Billing and Activities: Yes, You Need to Know This Stuff
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The document summarizes a presentation about billing and activities in Clio, a legal practice management software. The presentation covers how Clio can help lawyers save time by automating billing tasks, set up different billing rates, generate bills quickly, and offer new billing models like flat fees and subscription plans. Clio also makes it easier for lawyers to collect fees by integrating with online payment systems and allowing payment profiles to incentivize prompt payments.
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Billing and Activities: Yes, You Need to Know This Stuff
- 1. Clio Cloud Conference 2014 SEPTEMBER 22 – 23, 2014 · CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
- 2. Billing and Activities (Yes, you really do need to know this stuff) Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 3. Jarred Bolen Customer Support Specialist Drew Goddyn Technical Escalations Agent Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 4. Our presentation today: • Save time with billing • Do more with your bills • New ways to earn your fees Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 5. Why use Clio for billing? Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 6. • Track your time and expenses with just a few clicks • Save an average of 8 hours every week • Spend more time serving your clients Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 7. • Quickly set and manage default billing rates • Matter Custom Rates • Contact Custom Rates • Activity Descriptions • User Default Rates Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 8. • Bill for more using Clio • Add Time to Communications • Add Time to Resources • Use Timers for speed and accuracy Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 9. Save time creating your bills Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 10. • Generate bills quickly with our “5-Step Bill” • Select the clients you’d like to bill • Choose your bill generation options, and click “Generate” • Review your Draft • Approve the Bill • Download your final bill, or share via Clio Connect Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 11. • Quickly make corrections and revisions to your Bills Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 12. Collecting your fees made eas(ier) Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 13. • Clio makes it easy for your clients to pay their bills • Clio Connect online payments • LawPay • Paypal • LawCharge Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 14. • Use Payment Profiles to incent your clients to pay Promptly • Interest charges • Early payment discounts Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 15. • Quickly view overdue balances and accounts receivable • Write off bad debt Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 16. • Automate your accounts receivable with our integrations, such as: Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 17. New ways to earn your fees Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 18. • Flat Fee Billing • Increased productivity • More attractive to clients Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 19. • Subscription Plans • Convenience for your clients • Encourages client loyalty • Predictable, stable revenue Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
- 20. Thank you for listening! Clio Cloud Conference 2014 #ClioCloud9
Editor's Notes
- Good morning everyone and welcome to Billing Efficiency! For those of you who joined us at the event last night, we applaud your determination to make it to the first Clio University presentation of the day, and should you fall asleep during the course of our presentation, friendly Clio employees are on hand to provide a “push notification” by prodding you with the official ClioCon “waking stick”. If that isn’t enough to wake you up, please note that our goal today is to help you make more money. You look more alert already! Today, we will be focusing on ways Clio’s Billing features can help you get the most out of your day, save you hours every week, and even bill for time you never would have before.
- My name is Jarred Bolen, and I’m part of Clio’s team of Customer Support Specialists. In my 5 months at Clio, I’m sure I’ve had the opportunity to speak with many of you, whether through our phone lines, tickets, or online chat, and after today, you’ll hopefully be able to put a face to the disembodied voice in your ear whenever you have questions about Clio, and be able to say to those other users of your firm, “yes, he IS just as charming in person”. And my Name is Drew Goddyn, I’ve been the technical escalations agent at Clio for nearly a year now, and over that time I’ve had many chances to interact with users such as yourself both over the phone and through email support. My job requires me to work closely with support agents such as Jarred to try and tackle the more complicated issues such as understanding Clio’s interaction with 3rd party integrations. A fun fact about my time at Clio: While I can’t match Jarred for Charm, Since starting my time at Clio, I’ve responded to over x support tickets send in by users.
- Our presentation today is focused on 3 main points: How to track time more efficiently, and generate bills quickly What we can do with those bills and lastly, new ways to earn your fees that you may not have known were possible within Clio.
- But first, the question on everyone’s mind: why use Clio for Billing?
- As I’m sure you’ve experienced, Clio as a whole is built on a model of efficiency. As you may have heard in our ClioDay presentation, our users save, on average, 8 hours per week by using Clio. Our goal is to allow you to spend less time entering and tracking, and spend more of it serving your clients. By using Activity Descriptions (which we’ll cover shortly), for example, you can add a Time Entry with the appropriate rate, and have an itemized bill ready to be sent out in seconds. Given the amount of your resources you dedicate to tracking and billing for your hours every month, what better place to focus on increasing efficiency and streamlining your workflow?
- (DEMO STARTS HERE) Set and manage your default billing rates in a variety of ways Organized into hierarchy May seem confusing, they interact on a basic level Drew will be illustrating First step: user rate (most basic and most universal, all time entries unless otherwise spec.) To View…. Activities (different rates for different activities, automate time entry, saving time) demo ABA task codes
- Track time on activities you may not have even billed for (example)
- Now that we’ve gone over some ways to increase your efficiency while entering your time, we’ll now move on to what used to make the end of the month the bane of every lawyer’s existence: creating your bills, and getting them into the hands (or inboxes) of your clients.
- Using Clio, generating a professional, easy to read for your clients has never been easier. Once our time is entered, you can have a finalized copy of your invoice ready to be sent to your client in a few simple clicks. We’ll demonstrate this now. From the Bills tab in Clio, select the clients your like to bill for in the Billable Clients section. On this page, you also have the option to generate multiple bills by selecting several matters, or filter to find just one specific client or for a specific date range. Once we’ve selected at least one billable client, click Generate. Next, choose your bill generation options in this window. Most of these options are fairly self-explanatory, but this bill generation window is where we can do things like combine multiple matters onto one bill, or apply any necessary taxes. We’ll leave the settings as they are though, and click the green “Generate Bills” button This will create a Draft bill, which we can review by clicking in the green bar above, then clicking the Invoice ID or view link. Once we’ve verified that the time entries on this bill are accurate, simply click the “Approve” link at the top of the page. Your finalized bill will now be in the “Awaiting Payment” state, ready to download or share via Clio Connect.
- Another great feature in Clio’s Billing workflow is the ability to edit Time and Expense entries directly on your Draft bill, and have those changes reflect back in the Matter. This saves you the hassle of deleting your Draft, making the changes in the Matter’s Time tab, and recreating the invoice. To do so, we’ll find a bill in the Drafts section, and click “Edit”. Then, we can change the appropriate line item below. In this example, we’ll say we need to change the rate. Once we make the required changes on the bill, simply check off the “Update Original Record” box below, to ensure your both your bill and the matter page are reflecting the same information. We can also add new Time and Expense entries from the “Edit” screen, simply by clicking the “Add item” link. Just like with the changes we made above, having this new entry added in the Matter is as easy as clicking “Create New Record”. Then, we’ll Update the invoice by clicking the green button below.
- As I’m sure everyone in this room is aware, one of the biggest challenges facing small and solo firms is actually getting your clients to pay their bills. Our goal in this section is to make all the time and energy you invest into tracking and billing for your time worth it.
- Using Clio Connect’s online bill payments, your customers can review and pay their bills online in seconds, through Paypal, LawPay, or LawCharge. This means no more tracking down payments and waiting in line to deposit cheques or cash. You receive your funds instantly through your choice of vendor. For more information on sharing your bills and accepting payments through Clio Connect, I encourage you to check out our Clio Connect presentation today at 2 PM in _____________
- Clio also allows you the option of setting up Payment Profiles, and applying these to individual Clients. Your bills can automatically start accruing interest on late payments, or set up automatic discounts to encourage your clients to pay early. To create a new payment profile, we’ll navigate to the Settings menu, then select “Billing”, then choose the Payment Profiles option on the left-hand side. As Payment Profiles can be assigned to each individual client, we can create multiple profiles tailored to our different clients. The most basic Payment Profile is simply “due upon receipt”. To take advantage of the real potential of these profiles, we’ll select “custom payment terms”. Let’s say we want to charge 7% interest after 30 days. We’d enter a 30 day grace period, then enter in the interest percentage. We can also choose if this is “simple” interest, in which new interest amounts are based only on the principle balance owing, or “compound” interest, which will include previous interest charges in the balance used to calculate these amounts. We can also choose how often we’d like these interest amounts to update on the bill. For our purposes, we’ll have interest charged every 14 days. Then, we can simply edit the contact of our choosing to apply the payment profile. This will take effect on all future invoices generated for this Client.
- To better manage your Accounts Receivable, Clio has a variety of reports and features to quickly view and follow up on overdue balances. To get a quick snapshot of all outstanding balances, we’ll navigate to the “Reports” tab. From here, we’ll select “Accounts Receivable Report”. We have a few options as to how this information is presented. For a more holistic firm wide picture, we’ll run the report for all lawyers, all clients, and all dates. We can also choose whether we want to group the results by individual clients, by practice area, or by responsible attorney. We’ll select the Client option. Then, simply click Generate Report. In a few seconds, we’ll have a complete list of all outstanding balances, broken down by individual invoice. Now, once we know who owes us what, we can move onto the next step. Chasing them down, and forcing them to pay up. Or, alternatively, reminding them of their outstanding balances through a slightly less aggressive means. Rather than reprinting all of their outstanding invoices, we can simply generate Statements of Account for our clients. This option is found under the Bills heading. Then, in the grey bar below, we’ll click Statements of Account. For our example today, we’re just concerned with Clients with outstanding bills, so we don’t need to worry about the first two checkboxes at the top of the page. We’ll group our statements by Client, and, for those clients with multiple matters, we’ll select the option below to separate invoices by matter. Below, you can also apply one of your Bill Themes to your statement, to keep a consistent brand image on all client communication. Not familiar with Bill Themes? Well, you’re in luck! Stick around for the presentation immediately following, in which Drew and I will be covering them in more detail. For now, we’ll click the “Generate Statements”, which will create a PDF we can then print off and send to our Clients!
- By far, however, the easiest possible way to manage outstanding and overdue invoices is to automate it completely, and several of our Third-Party integrations allow you to do just that. Programs like ZenCash and Invoice Sherpa allow you to link your Clio account to automatically bring over client information and overdue balances, and create automatic reminders for clients with overdue amounts. For more information on these integrations, and how to set them up, please stop by our Smart Bar later, and we’d be happy to assist.
- Lastly, we’ll now be going over some different workflows in Clio to help you increase profit and provide the billing options your clients want.
- One of the recent trends in legal billing is the prominence of flat fee billing models. This method is great for a variety of reasons, namely: It can increase your productivity. If you have a flat fee arrangement with a client, it can be a great catalyst to work even more efficiently. These savings of time and money can mean capacity for additional clients, without cutting into profits. Another great reason to consider flat-fee billing is that standard hourly billing – (rewards efficiency rather than penalizing it) Clients also prefer flat fees because it eliminates the “bill anxiety” inherent in hourly billing. When your clients know exactly what you’ll be charging for your services (with the exception of say, reimbursable expenses), they’ll be more at ease, and more willing to pay a premium price for the same services, simply for the peace of mind. Flat fee billing is simple to set up within Clio. To start, we’ll create a new Matter for our client, Ron Cadillac Motors. We’ll say this is a bankruptcy case, so we’ll enter than in the description. We’ll select the responsible attorney, and then we’ll scroll down to the bottom of the page. Under Matter Billing, select Flat Rate. We can then select an activity description if applicable, but since we don’t have one that applies in this scenario, we’ll just enter in a flat rate of, say, $2000. Then, click Create Matter. Clio will automatically create a billable time entry for this flat fee. Now, if we click on the Time Tab, then Add, we can see that when tracking our time for this matter, time Entries will have a default rate of $0. This way we can still easily keep track of our hours, and generate a bill for our clients detailing all the work we’ve done on the case, only charging them for the flat fee. If we head over to the Bills tab, then select Billable Clients, we can see our flat fee for this matter waiting ready to be billed.