@Wendy N. Yes, we use the following general office/admin matters:

• Financial;
• Human Resources;
• Technology;
• Partner Meetings / Discussions;
• [Name of law firm] Trust Deposit (for our initial cushion deposit);
• [Partner / Employee name] (for documents related to each individual such as hiring / onboarding, CLE / training / discipline, sick/leave, termination etc.)

You can set the matters to “not-billable”. Without knowing how you use your reporting I could not comment on how this will affect it. I want to know how much time is spent on these different non-billable areas of practice.

Hi Wendy, I specifically asked Smokeball support if there was another way to do this rather than setting up matters with my firm as the client. I had hoped there would be a standard non-billable matter type, such as business development, but apparently there is not. So you do just need to set up each of your non-billable matter codes with your firm as a client (or you could assign a dummy-client name, I suppose!)

Chiming-in. 

As @JKibler said, we also have an office “general” matter that collects non-client specific time to better record our work.

On top of that, we have several institutional clients that have a good deal of non-billable admin work that applies to the client generally, but not to individual billable matters we’re handling for the client.   To account for this time, we have created -- and actively use -- a separate “general’ matter in SB for each institutional client.  We amended the matter number to add the work “general” in it so help clearly mark it as such and ease searches too.