Paul W. Carlson, CPA (00:00):
This here is going to show you the workflow for quickly collecting an initial payment from a client without having to create a matter and an invoice within my case. So the workflow that this usually applies for is a criminal defense firm or a bankruptcy firm. The client is on the phone or sitting across the desk from us and the client has agreed to work with the firm. We want to go ahead and charge their credit card for an initial payment. But because the client is here with us, we don't want them to wait for us to create the matter and then to create an invoice. That we want to get them through the process as quickly as possible. On the other side, we do want to swipe that credit card as soon as we can that we don't want to send them an invoice later.
(00:53):
So within my case, we need to do two steps. So one is we need to add some very minimal contact information into the system. So we do add contact. So this is going to be for Ruby Carlson is visiting us about an assault charge. If you turn off the client portal, we don't have to add an email address. I think it's worth taking the extra minute and adding the email address and then inviting the client into the firm portal. So with that, we have the contact in the system.
(01:29):
Next step is to grab a deposit into credit. So what this is we're going to charge a credit card. It's going to go into a limbo stage, and then we can apply the funds later. So here we need to search for Ruby Carlson and we get our credit card screen. So our credit card number is 11111111111112222. Name on the card is Ruby Carlson. Expiration date is November 2027. Security code is 816. Zip code. Going to a charge the card for $1.02 today. We could put a note in here like first payment, total fee is going to be $4. Or just add notes on here what the payment plan is going to be.
(02:34):
All right, we click deposit and the system's going to confirm the amount. It's been successful and we can see that the receipt has been sent to Ruby. So that payment has been posted. Interesting thing to notice with MyCase is if we go back into deposit to client again, let's bring up Ruby again, that my case saved that credit card number into the system. So we could do another charge just based on the stored information. This is handy because a lot of firms struggle that they need a place to store those credit card numbers so they can later apply the credit card into a payment plan. Or if the client misses a payment, where they can go into the system and run a charge at a later date. A lot of firms are taking screen images or they're writing things down, which is not following the credit card rules.
(03:38):
Where MyCase saves every credit card you charge for the client for future use and we've seen where you can have two or three cards in here and it'll save all of them. You can later select which card you want to use for that payment, or which card you want to use on a specific payment plan.
(03:59):
So this was the initial step of this process that we have quickly collected that client payment. In a follow-up video, we're going to talk about how to go into the system and create that matter and the payment plan so we can collect the subsequent payments from this client. Thanks.
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