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Billing and Client Contacts

  • April 17, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 23 views
J

Hello.  We are new to Smokeball and I have been reading some of the Q&A’s here.  Like a few of you here, we have clients who have multiple matters and I am not seeing/finding a convenient way to do a couple of things.  For example, let’s say our client, Company ABC, has 100 matters.  Company ABC has a main client contact for most of the matters and then there’s a billing contact and a contact we need to cc on billings.  Company ABC also has a couple of confidential matters where our company contact and billing contact are different and need to be separate from the other bills.  So 98 matters have statements that need to go to the same 3 people and 2 matters where statements go to 2 different people.  Here are my issues/questions:

  1. Do I have to go in to all 98 matters and add the main company contact?  It appears that even if I do that, their name doesn’t even pull onto the invoices anyway.  So now I have to go into each of the 98 matters and override the invoice address to get their name on the invoice?  I also have to go into each of the 98 matters and add cc’s to all of them?  This is EXTREMELY cumbersome!  We have many, many clients who have a ton of matters.  And now what happens if any of these contacts for our client change (as they do often)?  Now I have to go into each of the 98 matters and update them all?  Is there no better way to do this??
  2. I’ve read quite a few Q&As here too about the statements themselves … our client, Company ABC, does not need to get 98 invoices for their 98 cases. They also do not need 98 invoices all combined into 1 PDF.  How confusing is this for our clients?  There is no way at all to generate an invoice for a client that just shows all of their matters on it, has one balance due and will even show a past-due balance that they have (and not individually per matter but in total)? 

Has anyone here who also have clients with multiple matters found good ways to do any of the above?  There are not even enough hours in a week to update all of these files every time there is a change.

1 reply

T
Smokeball Team
  • Trey ScottSmokeball Team
  • Smokeball Team
  • April 21, 2026

Good morning, Jenny,

 

You are correct, that for the information you would like to include on your invoices (different billing address than the client, and including past-due balances) that you would need to override the debtor’s address, and also CC the additional recipients you would like to receive the combined invoices. You can use the combine invoices option, but it will include all pages of the invoices.

 

The Client Statement feature does not work with past due balances or the debtor override feature, and also does not work with CC’s to additional recipients, so it would not work well for your purposes. Additionally, the “confidential” matters would cause problems using this feature, so the best method to separate the invoices between confidential and non-confidential as well as including a different debtor address and CC other recipients is to update the debtor address and add CCs on a matter basis. 

 

I have submitted a feature suggestion to our billing product team with your concerns above to have them re-evaluate billing features for the future that could make this process smoother for your firm. Please do not hesitate to reach out to me with any other questions. 

 

Best,

 

Trey

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