Paul W. Carlson, CPA (00:00):
Hi, this is Paul Carlson, CPA with Law Firm Velocity. In this video we're going to invoice a client. So we are going to create the invoice, apply funds and trust to the invoice, and then email the invoice to the client. So from the dashboard we go activities, invoices, we're going to do add. So we set next invoice number. Just let the system do their default. Invoice date will be the day you're doing the invoices. For this example, I'd have to mess with things a little bit to bring it to the end of the month. So we're going to bring the due date to March 31st, whichever your firm uses. And here's the key thing. From an example, you need to set the cut date. So here I have example transactions on the 18th and 19th. So I need to tell CosmoLex to bring in transactions through the 31st. When you're doing this in real time, the dates make a little more sense.
(00:56):
So on the side we can choose that we are going to create an invoice for our hourly matters. We want to create the invoice just for this client, B hourly matter. And if you have multiple matters running from the firm, you can batch create invoices for all of them so that you could have a dozen invoices here we're going to create at one time. We click generate. All right, and from this screen, we can edit the invoice. So we're going to click on the invoice, click edit, so we can take a look at the items that we can select. From this screen, we can uncheck items that we don't want included on the invoice. So if we did not want this time billed this month, we can leave this time, uncheck it, time goes back into whip, and it would be billed next month.
(01:41):
For some firms, add a percentage of or add an overhead charge to invoices. So this example, we're going to say that we charge 4% of time cards. That's added to the invoice as an additional fee. And typically what this is doing is we're covering... We add this flat fee instead of paying or billing for individual photocopies and phone calls. And from there, those are the changes we needed to make. Generate.
(02:15):
The other thing we want to do is we need to action. Nope, we're going to do invoice payment. We're going to pull money from trust, and from our prior video this client had given us a $10,000 advance fee deposit. So here we're going to use $3,700.20 to pay off the invoice. We'll say it's an ACH, so we don't have to print a check right now for our example. We do receive payment. It says payment has been applied, and so now the invoice is hidden because it has been paid in full. So here we're to show all invoices and here's our invoice back. The balance is there. So let us print the invoice and review what we have. So we're going to do print this one invoice, and it brings it down as a PDF. It's just easier for me to show within the Screen Cast.
(03:20):
All right, so we have our Law Firm invoice. We have our header, amounts due to the client. Here we have the detail on the professional services added to the invoice. Here we have filing fees. We have the total invoice amount, and here we have the overhead charge. So again, this is 4% of professional services, total amount due. Then it tells us how much is left in trust. And then finally below we have a statement of the trust account activity that we have, the 10,000 deposit, and the $3,700 payment for the above invoice.
(04:02):
So the key things to check are one, to make sure that the balance is due. If the client has money in trust, you want to make sure that all the trust money is applied to the invoice, and we don't send out an invoice with a balance due and there's still money in trust. That is probably the most common billing mistake we see. And then the other piece we want to just double check is to make sure that we have an overhead charge on the invoice. And from that, the invoice looks good.
(04:31):
So we have two steps left. So the first is to email the invoice to the client and you would start the process here. And with the invoice email to the client, the most important step now is to log into the bank and transfer the $3,700 from trust into operating.
(04:50):
And so that is a quick overview of the billing process within CosmoLex. If you need help with your law firm's accounting, please check us out at Law Firm Velocity. Thanks, bye.
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