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Invoice review by attorneys

  • 31 October 2023
  • 5 replies
  • 56 views
B

Do any of you send draft invoices to your attorneys for review?  If so, what process do you use?

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Best answer by emily142 31 October 2023, 21:48

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5 replies

E
Rank
Userlevel 4

Hey there! Thanks for posting! As a former SB user myself, here was my process

  1. all time in by 6pm on the last day of the month
  2. office manager runs the transactions report in LawPay by the 1st and emails it to me
  3. I then checked payments that came in that were not made by the Pay Now button on our invoices
  4. by the 2nd or 3rd of the month I ran draft invoices by attorney responsible and sent them out to each attorney, at the same time, reviewing my own time on my draft invoices I relied heavily on the filter options on the invoices tab in SB Billing. Once on the global invoices tab, go to the Create Invoices sub tab, use those attorney responsible filters! They work like a charm
  5. Once the drafts were created, I downloaded each attorney’s invoices to one pdf, and emailed the pdf to them, or I printed it out, and put them on their chair so they could not sit down without seeing their invoices that need to be reviewed
  6. attorneys had 3ish days to review their draft invoices and send me edits by marking up their pdf print out of their invoices and turning those in to me, or they made their own edits/adjustments to the invoices in SBB on the invoices tab - this turn around time happened roughly 50% of the time. there were months when drafts/prebills were not generated until the 6th of the month…..
  7. all bills issued to clients by the 6th or 7th of each month

when creating the draft invoices/prebills, I relied heavily on the filters provided on the Create Invoices tab, namely the attorney responsible and the date filters. Because draft invoices/prebills were not run on the last day of the month, the date filters were very important. we did not allow november time to appear on an october invoice. 

 

Here is a short 8 minute video that covers some of what I mentioned above: https://support.smokeball.com/hc/en-us/articles/9663634993815-Bulk-Monthly-Billing-Guide 

 

If you are interested in learning more about staying on top of the invoicing process, please schedule a billing Q&A. We’d love to help out!

B

Thank you so much for that information. I do roughly the same process. I was just wondering if anyone knew of or used an online collaborative drive such as onedrive or google drive for attorney’s to redline.  Perhaps real time for multiple hands to be in the pot at once.

E
Rank
Userlevel 4

The invoices need to be edited in SB Billing in order for the time entries to retain their changes. If you ever want to meet up and discuss, give me a shout! emily.prazak@smokeball.com 

B

I make those final changes for the attorneys and then finalize. 

J
Userlevel 6
Badge +1

@Becky - my partners have done various versions of this too but with printing the invoices out. For new hires I want them to do it themselves with assistance from paralegal/book-keeper. The old way does not make sense and is a poor use of time. 

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