It groups every active critical date across your matters into urgency columns:

• OVERDUE — red, and only appears when something genuinely is overdue. A missed date that was never ticked off surfaces here instead of silently vanishing.
• TODAY — orange: urgent, but on schedule.
• THIS WEEK and NEXT FORTNIGHT — the near horizon.
• LATER — the far horizon: dates beyond the fortnight, including statutory deadlines months away. Like OVERDUE, this column only appears when it has content.

Each row shows the date, a short caption and the matter number; titles wrap to two lines so nothing truncates. Busy columns cap at five rows and collapse the rest behind a “+N more” expander. The single most urgent item gets a quiet tinted emphasis so “do this next” is answered at a glance, and a small “as of 9:41 am” caption in the corner tells you when the briefing was last refreshed.

Two kinds of rows share the columns:

• Hard legal deadlines — limitation dates, hearings and the like — carry their own marker in every column: a warning triangle when the date is overdue or within a fortnight, a flag on calmer horizons. They appear here however far away they are, and their reminders escalate as the date approaches. Hard-deadline reminders fire even if you’ve turned routine matter reminders off in Settings — a statutory deadline is not routine. (Only the master “all reminders off” switch silences them.)
• Just created — matters created in the last 24 hours appear as a chip row at the bottom, so a brand-new matter surfaces before it picks up any dates of its own.

Clicking a row or chip opens that matter’s workspace.

Tip

If the strip is empty (“Nothing critical in the next few days. Quiet stretch.”), you genuinely have nothing pressing — not a sync error.

The signals grid

Below Key Dates sits the dashboard’s centre of gravity: a two-column grid of the live signals you check most often.

Open Leads

The left column shows Potential New Matters — enquiries that haven’t been converted to matters yet. Each row is a person and a matter type (“Darcy J. · Wills · new”), with the practitioner shown as an initials circle (hover for the full name). Leads that have been sitting untouched get an idle badge, and anything past three weeks is flagged as cold — the coldest leads sort to the top.

A “N need attention” button appears when leads are overdue for follow-up, and See all leads opens the full Leads list in the sidebar (see Potential New Matters). If the leads list couldn’t refresh, the header says so rather than pretending all is well.

When there are folders in your leads folder on disk that don’t yet have a Lead record, an “N orphan folders” pill appears at the bottom of the column. Click it to open the reconciliation view and link them up. For the full lead-to-matter flow, see Potential New Matters.

Note

If your firm hasn’t connected a Leads database, the column shows a short discovery hint (dismissible) instead of the list — the rest of the dashboard is unaffected.

Recent Matters

The right column is one merged recency list — your local matters and the firm’s Notion register activity in a single feed, most recent first:

• PINNED (N) — matters you’ve pinned, up to a cap of 4
• RECENT (N) — the ten most recently active matters, grouped by recency

Each row shows the matter number, a short identifier (surname + matter type) and a quiet stage capsule (“Pre-Settlement”, “Asset Collection”) so the list reads as a status glance, not just a reopen list. Rows that exist in the Notion register get a small arrow that opens the register page; matters that only exist in the register (no local folder yet) appear as plain rows that do the same.

Hover a row to reveal the pin and Open Folder actions; right-click for more, including Open in New Window. You can also drop files (or Mail messages) onto a matter row to file them into that matter — the confirmation message names where they landed and offers Undo.

Note

Pinned matters are personal — they don’t sync with Notion or with other team members. They’re a local convenience.

Institution Notifications

Further down the page, this card appears whenever any estate matter has institutions in progress — and hides itself completely when there’s nothing to chase. Matters are grouped one row each: client, institution count, and the age of the oldest outstanding notification (orange once it’s past a fortnight). The header keeps a running “N need chasing” count.

Click a row to expand it and see the individual institutions with their phase. The matter number is a link — it opens that matter straight onto its Institutions pane, which is exactly where you’d act on the chase.

Note

The card only counts active (non-complete) institutions. If it’s not showing, there’s nothing outstanding — not a sync error.

NSW Processing Times

A reference panel showing how long the Supreme Court of NSW and NSW Land Registry Services are currently taking on common dealings. It sits collapsed as a single bar — click to expand it (the preference sticks):

• Supreme Court — probate, letters of administration, and related applications
• NSW LRS — electronic and paper dealings registration

Both blocks cache for an hour, so the values refresh in the background as you work. The “last updated” timestamp tells you when the data was last pulled.

Tapping the Supreme Court block opens the Wills and Probate page on the Supreme Court site; tapping the LRS block opens Current Registration Progress on the LRS site. Both are the official sources Certum Draft scrapes.

Note

If the panel shows dashes or stale data, the underlying source pages may be unreachable. Both Court and LRS data refresh in the background hourly; nothing you do on the dashboard triggers a manual refresh.

The footer stat line

The page footer carries one quiet line: how many documents the firm has created today (with the running weekly total) and a rotating tagline — “lovingly crafted”, “diligently filed”, “billable hours well spent”. The counts come from filesystem scans of each matter’s Working Documents folder — real files produced today, not a Notion count.

The breakdown of what kinds of matters the firm handles (counts and percentages per type) has moved to the Firm Data card on the Reference destination (⌘4).

The Matters list

The sidebar’s second destination (⌘2) is a browsable, sortable table of every matter on file. Its columns are Number, Client, Type, Created, Next date and Last activity:

• Next date — the earliest upcoming critical date on the matter’s calendar. This is the “what needs attention next” column.
• Last activity — when the matter folder was last touched.

The filter box matches number, client, type or address (accents ignored), and Return opens the selected matter. Finalised matters are hidden by default — tick Show finalised to include them (they’re badged “Finalised”).

Note

If the matters folder is unreachable (for example, Dropbox hasn’t finished syncing), the table says “Matters folder isn’t available” with a shortcut to Settings — it doesn’t pretend you have no matters.

Responsive layout

The signals grid reflows based on the dashboard’s available width: at 640pt and above the two columns sit side by side; below that every panel stacks full-width in vertical order. Everything else — Key Dates, Institution Notifications, Processing Times — is full-width at any size, so nothing is ever cut off in a narrow window.

What’s not on the dashboard

A few panels from earlier versions have been retired or folded into others:

• Deadline Watch card — merged into Key Dates. Hard statutory deadlines now appear in the same urgency columns as everything else (with their own deadline marker), and a LATER column holds the far horizon. One place to look, not two.
• “Recently Updated in Notion” column — merged into the Recent Matters column: register activity now bumps a matter’s position in the one recency list instead of competing for a third column.
• By the Numbers panel — shrank to the quiet stat line in the footer. The firm-wide matter-type breakdown lives on as the Firm Data card in Reference.
• Today / Someday cockpit — the committed-matters list that let you stage matters into “do today” / “do someday” buckets was removed in 0.9.192. It wasn’t earning its space.

Pinned matters in the Recent column cover most of the “what should I work on today” need these panels served.

Related

• Potential New Matters — what feeds the Open Leads column
• Creating a New Matter — what happens when you click New Matter in the toolbar
• Settings — where WeatherKit, folder locations and other dashboard inputs are configured