Paul W. Carlson, CPA (00:00):
Hi, this is Paul Carlson, CPA. In this video we're going to start setting up our case study within CosmoLex. So we're going to create the matter and then create an invoice for this initial $6,000 fee. Here we are at the CosmoLex dashboard. To add a matter we click matter, add, date open will be today. Client CosmoLex relies on predictive type. So if we're going to add a new matter for an existing client, we start typing the client name and it will appear here. To make the example more complicated, we are going to add a new client.
(00:38):
So the trickiest part of this screen is deciding if the invoice goes to a person or to an entity. Firms like to send invoices to individuals. It seems more personal or we've seen on the flip side is in IRS audits that if the invoice is made out to an individual, the IRS will argue that it's a personal expense and not a deductible business expense. So if you are working with a business, make sure you go ahead and set this up as an entity. We will name the entity Test Company, so we need to copy that into these other fields as well. Client ID, if you have client ID numbers, you want to enter that. If you don't use client ID numbers, you can skip that field. We need an address for the company. So we'll do 100 Main Street, Phoenix, Arizona, zip code 85248 United States. We also need the name of our primary contact, so we'll just call this Susan.
(01:58):
So that's all we're going to fill out for this example. As the firm starts to use CosmoLex as a central information system, filling this information out as soon as possible will really save time as other people aren't having to find information. So hit save. Our billing method for this matter is fixed fee and it was $6,000. And we can add a matter name. So just generic name for this example. We can add a file name if you want to. And with that we can hit save. We have to say who owns the matter. So in this case, the matter owner is Partner A. All right, so from there we have created a new client. We have created matter, and we can see our unbilled amount is $6,000. So the next step in the process is to create this initial invoice.
(03:02):
Now to create an invoice for this new matter, we go to activities. And from our initial pop-up screen, we want to have the invoice date as of today. Include matter till, so this is saying include activities through what date. So I created this matter on February 15th, I need to put a cut date after that in order to see the matter. For billing type, you need to pick hourly. You'll only see hourly. This is a fixed fee. So here we hit fixed fee, and from here we can generate the invoice. And here we have our invoice. To view the invoice, we can click on here or click on the row and it'll bring up the invoice. All right, so in this video we did three things. We created a new client, we created a new matter, and we created the invoice that we will use to record payment against this flat fee. Our next videos we'll talk about applying the payments and the trust accounting pieces. If you need any help with your immigration firm's accounting, please check us out at lawfirmvelocity.com.
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