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Billing Clients With Multiple Matters

C

I have a bunch of questions and will set up a Billing Q&A, but I thought that here I might be able to get a change for more suggestions, perhaps from someone who has a good workaround.

I am a sole business transactional attorney. Many of my clients will have multiple matters running at the same time (eg: 2 trademarks; 3 major contracts; 1 re-draft of their in-house NDA). They do NOT want to get 6 invoices this month.

I’ve been using “combined pdf with cover letter” which is a great start. But, my understanding is, that cannot be emailed from within Smokeball billing. 

Question 1: Can I email the combined pdf with cover letter invoices from within smokeball?

What I’m doing so far is to download that Cover letter with the invoices to my desktop outside of Smokeball. I’ve created an Outlook email cover letter, and I sent that out. BUT… what I didn’t anticipate was, the client still has to click on each invoice to pay.

Question 2: Am I correct that the client then has to pay for each matter separately (clue: they don’t want to).

I’m thinking that perhaps I can, after I download the Cover letter with invoices I could create my own PAY HERE button with a link to LawPay. But this would be a bit of a nuisance. 

I thought perhaps I could fiddle with the reminder email and use that which DOES have a pay now with the Cover Letter, but it attaches only summaries of each matter’s billing, not the original invoice.

Questions 3, 4 and 5:

Am I the only attorney on Smokeball who has clients with multiple matters? 

Does anyone have a workaround?

If this isn’t a problem unique to me, is there something I can ask Smokeball to change (like allowing us to modify the Cover letter to allow a “Pay Now” button), that would be easy to do, perhaps even by next billing cycle?

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Best answer by emily142 19 July 2023, 22:06

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10 replies

E
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Userlevel 4

Hey there! Thanks for reaching out to the Community! Welcome! I am so happy to hear that you scheduled a billing Q&A. You can brainstorm with a billing specialist.

 

Question 1: Can I email the combined pdf with cover letter invoices from within smokeball?

You cannot email the combined PDF from SB Billing. But you can submit a feature suggestion!

Question 2: Am I correct that the client then has to pay for each matter separately (clue: they don’t want to). Yes. I would add my LawPay link to the email that I am sending out with the combined PDF with all of the client’s invoices.

 

Questions 3, 4 and 5:

Am I the only attorney on Smokeball who has clients with multiple matters? Nope!

Does anyone have a workaround? We can submit feature suggestions.

If this isn’t a problem unique to me, is there something I can ask Smokeball to change (like allowing us to modify the Cover letter to allow a “Pay Now” button), that would be easy to do, perhaps even by next billing cycle? We look forward to brainstorming ideas with you in a billing Q&A!

J
Userlevel 4
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We have corporate/institutional clients at our office with several ongoing matters requiring multiple monthly invoices.  We’d be interested in how/if a feature upgrade will ever be implemented.

In the meantime, our workaround is to take our client’s single co-mingled check and manually apportion it to the various invoices.  With some corporate clients, we keep a side tracking spreadsheet to ensure we always have an updated summary of all the moving parts.

For @emily142 - to facilitate positive client relations, maybe instead of the corporate client inputting their own ‘pay now’ credit card payment for multiple individual invoices, they signal to you via email that the batch is “ok to pay’ and you run it through LawPay once….then apportion payments yourself behind the scenes?. 

E
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Userlevel 4

You could absolutely have your client send an email approval for payment of the invoices. My firm represents a medical clinic that has 4 locations. Each location has its own matter, as the subject matter of each clinic is different and the clinic needs to keep track of the legal expenses incurred by each location. We combine the invoices to one attachment with a cover letter. We then send the clinic an email (we have an email template for them created in outlook), that contains our LawPay link and an attachment of the cover letter and invoices. Their billing department clicks on the link and enters the card information. Once that has been completed, I pull up the 4 matters in SB Billing and pay each invoice. I use the Notes section of the payment pop out window to add details and information about the LawPay payment made. I run payment reports in LawPay each month, to verify that all payments were allocated accordingly. If you want to brainstorm or take a deeper dive into this content, we would love to meet with you in a billing Q&A. We always recommend submitting feature suggestions because the more we receive for the same feature update, the more likely the feature gets implemented.

J
Userlevel 4
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“We always recommend submitting feature suggestions because the more we receive for the same feature update, the more likely the feature gets implemented.”

@emily142 and others on the SB team - I think a lot of us would love to see the leaderboard on the hundreds (or thousands?) of feature suggestions in the queue so we could then help ‘stuff the ballot box’ to help the programmers triage the ones that would most broadly serve the SB community.  

 

J

Carolyn16tx - 7 months later, have you found any good work arounds for billing clients with multiple matters? Our Firm is new to Smokeball, but we have several clients with several matters that will certainly not want to receive a dozen emails and make a dozen payment.

Thank you!

M
Userlevel 2

A “billing matter” could be created to combine all Time & Expense entries for each individual matter into one invoice. Subjects could contain tie-back language to the individual matter that line item is related to. 

This is not ideal for a number of reasons but achieves the end result of one invoice to a client with multiple matters. 

I would much rather see a resolution in the billing module to combine multiple matter invoices into one to keep the individual matters “clean” and reduce the possibility of errors. 

E
Rank
Userlevel 4

MFD, your suggestion would work, it might be time consuming if there are numerous entries recorded, but that would definitely work.

 

The other option as of now is to combine all invoices to one pdf, download that combined pdf to your computer, prepare a cover letter enclosing the invoices with a total amount owed and send both off in an email to the client. 

 

Under the download button in SB Billing, you can select Combine with Cover Letter. Some firms use this option, because the cover letter provided will reference the total amount owed. The firms that don’t use this option prefer to draft their own letter.  

M
Userlevel 2

@emily142 I think we do utilize a combined PDF sometimes, but also just attaching multiple invoices from multiple matters to one email. I have begun to create automated standard correspondence documents in the F&T Library to use as email body content when attaching invoices from multiple matters to one email.  The correspondence have simple asks for the type of correspondence and the total amounts requested. No container needed because Outlook has the signatures.

E
Rank
Userlevel 4

Phenomenal ideas. I love that you created an form for the library to help streamline this process. 

J

The other option as of now is to combine all invoices to one pdf, download that combined pdf to your computer, prepare a cover letter enclosing the invoices with a total amount owed and send both off in an email to the client.  

Is there a way to customize that cover letter at all?

 

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