Generating a Bill

Question 1

Step 1: New bills

Answer 1

A Billable Clients list is accessed via the New Bills button on the main Bills page. It lists all of the matters with unbilled time and expense entries. Users can generate bills for a single client or matter, all matters, or any number in between. This list can be filtered by client, matter, attorney, activity date, and custom fields, making it easier to curate a list of matters that are ready to be billed

*please note that only matters that are marked “Billable” will appear in this list

Question 2

Step 2: Generate Drafts

Answer 2

When generating bills, users are provided with a number of options:

1. Issue Date: the date that you intend to send the bill to the client. Interest will begin to calculate on this date
2. Due Date: The payment due date defined by the client’s Payment Profile. The due date will trigger interest to be charged if the bill has not been paid
3. Use Contacts’ Grace Period: If you change the “Issue Date” but want the “Due Date” to respect the grace period specified in the Payment Profile, check this box
4. Detail Level
   - All Details: Displays time and expense entries as separate line items on the bill with the option to display activity categories
   - Activity Summary: Combines all time entries with the same activity category into a single line item
   - All Items aggregated: Combines all time and expense entries into a single line item
   - Aggregate by Type: Combines all time into one line item, and combines expenses into separate line item
   - Only services aggregated: Combines all time into a single line item while expenses are given their own individual line items
   - Only expenses aggregated: Combines all expenses into a single line item while time entries are given their own individual line items
5. Combine Multiple Matters: Combines charges for multiple matters for a single client on one bill
6. Include $0 Balance: If you have matters with $0 time entries and want those matters excluded from bill generation, uncheck this box
7. Apply Tax: Applies primary tax rate as specified in Bill Settings to all bills being generated
8. Apply Secondary Tax: Applies secondary tax rate as specified in Bill settings to all bills being generated
9. Skip the Bill Approval Process: If you want all bills generated to skip the Draft state and straight to Awaiting Payment, check this box
10. Change Bill Time: Select an existing Bill Theme in the account to be used on all the bills generated in this batch
    * Once you are satisfied with the options you’ve selected, you can click “Generate bills.” This will generate all of the bills at once and send them to the Draft state (unless you’ve chosen to “skip the approval process” in which case they will go straight to Unpaid)

Question 3

Draft Bills

Answer 3

As soon as the bill is generated, it will move to the “Draft” state area where you can edit the bill if necessary before sending it to a senior attorney or staff member for review, or before approving a Bill and sending it to the client

Question 4

Draft Bill Notification

Answer 4

An easy way for a user to notify someone in the firm that Draft Bills have been generated and are awaiting next steps is to enable Bill Notifications. This setting can be enabled by going to the Settings panel and clicking on “Billing.”

The option to enable Bill Notifications is near the bottom of the Bill Settings screen

Question 5

Bill Editing: There are two areas where you can edit a bill:

Answer 5

1. From the main Bills page, locate the bill in the Draft list and click on Edit for the bill you’d like to work on. This will take you to the bill edit form where you can modify and apply any necessary changes
2. When viewing a single bill, the Edit button can be found on the far right side

Question 6

When you first view the edit page of a bill, you are first presented with the option of editing bill details such as the issue and due dates, the Bill ID #, among other fields

Answer 6

Line items will be grouped together per Matter (where multi-matter bills are concerned). If you are working with a long list of line items, you are able to filter using the quick filter buttons for Services or Expenses or search for a specific item by using the keyword field at the top of the table

Question 7

When editing a specific line item, you can change the following:

Answer 7

• Remove the item from the bill
• Type (Service vs. Expense)
• Activity date
• Category
• Description
• Quantity or Hours
• Rate (hourly rate or flat fee amount)
• Discount (percentage or dollar)
• Tax(es)

Question 8

Any fields you can update will show a pencil icon when your cursor hovers over it. Click in the field you want to edit to activate it for updating

Answer 8

At the top of the page, there are some other important options:

1. Discount note-Notes regarding any invoice-wide discounts
2. Invoice note-Any notes you want to add to this particular invoice
3. Invoice discount ($)- A discount that is applied to the entire invoice (percentage or dollar amount)

*at the very bottom, you can Save or Cancel the edits that you’ve made

Question 9

Approving bills:
bills can be approved at multiple stages:
-When generating bills (by skipping the Bill approval process)
-From the Draft state and from the Pending Approval state

Answer 9

If a bill is approved days after being generated (which may happen if it needs to go through a number of review steps) then the approver will be asked if they want to change the Issue Date to the day that the bill was approved

This is important because by changing the Issue Date, the interest and early payment periods will update accordingly

Question 10

Approve and Apply Trust

Answer 10

Those who are on a subscription plan of Boutique and Elite can use a feature called Auto Trust Application. If you have clients with money in trust, you can apply these funds automatically to their bills when approving them. This speeds up the billing administration and helps ensure that bills are paid quickly