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Law firm invoice template word for Customer Service

thank you katie for the introduction um and welcome everyone to this recorded session of best practices for legal billing and getting paid um a little background about myself to set the stage here i actually started my career as a computer science major many years ago um so came up in technology and i eventually landed myself in the legal world as a director at a bar association and from there went to manage law firms of various sizes and about 10 years ago created our own little business that focuses on bookkeeping and accounting needs for solo small firm lawyers so i've been in legal for well over 20 years i've seen a lot of things as it relates to billing practices so i'm sharing with you some practical experience that i've seen working with over we've got over 300 clients that we work with so at any time take that all it's a grain of salt this is what i've experienced um and hopefully by the end of this you guys can walk away with some concrete best practices to improve your billing and getting paid uh faster so the webinar is going to cover there's a little thing about me there the webinar is going to cover uh topics that all relate to billing and and basically cash flow in the end you know getting getting money getting bills out and money in the door um we're gonna talk about some of the technology available to make create a smooth consistent billing cycle we're gonna go over the trust retainer management and and how how how you can set this up in your own firm to manage this and help make sure that things aren't falling through the crack we'll talk about some tools to to build time efficiently we can't have billing happen unless we have actual time entries and expenses to bill and making sure that they're accurate i'm going to spend a little bit of time going over flat fee billing with some contingent cases but mostly flat fee billing it seems to be a topic that comes up a lot i we find with our client base that there is a mix of hourly and flat fee very few of our clients do only flat fee billing but i want to go over that as far as the billing workflow and really more about the economics of that the other thing i want to talk to you about is do you have a billing schedule um are you billing on a set time every month are you billing once a month or twice a month but whether it's once a month or twice a month you have to do it consistently to train your clients to expect that bill to come in so you can get paid and then we'll talk about some um technology really around making it easy to get get paid but what's out there now as far as taking credit card payments or zells or venmo's um and how we can set that up the last two topics i want to talk about are the billing metrics after you're done billing what reports should you be running to capture what has happened during your billing cycle knowing how much you build what was collected via trust transfers and then what new ar has been created and that leads into the last topic i want to go over are cash flow reports and the value of those cash flow reports especially if you're doing everything all the bullets above correctly you should be able to create a really valuable weekly cash flow report so the first one i always like to talk about is laying the foundation for for your billing cycle to get paid and the the the head of the snake here if you want to say that is with your fee agreement and their fee agreements have evolved over the years since i started doing this i don't think old fee agreements never really covered or talked about billing expectations we always added sections to cover your fees um and expenses but now what we're seeing is the need to actually have a section in your a fee agreement that covers billing and explaining your billing so i want to go over some of these steps in here um we want to explain the process what to expect but in a very simple bulleted text we want to make it easy for your clients to read this because it's probably one of the most important sections the first thing to talk about is what is your billing process what can the client expect how frequently will they get their bills how will they get their bills will they come through email will they come through your portal maybe your law practice management software has a way to send bills directly out through the software but either case you want them to know how they're going to receive their bills you also want to know who in your firm is going to be the billing contact so that when you get the bill sent out you're not getting bombarded with questions about your billing so in your fee agreement it's it's worthwhile to just list who your billing contact is if they have any questions about their bills or making payments the other thing you want to lay out is what payment methods do you accept um credit cards are definitely the way to go these days but if you're going to take cash do you take wire transfers if you do wires are there fees associated with the wires so think about those the other thing on credit card payments whether you work with um you know we do a lot of work with law pay and the new a new one is called gravity legal payments another great company but inside of those two platforms you can actually exclude certain credit cards um i have a number of clients that do not like to take american express because the fees are higher so that's something that you do have the flexibility to adjust the other thing we want to lay out in this fee agreement section is the concept of a retainer of a trust retainer first of all will you be taking a retainer up front and does the client understand how that retainer is going to be used right sometimes i i feel like clients feel like that's the when you put a number in there that this is your retainer or your your trust deposit they see that number and think that that's all they're ever going to have to spend on the case which isn't true necessarily if it's an hourly case so you have to make sure they understand that and if you're going to implement um replenishment of retainers which we refer to as evergreen retainers you have to cover this as how you're going to implement this what is their minimum balance that they have to keep in their trust balance in their retainer balance and will you require to keep a credit card on file so that you can automatically replenish the retainers we have another number of clients that do that practice where we do get the credit cards on file and if you work with a credit card system that like a law pay or gravity legals you don't have to store the credit card information this credit card information is stored inside of their platform which is the ideal way to go um the other thing to cover here is if it's a flat fee billing matter explain up front what does the flat fee include are expenses going to be built separately and outside of the scope of the flat fee amount so those are things to all go over in this section oh the other thing that's worth bringing up in this section is if your flat fee deposit is going to be non-refundable is it earned up front that's something to spell out here in your fee agreement because if it's earned up front you can deposit that money directly into your operating account the second second section or one other thing about fee agreements um fee agreements have all evolved over the years to now that they're now they're all electronic so you're using hello sign or or something to send out your fee agreement these days but what can happen with that is that you're not actually sure that your client's reading all these sections that are so important so when you're preparing your fee agreement it's worthwhile to add an initial section initial box next to the sections of the fee agreement that you want to make sure they really read so um keep that in mind when you're sending out your electronic fee agreements the other thing i want to talk to you about is when we're talking about a billing there are certain things we have to collect up front when we create the matters to help facilitate a smooth billing cycle um one of the things i'm going on reading my notes here um i'm going to refer to these as matters and some some places refer to them as cases but we want to be able to collect information about the case in one place we don't want to have to create duplicate entry of data so one of the best things that's come up lately are these wonderful crm systems that you can take your intake in and then have that data on that it automatically transfer it over to your law practice management software so you're not have to double entry things um so comment some of the things to think about to collect with your billing in mind is what type of case are we setting up if it's going to be an hourly case when you're setting up your matter make sure your rates for everybody that's going to work on the case are set correctly so that when the billing happens you're not having to go in and edit rates all the time if it's a flat fee case make sure your law practice management software allows you to select a matter as a flat fee type this becomes really important when we talk about the profitability of flat fee cases um and i'll get back to that in a minute if it's a contingent case you want to make sure you're able to note that and actually include what percent award you're going to get on settlement the other one i like to talk about are pro bono cases and i like creating a separate billing cycle category for pro bonos so that you're not necessarily going to be billing these every month and you don't necessarily want them in your billing cycle but yet you want to keep track of how much revenue or how much time you spend on pro bono cases for for um kpi reports you know how much time did you spend on that sometimes um bar associations will actually use pro bono work towards continuing education hours if you can report that the other type of setting we use is bill at end of case and all these ones that i'm going through here where it talks about the defined type of case for billing workflow um inside of clio which is the product that i use the most we use custom fields to set these up because this helps us filter out what bills are going to be billed in batches if you have a particular matter that you don't want to get billed at till the end of the case we want to notify that because we don't want that matter showing up in your normal billing cycle every month and then having to pull it out or have it accidentally get built and then whatever other special cases you might have for your own law firm needs why i find it important to define the type of case is because it lets me batch bill better so i can run a batch of bills for hourly cases i could run a batch of bills for flat fee i could run them for pro bono i have lots of different i have more flexibility now which makes the whole billing cycle much more efficient when you're setting up your new matters and your new clients be sure you collect all the client information remember that this information is going to show up on your invoice so make sure everything's spelled correctly make sure the address has been added um and but mostly those two things and one of the things because the worst thing you want to do is send an invoice to a client that just has their name on it with no address information it looks sloppy and if it's not spelled right one thing i want to point out as estate planning clients is how you set these up so that their names appear on the bills because a lot of times you're doing these for couples and you want to make sure that when you create your client in your data in your in your system there that it includes both both both the spouse's names so that when they get their invoice it's not just showing the husband's name or the wife's name but it actually shows both names the other thing you want to set up inside of your matter is we i call them related contacts um a lot of practice management softwares have these but the one you want to really identify here is who should get the invoices so when you do your billing and you send out your invoices you want to get this invoice into the hand of the person that's going to get it paid so you get it paid correctly quick quickly so when you're doing intake with your client an important question to ask them is who they who should be receiving copies of the invoices in addition to themselves to themselves so you might have to send it to two people the other way on that one is identify any preferred methods of communications if if for whatever reason um they they want their bills mailed not i don't know why i would want that but some people do i have a number of clients that we we create a custom field inside the database that says you know method of of um sending bill is is via email or via usp us mail so just ask that question so again you're making sure that it's getting it into the right hands and in our business we are big on checklists so i have a checklist for a new matter set up to make sure that we're covering all the bases before we actually start the billing process for those cat cases um oh sorry i'm going backwards all right let's talk a little bit about retainers um we have found with our group of clients that the clients that do get and get retainers up front and replenish them are the most profitable law firms we work with their cash flow is amazing so talk a let's talk a little bit about here about the difference between a trust retainer and a general retainer trust retainers are retainers that actually get deposited into your iota account and sit on your books as a liability that's not your money until until you've run an invoice and have earned those fees and can reimburse yourself for expenses general retainers on the other hand are retainers that go directly into your operating account so they're technically earned upon receipt so we have two types of retainers i'm going to focus mostly on trust retainers since that's the one that we use the trust replenishments for as well and when you're asking for a trust retainer when you're signing up a new case you have to ask yourself how much do you really need up front and my aunt my my answer to that question is can you ever really have too much and the answer is really no um because you can always return the money if you don't use it all which actually happens very rarely most of time you're running out of retainers i think you can all relate to that concept there um so don't be afraid to ask you know don't ask for a 500 retainer really really put it out there let them know how much you think you're going to need to cover the first couple months of this case and remember this is hourly this is all hourly work um and in the end it's going to save you a lot of time and energy if you get enough trust money up front because you're not then following up on ar later um when you're back to the fee agreement again and we're talking about getting trust retainers make sure you understand let make sure the client understands exactly what a trust retainer is this concept of a trust account is brand new to them it's not terminology they're used to hearing so it's worthwhile and explain it to them that it's money that that you you don't earn until you get a bill sent to them and apply the funds and that if there's any left over they will get the money returned lastly we talked a little bit about evergreen evergreen retainers um well the other thing i want to add here is if you're going to do evergreen retainers which is really the minimum trust balance concept that they have to keep a minimum balance um you may want to let your share with your clients that's like when they get an email that says hey it's time to replenish your trust balance to your minimum amount it might be worth sharing with them a sample of the email text they're going to get related to replenishing the retainer after a billing cycle sometimes they get a little bit confused because they may get a invoice from you that says you know here's your current invoice we used your retainer funds to make payment there's no payment due at this time right but you are due to replenish your retainer so now we have to collect eight hundred dollars to replenish your retainer so that that text in an email can be a little bit um confusing to a client if you're sending that to them for the first time and they have not ever had that explained to them so worthwhile explaining that um this one is collecting the retainers and the amount due here's a scenario let's say that you um you bill a client the current invoice has depleted their funds so now they owe 500 and they're due to replenish the retainer to a thousand dollars so when you're sending out their current invoice you're going to send a message that says you know here's your current invoice we've used your retainer funds on balance your current retainer balance is zero dollars and you'll you now owe 500 on the current invoice and by the way you are now due to also replenish your retainer to a thousand dollars so technically they you have to collect fifteen hundred dollars to pay their current invoice and to replenish their trust that's a lot of language to send in one email um and it's and if they're paying by credit card the problem with with sending them a link to to make this payment is you don't have the option of sending them a link to their operating account well you do you do have the option of sending them two links the chances of them using both links are slim to none because you need a link to your operating account for the hundred dollars and you need a link to your trust account for a thousand dollars i want to point out that gravity legal um love this piece of their technology talking about using technology to make life easier they have it built into their system that you can send a client a request for fifteen hundred dollars and when that payment comes in it will automatically split the payment and put five hundred dollars into your operating account and a thousand dollars into your trust account so if you do a lot of these scenarios it's actually a worth looking into uh the gravity legal i am not sure if law pay has this on their radar screen to do or not but i knew do know that gravity legal does and we're using that with a lot of clients the next one back to credit cards for replenishment of retainers just remember you don't necessarily have to collect and store the credit card information if you work with a credit card processing that you can easily recharge or process recurring payments then you don't have to have the risk of storing any client information which becomes an ethics issue i believe in some states um so that's why we like working with credit card companies that are used to working with law firms um that give us this flexibility on that wind the other thing i want to point out it goes back to your fee agreement which you know is the foundation that we're talking about um if you do and and i'm going to point this out because i do have a number of appliances that do this inside of their fee agreement they actually have a section where they capture the credit card information so you actually have the opportunity to have that credit card information to make that those trust replenishment um payments yourself so you're more in control of it um with that credit card information i'll just throw that out there as an option um let's talk a little bit about what you do all day you know how how how does your time end up on the bill and expenses because that was one we don't want to lose track of um and how what tools you have in place to make sure that all of your time is being captured you would think about where you spend most of your day doing it's doing emails it's meetings it's document prep it might be hearings it might be administrative work that's actually non-billable but you want to capture it in your daily day so you know how much you're spending time on things like that you might be interviewing potential new clients that takes time so think about capturing your time we do this to get your utilization rate which is a whole other topic for another seminar but um something you really want to pay get focused on for everyone in your law firm is this utilization rate how many available hours of the day are getting booked to billable work right and it's it's actually a very low number quite surprisingly but um and you won't know that number unless you're tracking your hours so in our business i have 12 employees we bill by the hour and everybody documents their time daily and at the end of the day they run a daily timesheet report that at the bottom of the report it'll show how many hours they recorded on on time that day and we have limits that we set so we want to make sure that they're billing at least 6.5 hours a day and in capturing your time let's use what we have available to capture it so you're not having to remember to go add time entries if you're putting your meetings on your calendars or phone call meetings you can go to your calendar in some most practice management software systems and convert that calendar entry to a time entry okay when you're composing or responding to emails there's products out there that after you hit send on the email it'll pop up a screen that says hey you just wrote this email do you want to record a time entry for that and and on what matter do you want to put that time entry i tell you what responding to emails is is it is a is it takes a lot of time out of your day and i bet doesn't end up on many bills so using we use faster law there's a product called chrometa that's a good product there's other products out there but that one's worth investing in the other products that are out there is during the day when you're working on word documents or excel spreadsheets or pdfs you're going to have a program running in the background tracking how long you had a document open and you were working on it and when you close that document a screen will pop up and ask you if you want to record time for the work you just did on that particular document a lot of law practice management systems have timers one of the habits we have is we use clio we go in and then in the morning and we create a pretty much a daily to-do list under the activities page and as we're going through the activities all day long we're turning on and turning off the timers as we complete the tasks and very valuable tool on that end and of course review your time at the end of the day it's a lot to take in there but it's really important to understand the need to capture your time so that the bills so you can get paid for all the work that you've been doing flat fee cases let's talk a little bit a minute about flat fee cases and why why clients like them and why you might like them clients like them because it's predictable and it's a bit transparent right um you like them because it's easy billing and i have a lot of people saying well i don't have to enter my time back right and a lot of people will say it's more predictable income but it's only predictable income if you're signing up flat fee cases in a efficient way right and you're getting the efficient work done and you're getting enough of those flat fee cases in every every month um on the point about you don't have to enter your time you actually really do have to enter your time because you're not going to know how profitable a flat fee case is without capturing your time on those flat fee cases and the other challenge is if your new firm starting up how do you set your flat fee case amounts that's probably one of the bigger challenges and i guarantee you that most of you are probably setting up setting them too low um so how do we know what to do with our flat feet cases um you need to enter your time and track it and when you're looking at your law practice management software and you're entering your time you don't want that time to be billable time it's actually non-billable time because you're only going to bill for the five thousand dollars flat fee part of it but you want to enter all your time so that you can run your reports but you don't want that time to show up on a bill necessarily so keep that in mind but you still want to enter your time um another note about flat fee cases is if you set up your flat feet case to take um let's say it's a five thousand dollar state plan and you're going to take 2500 on on a signing of the fee agreement and then at the delivery of the product you're going to take another 2500 they have to pay the last part of it um we have a lot of estate planning lawyers and i'll tell you what they run into a lot is after they've prepared all the documents the clients dragged their feet to come in and actually sign the documents right so you're never gonna you're not getting that last payment because the documents are never getting signed so keep that in mind when you're setting up some of your estate planning flat fee cases on exactly when you want to take delivery of the final payment and time that better so you're not waiting on the client who can be dragging their fee the thing i like about fluffy cases is it develops it forces you to develop really solid standard procedures because these flat feet cases have to be efficient it forces you to focus on the workflow and execution and delivery of your product um and then there's technology available out there to help you actually build these workflows and legal boards is one of the ones we use a lot great product where you can build the workflow for any type of different case and make sure that you're not letting anything fall through the crack and it's repeatable so every time you sign up a new another estate planning you have the set workflow in place that you can assign to that case so that's one of the things to think about flat fees that i really super like is it does force you to think about workflows contingent cases why do you have to keep time on contingent cases contingent cases vary a lot but one of the things you really want to make sure you keep track of on contingent cases are any expenses that you are paying for making sure those get added and if you ever have to submit a fee award letter you're going to have to be able to submit how much time you actually spent on the case we see this a lot with probate cases so keep all those in mind okay and another these are just some things to think about if you're going to do flat fee cases um one of the things that i find with those is that i actually do expose you to a new set of desirable clients um that maybe don't don't want the hourly case so but if you're going to attract those clients you have to have a marketing platform on your website that does promote these flat fee services in a very attractive way and really outlays what i call packages of of services whether it's a setting up an llc might be a package a flat fee package different levels of estate planning maybe flat fee projects if you're doing evictions things like that so clarity you know real um transparency about your flat fee services on your website can go a long way to helping you be more profitable in getting more flat fee cases and delivering on those five feet cases okay um this is a little bit about what do i need to measure on my what data do i have to collect and then be able to run reports on so i know that my flat fee cases are profitable um so we got to look at historical data so as you're starting doing flat fee cases the more data you capture is going to help you actually price your flat fee cases in the future um so one of the things we want to look at is one of the good things about flat fee cases is the collection history the collection and realization on these cases should be close to 100 percent um the only time we see that fall off is in that scenario i talked about um estate planning when the clients dragging their feet to come in to do the final signing which means you're not getting that final payment um the other thing you want to look at is what is your your cost per flat fee matter and that's not not how many hours you put in it times your billable rates that's more about the labor cost so if if someone is you know billing at you know 200 an hour and but and they're on a salary of a certain set amount that's your labor cost the salary is your labor cost so you want to think about what is your actual cost on those matters versus how much you actually build on those matters and then that can get you to your profit number as well so keep that in mind um the number four item about billing and getting paid is sticking to a billing schedule um we're seeing a large increase in number of clients that are billing twice a month um and most of the clients that are billing tries a month are clients that actually have monies and trusts that are really being diligent about getting retainers and retainer replenishments but whether you decide to build once a month or twice a month you have to be consistent with it and it's really hard to let this slip off your plate if you're a really busy solo lawyer or small practice lawyer so it's best to delegate this to someone other than you um to do your billing and and when you when you're going to delegate this task before you delegate it as part of the delegation create an invoice checklist is going to be really important because there's going to be certain steps you want to make sure happen during each billing cycle such as when are when are draft bills you know um created when are they reviewed and due back right um do we have uh what reports do we run after billing one of the most important reports you want to run is your trust transfer report so you know how much money to transfer after you have completed the billing the other report that might be on that checklist is do you know your trust replenishment reports so in your billing summary so there's a lot of things that happen during a billing cycle more than just sending out the bills it's also the aftermath of the billing process so creating that checklist and i think i have a sample of a checklist here and i don't know if you guys are going to be getting a copy of this powerpoint or not well i have to ask joe at legal boards um but this is a sample of a checklist that we put together for a client um that has detailed steps of everything that has to happen and once again we're we use cleo a lot so you're going to see reference to clio whether it's cleo practice panther my case or or whatever lean law product you're using it all can pertain the same way so good to keep that in mind um the second the fifth thing i want to bring up on the billing is oh this is one of my pet peeves and we do a lot of invoicing for clients and i see a lot of bills go out that have really bad grammar on a bad punctuation that the the lawyers to start taking the time to correct um i think that sends a bad message to your client it's sloppy looking it tells them you don't really you're that you might not as care as much your attention to detail isn't great but as a lawyer your attention to detail has to be really good actually to build the confidence that you want to extend to your client and that confidence is not only in your legal work done but also in how you present your bills to them as well so keep remember to check that have um like when you're training new lawyers or paralegals you should have a cheat sheet for them on your expectations of time entries like you know create you know every every sentence begins with a capital letter do you use periods at the end of the set that's each time entry are you grouping time entries so sometimes i'll see a time entry like for 0.9 but in the text of the description they'll have you know reviewed emails point one um prepared documents point six and then the last one might be review documents with lawyer for point two which all adds up to the point nine if you're going to do that you just have to make sure that your math is correct the other thing that you want to make sure you're doing is your time and your time entries are a way for you to tell the story about how you're moving the ball along with their case right it's showing progress that things are happening um if a client gets a bill with only one time entry they they're obviously going to see that there wasn't much done on their their case that month or that billing cycle but it's important for you to capture all your time and put it on the bill if you want to not charge for the time that's fine you can always zero it out but still showing the client that the work was done has a lot of value and it also is valuable to let them see that you didn't charge them for those times so we tend to make um separate time entries that we want to we want to zero out in that place where we talked about grouping time entries this is the case where you don't want to group the time entries so that you can intentionally zero it out the other thing about sending bills to your clients is are they getting regular information about the fact that they have past due balances and and and do they have money and trust so each invoice that you send out when you build your invoice template should have a section we call it a statement of accounts that will list any outstanding invoices and how much is owed on each of those invoices and then the next section of the invoice template would show what's their current trust balance so that they can visually see how much they have left in trust so those are those things and then the other thing we want to talk about is making it easy for your clients to make payments and this has changed a lot over the past 10 years with credit cards becoming so widely accepted and i think with covet it became even more important because mailing checks was really difficult if you weren't in the office anymore you were working from home um and the checks were arriving at the office we saw a large delay in um and getting those checks added to the um to the bills in the law practice management software and what would happen is we would send out an invoice to a client that showed a pass-through balance but they would say hey i mailed a check two weeks ago why isn't that check on there well we find out where the check stuck down at the office which we haven't been to for you know a couple weeks um so a lot of lot more firms started taking um credit cards over that period um when you're building your invoice template something to think about is in the footer of your invoice make sure you add pertinent information about how they can make a payment um listen all your payment options if your credit card go ahead and make sure you embed the credit card link to make payment if you're going to do ach make sure you add the information for them to send the ach payment to and if you're going to accept wire transfers make sure your includes your bank information as well paypal zell and venmo um i caution using those methods if you're taking payments into the trust account um i'm not even sure that um venmo will let you do that uh but i don't know a lot about the venmo other than paying my kids for stuff that they'd be paid for um and the zell one we do see a more increase in zell more like more payments going out vsl than payments coming in um the other thing about those cell payments i'll caution you on is from a bookkeeping standpoint because that's what we do is those sell payments will show up in the bank account and all of a sudden you have to remember to actually add that payment to the invoice that's in your billing system right so there's a little bit of um a little bit of extra work there when you see that sell payment come in you have to actually remember to physically go apply that payment to to the invoice in the system to reflect that okay let's talk a little bit about billing metric reports after you've done your billing what do we want to measure about that billing cycle this is probably my funnest part about billing but i like reports so one of my favorite reports is called a billing summary report um and i'm going to basically go over the clio version of this report but i'm sure this is available in other systems as well we run this report so we can send to the lawyer a summary of every invoice that was created and billed it also shows the amount built by attorney how much was collected and that is going to be the collective column is going to be because we use trust money to pay the bill right um so we call those trust transfers and then what new ar was created as a result of this billing cycle um so it's a nice report the totals at the bottom are really what they're going to focus on is the amount that was billed that's future revenue right that's going to be coming in the amount that was actually collected during the billing cycle which is your trust transfers and then what new ar is created because we always want to keep an eye on our accounts receivable the second report that we run which is really for audit purposes is we want to run a report that shows by detail by client by invoice number the amount of trust money that was applied during the billing cycle and that total amount and we call that a trust transfer report and that's the report that needs to be recorded in your in your quickbooks in your financial system and that's the amount of money that has to actually physically be transferred from your trust account to your operating account and having that report we call it an audit log so it has backup of that number that dollar amount that you actually transferred at the bank the third report we run is called a trust replenishment report and this is a report that will list every client actually i think it's by matter the current trust balance right the amount of their minimum required and how much they're below their minimum requirement so this is a report that we use as our control log for knowing who has to be sent trust replenishments and it's anyone that has a dollar amount in the column that says below minimum trust balance we do tend to review this report with our attorneys before we just send out replenishments because if you're at the end of your case they may not want to replenish and they also might be ready to to return any trust monies so that's a great report to review before you automatically just start replenishing trust or sending out trust replenishment requests the web report is after billing we run the whip report which by now should be pretty much depleted because you just did a lot of billing unless you've got contingent cases out there but we like to run the rip report after billing to see what didn't get billed at any time and if we missed anything and then the last report we run is the ar aging report and we do the aging report because it shows the columns remember an aging report will show current 30 days past due 60 days 90 days 120 right so we want to look at you know what was new ar what got created in the current column but we also want to look at those current columns do they have really old stuff that's 90 and 20 days old so that's a telltale sign that you're working on a client doing current work on a client that owes you an invoice that's 90 or 120 days old so to us that's a red flag all right we want to red flag that client we want to get on top of that right away with a phone call and get some payments made before you continue working on that another billing cycle sorry i could grab a drink here and then the last thing i want to finish up with is cash flow reports another fun report that i love doing um we do a lot of weekly cash flow reports um but the is it focus on billing for a minute what i want to focus on is what is on a cash flow report that helps you as a business owner and one of the things that we're going to do one there's a lot of things on the cash flow report but things that are going to be on the cash flow report that are going to help you you know understand your business and your own billing cycle are a couple things we track accounts receivable so every week we're looking at your accounts receivable number seeing it going up or seeing it going down we prefer to see it come down but after billing it will go up right away right because you had just did a billing so we'll see that number go up but two weeks later we really hope we see that number come down the other thing that we track on there are your work in progress so what is future and your work in progress is a prediction of future income if you think about it that way so that tells you how much you have available to bill on your next cycle and then the other thing that i actually don't have on here which i should is what's your current trust account balance how much money are you holding in trust because that's also a predictor of future revenue for the billing cycles the other things that are on your cash flow report actually i'll bring up a view of one right here it might be a little hard to see but this is just a snapshot of a typical um billing report but i really want to point out at the the top of it we we focus on what monies came in and it's the current we always focus with the current week is the actual is actual numbers the future weeks to the right are projection numbers okay um the bottom part where we talk about um see where towards the bottom of the page if you're looking at my pointer there we have the current credit card balances which is valuable to keep an eye on as well but we also have those work in process numbers and the accounts receivable in your current trust balance so we're keeping track of these numbers we're looking at them every single week as a predictor of future income okay for future revenue which is at the top of the cash flow report the top of the funnel um so that is on the other thing on the cash flow reports that we like to keep track of we didn't talk a lot about expenses or things like that but we keep an eye on what's what's the current month-to-date revenue and then what's your monthly nut in a monthly nut if you're not used to that terminology is what are your fixed monthly costs that have to be covered every month and any time you make revenue beyond your monthly nut it is that you're ahead of the game it's money in your own pocket you know maybe you can take a larger owner draw that month um if it's below the monthly nut that means you got to step up your billing before the end of the month to reach that goal so that's what those numbers are for right there that was a lot of information to cover um i appreciate your time and if you have any questions um or happy to answer anything i am pretty readily available via email which is not on here right now but it's on our website if you get our website you'll find my email on there as well um happy to help out if anybody needs any other tips or tricks for doing billing and improving your cash flow let me know i'm happy to answer any questions katie i'll let you take it from here and appreciate everyone's time