In most law offices, the billing needs to be reviewed by one or more attorneys before being sent out to clients. Depending on which billing program you use, there are a number of ways to do this.
First and foremost, we recommend generating a pre-bill worksheet whenever possible. This report gives the reviewer a complete picture of a client’s status at billing time, plus a lot of valuable supporting information such as the last bill date, last payment date and amount, description of the billing arrangement, and calculation of any interest due on the previous balance. It’s also not a bad thing to have on file for a while in case a client has a question about how a bill was calculated.
In some offices, attorneys prefer to review a document that looks like the actual bill will look. Your time and billing program most likely offers several options for how to proceed immediately after printing bills. Choosing the correct option is very important to the integrity of the billing process. Using Timeslips as an example, the image below shows the screen that appears after you choose to print one or more bills to a printer or to a file:
Options on printing bills
The first option is the safest: place bills in Proof Stage.
After each printed bill is reviewed, it can be individually approved if correct, or cleared for later correction/reprinting/approval and delivery.
Timeslips also offers a Revision Stage, which we do NOT recommend using unless you are crystal clear about its purpose and implications.
If you don’t use Revision Stage, it can be disabled so a user cannot select it by accident.
If you are 100% certain the bills just printed are absolutely correct, though, it’s ok to choose the option to Approve them. The option to Approve Some Bills, on the other hand, provides a choice between Approval and Proof for each bill in the batch. This option can streamline things when you are processing a batch small enough that you can immediately choose which bills are correct and which need revision.
The last option is Do Nothing, which cancels all further processing of the bills that have just printed. Some programs present this option as a Cancel button instead. Beware– if you choose this option, then you have printed documents that look like bills, but they are NOT bills, nor do they have the potential to become bills, because the billing system is not aware of their existence. All of these must be reprinted after corrections are made in order to again have the option to approve or place them in Proof.
As such, it is critical to ensure that these are not sent to clients. Failure to do so will have a serious impact on the integrity of a firm’s billing records.
So, what if your bill reviewers insist on seeing drafts of the actual bills instead of pre-bill worksheets? How do you make sure they are not sent out, which becomes critical if you have chosen the “Do Nothing” option? One client firm prints draft bills on brightly-colored paper, a clever option because they are easy to spot on a desk full of other paperwork. Another great option is to use something like the “Draft” watermark introduced in Timeslips 2015. Using Proof Stage is a good option, too.
A little attention to each printed batch of bills can go a long way toward making your billing procedures work well. When invoice numbers and balances sent to clients match those in the system, payments are easier to apply and track.
Interested in improving the integrity of your firm’s billing records or exploring these options further? Contact one of the Eastern Legal Systems billing experts at 877-357-0555 or [email protected] to ask for help.
Jack Schaller has been active in the field of law office technology since 1989, and has worked with a variety of commercial accounting, legal billing, practice management, and document management software products during his twenty plus years in the software consulting field. During his tenure as a software consultant he has garnered many sales and service awards for his work with legal software products. Jack is a frequent presenter at legal conferences and seminars, and is a regular contributor to TechnoLawyer and other technology publications.