Creating Client Invoices in Clio
Transcript
Hi, this is Paul Carlson, CPA with Law Firm Velocity. In this video, we're going to run through creating client invoices from Clio. So from the menu we go bills, billable clients. We want to use this filter to set our dates. In in this simulation, we are running invoices for the time of September 1 through September 15th, 2017. We can set our start date to 09/01/17 through 9/15/2017. That best practice we're seeing from law firms is they are running invoices twice a month, that the increased communication with clients helps smooth over issues. And for growing firms, we need the cash as quickly as possible to fund payroll. One odd thing that I'll typically do is I will set the start date to 1/1/2000 just on the off chance that someone entered time in a prior year, this way it will capture it.
(01:06)
We only want to bill for this matter. For this example, typically we want to go ahead and run invoices for all times within the system. So with that filter and that in place, we're going to go generate, a couple days ahead for the example. If we're running the invoices through the 15th, we would run those on the 19th, and we would set the due date a week later so that everything's due the 26th and we can generate the bill. Now, everything goes to the draft status. Here's the invoice we just created, so we can go over and view it. Let me quick change the bill theme. And these example databases, things get weird. All right, so here we have a draft of the invoice. Here's the three time charges. Here's the filing fee expense. We have the invoice total, and here's a statement of account.
(02:12)
So this all looks correct. At that point, we will say approve and you can delegate the approval to other people. From here, we have the approved invoice. We look down in trust. We have $25,000 in trust that we want to apply to the invoice. So we go up to payments. We're going to add a payment. We're going to do the payment as of the invoice. We're going to do the payment a day after the invoice is issued. The source is the trust account. We keep trust money on the matter. So here we have $5,000 on trust. So we can go ahead and make that payment and we are going to have the funds go into the operating account. So from here, we can post the payment. Let's go back over to the invoice. And so what we're expecting to see is that the balance due is zero and that we can see that the payment came out of trust.
(03:19)
The things I'm looking for is most of the time, we use trust money to pay client invoices. So I'm expecting to see this to be zero and I'm looking for the trust draw as of today's date to make sure that we didn't accidentally say that payment was from operating funds, which wouldn't reflect the trust draw. And from here, we're good. And so at this point, we can share the invoice and so we could email this directly to the client, and from here it will be emailed out. And with that, just a quick introduction of the bill going out. There's typically a couple approval processes involved before just one person sends everything out the door. The one thing to be careful of is we created the invoice and we told Clio to use trust money to pay the invoice, but the trust money has not been moved at the bank.
(04:25)
So the final step after this is once the invoices are done, we need to go over to the bank account and make transfers from trust into operating for all of the invoice payments. And with that, there is a very quick and very brief introduction to billing from Clio. If you need any help with your law firm's accounting, please give us a shout at Law Firm Velocity.
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