Ajax's Centerbase Integration: Everything You Need to Know
In firms running Centerbase, most billable time that doesn't get recorded gets lost for a familiar set of reasons. The work was scattered across email, document review, calls, and research. By the time you sit down at your Centerbase screen at the end of the day, you have to remember all of it, attribute it to the right matters, attach the right codes, apply the right rates, and write a narrative that reads cleanly enough to bill. Most lawyers handle that the next morning, the next week, or never.
Ajax's Centerbase integration is built to close that gap. We watch the work as it happens, draft the entry in your voice, and push it into Centerbase with the matter, activity code, and billing rate already attached.
Here's how it works, what syncs, what setup looks like, and the one Centerbase-specific detail you should know going in.
What is Ajax?
Ajax is an AI-native timekeeping tool built for lawyers. It runs as a native desktop application that reads your screen in real time and automatically drafts time entries across every application you use, supplemented by API connections for email, calendar, Zoom, Teams, and VoIP calls.
Ajax's privacy architecture is built for the sensitivity of legal work, including privileged client communications, matter strategy, and the rate and billing data that lives in your Centerbase environment. Screen content is processed, used to generate a draft time entry, and then automatically deleted on a rolling basis. We don't use your data to train our models.
Our infrastructure providers, including the AI providers underneath us, are contractually prohibited from retaining or training on anything that passes through. Ajax is SOC compliant. Every lawyer's Ajax is an individual silo, so nobody at your firm can see your activity, not even managing partners.
What is Centerbase?
Centerbase is a cloud-based legal practice management and billing platform built for mid-sized law firms. It runs the firm's matters, time entries, invoicing, trust accounting, and reporting from one system.
If your firm bills through Centerbase, it's the system of record for everything that gets billed and everything that gets paid.
Does Ajax integrate with Centerbase?
Yes. Ajax has a deep two-way sync with Centerbase. Your matters, client list, billing rates, and activity codes flow into Ajax automatically. The time entries Ajax drafts flow back into Centerbase as native entries, ready to bill, with the matter, code, and rate already attached.
The architecture is worth understanding before you read the rest of this article, because it shapes everything else. Ajax's primary capture layer is screen reading at the desktop level. It runs across every application you use during the day: your browser, Outlook or Gmail, Word, Excel, your Centerbase web app, Zoom, Teams, your VoIP phone.
We supplement that screen capture with lightweight API connections for email, calendar, and call metadata, which fills in mobile activity and gives us the structured data (call duration, participants, timestamps) that helps with matter attribution and grouping.
The Centerbase API connection is a separate layer. It's how Ajax knows your matter list, your activity codes, and your rate tables in the first place, and it's how finished entries land inside Centerbase as native time entries you can bill against. Most tools that advertise a "Centerbase integration" stop at this layer and log a list of windows or email headers as time entries. We use Centerbase the way you'd want a billing system to be used: as the system of record for what the firm bills, with the draft entry already populated.
Centerbase is one of Ajax's deep practice management integrations, alongside Clio, MyCase, PracticePanther, SurePoint, Filevine, and Actionstep. We also support most other billing systems on request.
How Ajax captures your work and gets it into Centerbase, step by step
Five things happen between the moment you start working and the moment a finished time entry lands in Centerbase.
Ajax sees the work as it happens
While you work, Ajax is taking the activity in on two channels. On the desktop, it reads your screen in real time, pixel by pixel: the email you're reading, the contract paragraph you're redlining, the brief section you're drafting, the matter screen you've got open in another tab.
On the API side, it pulls email and call activity from any device you're signed in on, so a reply you send from your phone arrives at the same draft entry as the document review you did at your desk an hour earlier.
A draft entry lands in your voice
About 45 seconds after you finish an action, Ajax produces a draft entry. The narrative is written in the style of your prior Centerbase entries, which we ingest during onboarding.
If you usually write "Conferred with client re: settlement strategy and reviewed counterproposal," that's what your Ajax-drafted entries look like. If you usually write "Conf w/ client re settlement; rev counterproposal," that's what they look like.
Ajax attributes the work to a Centerbase matter
This is the part most time-tracking tools get wrong. Matter attribution can't come from a CRM contact list alone, because most of the people relevant to a case (judges, opposing counsel, peripheral parties, a co-defendant's paralegal, a witness) aren't in it. Those names live in email threads, documents, and call participants.
Ajax builds matter attribution from the content of the work itself. When it can't confidently attribute an activity to a matter, it flags the draft entry for you to assign, and then it learns from the correction. The next time the same opposing counsel emails about the same case, Ajax handles the attribution automatically.
Related work gets grouped into one entry
A single piece of billable work is usually seven emails across the day, plus the contract you reviewed in the middle, plus the ten-minute call where you and your client decided how to respond. As individual line items in Centerbase, that's fourteen entries to wade through. As one piece of work, it's one entry of about an hour and forty-five minutes.
Ajax groups intelligently across the day. You can configure whether you want block billing or itemized entries, depending on your client's billing guidelines.
You review and release to Centerbase
Ajax's review interface is a two-column flow, with the entries waiting for your review on the left and the entries already sitting in Centerbase on the right. You click and drag from left to right, like clearing a to-do list. The drafted entry becomes a native Centerbase time entry with the matter, activity code, and rate already attached.
What syncs between Ajax and Centerbase
The Centerbase integration is a full two-way sync, including post-release edits.
From Centerbase to Ajax:
Matters and client names. Every active matter, synced automatically. New matters created in Centerbase show up in Ajax without anyone configuring anything.
Activity codes. UTBMS codes and your firm's custom codes, applied to the clients that require them.
Billing rates. Pulled straight from your Centerbase rate tables, so the rate on the draft entry is already correct before you see it.
From Ajax to Centerbase:
Complete time entries. Matter assigned, activity code set, billing rate applied, narrative written in your voice. They land as native Centerbase entries, indistinguishable from entries typed directly into Centerbase.
The two-way piece matters most after release. Push an entry into Centerbase, then your client emails back, and you do another forty minutes of work on the same matter. You can edit the entry in either Ajax or Centerbase. The edit shows up in both. If a billing partner adjusts the narrative in Centerbase before invoicing, that change reflects in Ajax. If you fix a typo in Ajax, that change pushes back to Centerbase. The entry stays a single source of truth no matter which system you happen to be in when you change it.
How to set up Ajax with Centerbase
Setup is a single connection at the org level, with no per-attorney OAuth dance and no IT project required to roll it out across the firm.
You connect your Centerbase account to your Ajax account one time, and every user in your firm is covered by that single connection. Your IT team approves the API connection once during onboarding and is done.
There is one Centerbase-specific setup detail worth knowing up front. Centerbase's API runs through a user seat in your organization, which means Ajax needs a provisioned seat to run the integration through. Ajax pays for that seat. If your firm already has an administrative seat that nobody is actively using, we can use that one instead. Either way, the cost is on us.
This is genuinely Centerbase-specific. Most billing systems expose their API as a standalone tool we can authenticate against without consuming a user license. Centerbase is architected a little differently, and the seat detail is the first thing your firm's IT and billing team should know going into setup.
Once the integration is connected, the white-glove onboarding flow looks like this:
We sit down with your firm's billing leadership and intake your billing guidelines (UTBMS conventions, client-specific narrative rules, grouping preferences)
We connect Ajax to Centerbase and pull in your matters, codes, rates, and prior entries
We customize Ajax's settings to your firm's existing patterns so the draft entries match the voice your firm already uses
Ajax runs silently in the background for about two days before your kickoff
On day one of the rollout, every attorney sees real time entries already waiting for them, written in their voice
A note on the word customize. We don't train models on your data. We configure Ajax's output settings based on your firm's existing patterns and billing guidelines. That distinction matters for security, and it's the reason Ajax works with firms that handle cases for six of the eight money center banks.
Pricing starts with a flat $100 trial fee. Ongoing pricing depends on firm size, and you don't pay anything ongoing unless the trial returns ROI you can see in your own Centerbase numbers. About 97% of firms that pilot Ajax move into a subscription afterward. The fastest way to see whether the integration is worth it for your firm is to book a demo and run the trial against a week of real work.
What this looks like in recovered revenue
A worked example for a five-attorney firm averaging $350 an hour: if each attorney recovers 30 minutes a day of previously unlogged work that Ajax catches and pushes to Centerbase, the firm captures roughly $19,250 a month. That's a hair under $230,000 a year, and it's a conservative estimate. Thirty minutes a day is well below what most firms find sitting in their workflow when they look closely.
Peakstone Law reported one attorney increasing her billable hours by 50 a month after switching to Ajax. Amy Robinson tracked 63% more billable hours over her first six months on Ajax, which she reports translated to over $350,000 in increased annual revenue.
Common questions about Ajax and Centerbase
Does Ajax replace Centerbase?
No. Centerbase remains your system of record for matters, rates, codes, invoicing, and reporting. Ajax sits alongside Centerbase as the entry-generation layer, and the entries land in Centerbase as native entries you bill against.
Can my managing partner see my entries before I release them?
No. Entries in Ajax are private to you until you release them to Centerbase. Nobody at the firm sees anything until you decide it's ready, not even managing partners.
Do I need to add an Ajax user to my Centerbase organization?
Yes. Centerbase's API runs through a user seat, so the integration needs a provisioned seat to run through. Ajax pays for that seat. If your firm has an existing administrative seat available, we can use that one instead.
Does Ajax handle our custom activity codes?
Yes. Ajax pulls in both UTBMS codes and your firm's custom activity codes during the initial sync, and applies them automatically on the clients that require them. If a client's outside counsel guidelines require a specific code on certain entries, the draft already has it set.
What doesn't Ajax capture?
Work that never touches a screen. Handwritten notes from a hallway conversation, in-person sidebars at the courthouse, phone calls where you never opened a related document. Pen-and-paper work is a blind spot for any screen-based tool, ours included.
Final thoughts
When the entry creation stops being a chore at the end of the day, your billables stop being a Friday-afternoon reconstruction project.
To see what a week of your own work looks like as Centerbase entries, book a demo or start a trial for $100.
