Time and Expense Entry

There are multiple options available for tracking your time.

Choose from various billing methods: hourly, fixed fee, and contingency to support your firm's various billing needs.

Understanding the billing workflow, from creating a matter to receiving payment for an invoice, is crucial for ensuring a smooth and efficient billing process.

Changing the billing method associated with your matter is possible, but it depends on two factors:

The Global Timer facilitates seamless transitions between tasks, ensuring precise time tracking for your matters. This feature enables you to monitor time for various activities, including interruptions. It's important to note that only one timer can be active at any given time.

Keeping track of multiple timers enables you to easily monitor time for various activities, accounting for interruptions.

This article will walk you through the various fields of a timecard, offering guidance on efficiently adding your time.

You can edit a timecard, whether it's billed or unbilled, provided you have the necessary permissions. However, once an invoice is finalized, you would need to revert the invoice to draft to make any required changes.

You can delete a timecard, whether it's billed or unbilled, provided you have the necessary permissions. However, if your firm uses accrual-based accounting, you must use the Change/Write off function to delete an item already billed.

When billing by task rate, you establish rates for specific tasks, and these rates are then recorded on timecards.

Hard cost expenses pertain to out-of-pocket transactions eligible for subsequent reimbursement. In a single transaction, you can allocate these expenses to multiple matters and firm costs.

Hard cost expenses involve merging an operating bank account transaction (accounting) with a matter expense card (billing), making the process of editing such expenses intricate. The suitable course of action depends on which transaction element you intend to modify.

To delete a hard cost:

Soft costs are also known as indirect costs or cost recovery. They are "in-house" items generally considered part of your firm's overhead, a portion of which may be attributed to your client.

The process for editing a soft cost depends on whether your firm has billed for it.

To delete a soft cost:

Tailor your billing frequency to align with the specific requirements of your firm and clients. Assign the chosen billing frequency to Client-Matters, enabling you to filter Matters with applied billing frequencies when generating invoices or Pre-bill reports. Additionally, streamline your workflow by filtering Matters, Time/Expense entries, Invoices, and more based on the designated billing frequency.

Once you've enabled a matter for split billing and configured it to split the bill with other matters, you can start splitting bills between the main matter and secondary matters. At times, the financial responsibility for a particular matter is shared among multiple parties. Split billing facilitates the division of fees and expenses associated with a single matter across multiple matters.

If you allow clients to make installment payments for their matter's fixed fee, we offer two setup options for this recurring billing arrangement:

Occasionally, you may need to delete, void, or edit a pre-existing multi-matter hard-cost operating transaction. Please take caution when undertaking these actions, as they can impact your General Ledger, Accounts Receivable, and WIP reports.

Generate a timecard effortlessly by converting events, tasks, notes, or emails into it, ensuring precise billing for your actions. If you mark an activity as billable but fail to record time for it, the Money Finder list will spotlight it, acting as a prompt. You can access the Money Finder on both the Firm Dashboard and the Me Dashboard.

Due to the extensive range of Uniform Task-Based Management System (UTBMS) codes and the preferences of many audit houses/processors that permit only specific codes, the risk of incorrect code usage is elevated. This increases the likelihood of nonconforming bills being rejected.

To optimize the organization of your matter expenses, we have separated them into two distinct categories: hard costs and soft costs. By tracking reimbursable costs separately, your firm ensures accurate revenue accounting, effectively offsetting Profit & loss expenses.

Enhance the efficiency of your time entries by incorporating shorthand in your descriptions.

Default shorthands have been included for your convenience. It is advisable to review the list before generating new shorthands.

While handling Hourly matters, the system automatically utilizes the default rates of each Timekeeper to compute the value of the entered time. Nevertheless, there might be instances where a matter stands out or is uniquely structured, prompting you to adjust the billing rate for that specific matter, deviating from the default Timekeeper billing rates. Such customized rates are referred to as Localized Billing Rates.

Our software supports the industry-standard eBilling formats known as LEDES 1998B, LEDES 2000, LEDES 2.0, and Litigation Advisor and the international eBilling format, LEDES 98BI. If your firm requires another format, please contact our support department.

You can add a timecard to an hourly matter that charges a flat fee instead of an hourly rate. This works well for matters requiring a type of hybrid billing, or for flat fee matters for which you want to itemize flat fee tasks on the invoice.

The desktop time tracker allows you to keep track of your time for any activity that you may be working on.

Software such as Lexmark, Ricoh, Canon, Copitrak, Papercut, and Xerox can track certain soft cost expenses, such as photocopies and printing. The software produces .txt files you can download to import the data into the application.

If a phone message is associated to a matter, you can bill for it.

Billing clients depends on a number of factors ranging from who they work with, how much time and resources are required for a particular matter, how many matters the firm is handling for the client, and more.

You can auto-create a timecard while adding your events, tasks, and notes, ensuring that you record time for those billable activities.