Paul W. Carlson, CPA:
Hi, this is Paul Carlson, CPA with Law Firm Velocity.
(00:03):
In this video, we're looking at how to create a matter invoice, and record a payment for a prepaid flat fee that is deposited directly into the operating account as soon as the firm receives payment. The big question with this process is: when do you create the invoice and the matter within Clio?
(00:24):
Now, there's two schools of thought. So one is you create the matter and the invoice as soon as the client expresses interest and expresses that they're going to hire the firm. The logic there is that once the invoice is within Clio, you can use an accounts receivable report to follow up on any missing payments. The problem with this process is if the client doesn't hire the firm to complete the work, that we now have an invoice in Clio that needs to be deleted, and the matter will need to be closed, and we've cluttered up Clio with yet another contact. So it really depends on the firm's sales process and close rates as to when the matter and invoice are created.
(01:11):
So let's jump in and create an invoice for a $4,000 flat fee. So we go to Matters. We need to create a new matter. This for Client A. And this is going to be matter description, is test 4,000. Go down to the Billing Preferences, and select Flat Fee for $4,000. And we can save the matter. And Clio will point out the things we missed. So we're going to make this open to everyone. I have a couple custom fields that we need to fill in because they're required. You probably don't have these. And from there, we've created the matter. From here, we can see that a setup is billable flat rate for $4,000.
(02:06):
To create the bill, there's this nice little quick Bill button, we can just click right here. And so, here we have the draft invoice, so that looks good. I'll go ahead and generate. Go view the bill. This looks like what we need, so we can approve it. And from here, we can record a payment and say we received a direct payment today for $4,000. And we can record. And from that, we can quickly look at the matter, go under Bills, All, and we can see that we've created a $4,000 invoice issued today with a balance of zero, because it has been paid.
(03:00):
One potential change to this process is after the invoice has been created, and the client has not yet paid, that we could email the invoice to the client, and they could pay online and LawPay would automatically integrate in the payment. And with that, that's a quick overview of how to create invoices for prepaid flat fees in Clio. Thanks.
.jpg)
