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Lawyer billing format for Planning

hey everyone welcome to today's webinar about best building practices we're going to let everyone trickle in today we're going to be hearing about some of our highest performing customers and how they get the most from their billing practices [Music] as we're all getting settled in we're going to be providing opportunities to ask questions at the end of the webinar so as you go through this webinar feel free to use the chat to go ahead and type in any questions you may have as we get started here and let everyone come in we're gonna ask a fun get to know you questions so get ready for that if anyone's not aware of where the chat is you can navigate to the bottom of your zoom webinar panel there's a button that says chat just click that um you're able to toggle between the hosts and panelists and then um everyone just make sure it's set to everyone so we can see your responses all right as we're getting ready here why don't we answer a fun question so um i know all of us have had our working environments change over the past year and a half so i'd love to know do you prefer working from home or do you prefer working from the office and why more productive in the office danielle i definitely don't have the same experience there's just so many fun people to talk to a lot home less distractions some people said it's more productive at home but no no co-workers there a lot of people saying they use their commute time for being able to do other things outside of driving to the office i'm impressed with the people who say they're productive both ways that's awesome to hear definitely don't envy those with the hour long commute thought that's painful i bet that time is better spent at home all right guys well let's get started um i want to uh go ahead and introduce myself and mention the purpose of this webinar so today we're just going to be going over um things that we've heard as we've really built out our billing and payments platform to just understand what some of the common best-selling practices are um what we've heard from others and how they've had success in using my case and then just how you might be able to improve your own billing practices to increase efficiency um like i mentioned i do want to introduce myself i'm kathleen and i head up our product and ux team here at my case i work closely with law firms to really understand the daily challenges that they face and then we look to figure out how we can solve those with technology so i've been at my case for about five years now and i'm constantly surprised by how much work there is to do in a law firm so i love talking to y'all and just figuring out how we can make that better today i'm going to be facilitating this webinar and then joining me today is our presenter and in-house billing and payments expert sam so sam works directly with our customers as well to learn all about billing and collection challenges they face and then works with our development teams to figure out the best solutions to those challenges and then when he isn't helping law firms bill collect payment he can be found trail running around san diego all right so as we get started i wanted to ask y'all a quick question um you'll see a poll pop up and you'll be able to answer this from your computer so this first question here is how do you build your clients are you using flat coffee contingency hourly or mixed you should see a poll pop up go ahead and respond with that i'm going to give you guys about 30 seconds to go ahead and answer this poll then we'll close it and show those results just a couple more seconds here all right i'm going to go ahead and in the bowl and share these results so it looks like it's mixed with flat fee and hourly all right so we are going to go over some of these key challenges we hear our customers mention and one of the things that we often hear is that customers get so busy with just their daily work that they miss some of the billable hours that they could collect from their clients and so sam i know you've heard this challenge communicated in the conversations you've heard with law firms what what types of things do you hear yeah and hi everyone again as kathleen mentioned uh sam allen here with the my case product team um this is actually one of the overall biggest challenges we do here from our customer base and that's actually true across the board whether you bill hourly or even if you work flat fee contingency cases predominantly um you still need to keep accurate records of your work be it for you both your clients or courts whatever um you know the types of cases you're working involved so in response to this my case was built to ensure that you are really maximizing the number of billable hours you can capture uh in fact if i move over to the next slide here we've typically seen our customers increase the number of total billable hours captured by up to 20 percent and i'm gonna actually hop over to my case here and go through some of the features that have allowed our customers to do that uh also are simple uh the first one here are these um timers that are built into the system and accessible from anywhere within my case so when you're busy doing work that is potentially billable or work that you just at least want to keep a record of let's say as an example i'm doing some document preparation for my adam civil case i will click the relevant case um do a simple description here let's do document prep and as i'm doing this uh drafting documents filling out whether whatever stock templates i have um all i have to do is select this timer and when i'm done i'll pause it and select save a time entry so obviously for the purpose of this demo this is going to be a quick one only 20 seconds but when i select the time entry will carry over that information to this modal and the cool thing is as a my case user i already have my default hourly rate saved to the system so we will automatically calculate for you um based on the amount of time logged and your hourly rate how much you could potentially charge for this case or excuse me for this particular time entry i'm free to add any additional um descriptions here or if i have stock saved up activities within my case a lot of case research consultation fees court appearances in this case document drafting i can select that and when i'm done all i have to do is click save and that time entry will be automatically filed away to the relevant case and client files uh what this does is just ensure that as i'm going on invoicing which we'll go over later on i'm not having to scramble around to keep proper record of all of my entries for all my different cases and clients now beyond these uh generic timers that we have up in the upper right hand corner here we also have what i'll call contextualized timers and i'll show you what i mean by that so let's go over to the call log for an example uh let's say a customer calls in and um i want to keep track or keep record that call i would simply click add call go excuse me oh my apologies i keep uh there we go having a couple internet issues here uh once i click add call if you notice in the lower left hand corner here as soon as i clicked add call a timer started for me now what this does is essentially ensure that you know i'm not having to actively remember while i'm doing other things that i should be keeping track of this time if once i'm done with this call i feel it is worthy of being recorded and it's something i'm going to want to build for i would simply select this save and add time enter button here and these exact same ad time and tree modal will pop up and like before it will get filed away to the relevant case and client files that exist within my case so that's a high overview of the different ways you can keep track time within my case but beyond these we actually hear from a lot of our clients that they don't even have time to proactively or actively keep track and remember to click those timers or enter in their relevant time entries while they're busy doing myriad other things i was actually just talking to a criminal defense firm the other week and now that courts have been open for a few months uh it's kind of just a sprint just to accomplish all the tasks they need to serve their clients and that's all right uh they it's my case will actually in the back end uh keep track of all of your potential time entries for you using what we call the smart time finder um so i'll demo that now i'll simply collect excuse me click the smart time finder here in the lower right hand corner um for the purpose of this demo i'll just do year to date and what you see here is um a list of all any action that i perform within my case be it you know sending a text message emailing someone from my case sending a message to the client portal any event task really sky's the limit here um all of that even if you don't actively save uh or record a time entry will get logged in this smart time finder so that at the end of your week month quarter whatever cadence it is that you go through and like to review your time entries you can go through and say oh i remember that phone call with a chat and i could even click into it to view a description to draw my memory i didn't track time for that uh because it's existing in this list here so i'll select uh select track time and you'll be able to save and file away that time entry with the appropriate amount of time and appropriate um [Music] billable amount based on your hourly rate that's saved within my case so really with all these features we allow you to both actively as well as passively track and record all of your potential time entries so you're actually getting paid for all the work that you're doing so with that i'll actually pass it over back to kathleen here thanks so much sam yeah we know you guys are super busy and that you're constantly having to juggle between different activities but i know billing and invoicing is obviously very important to you as that's the way you get paid so i'd love to just take some time to understand how much time do you actually spend on billing and invoicing each month you or your staff um you'll see the pool pop up feel free to just select the answer that represents best how you guys spend your time on building an invoicing and then we will share those results in about 20 seconds here great i'm just going to give it about five more seconds go ahead and get your responses in again selecting from the poll how much time do you and your staff spend on billing and invoicing each month all right we're going to go ahead and stop that poll and share these results so it looks like the most commonly uh chosen answer was 10 to 15 hours followed by 16 to 20. so again a pretty significant amount of time each month spent on billing and invoicing each month so as we go into the next hurdle i i don't think it'll come as a shock that many of our customers are saying that billing and invoicing takes far too many hours per week they're spending a lot of time here and time that could be better spent serving their customers or in doing other work that is relevant to the firm and so i know sam's heard a lot of around this um sam what are some common challenges that you've heard around billing and invoicing and how much time it takes yeah well first i'll say shout out to all the folks in the audience here you're going through a lot of your billing invoicing faster than what we've heard from a lot of folks um there really is a wide range of hours a firm will typically spend on creating and managing their invoices each month depending on your individual processes and billing structures can also influence things uh but a pretty universal sentiment is that it's just taken way too much time um well we've heard from our current customer base that a firm will spend upwards of 10 to 15 hours conservatively on creating each voices every week or two and that is often exacerbated by having multiple softwares across which your data lives so for instance your work may be tracked in one software your invoice has generated another and you might be receiving payments through a third or even fourth software so reconciling all these different data sources and ensuring continuity becomes a bit of a nightmare when it comes to actually creating your invoices and getting them sent out fortunately with uh my case in my case payments uh all this data does live together and invoice generation becomes a lot more streamlined um you can see that i'm on our current customer base um based on feedback from them we've seen a average monthly time savings of about 10 to 15 hours so i'll hop on over back to my case and we will walk you through some of the different ways you can generate and send out invoices within our software i'll start simple i'll go with a simple single invoice generation and creation here i will go over to excuse me the billing tab and select invoices and again i'm just going to walk through to get started uh creating a single invoice so when i'm ready to create a one and off invoice i will select add invoice and what you're seeing here is just a running list of all of the open cases and clients that have a dollar amount associated with their case so in order to generate an invoice all i have to do is select invoice this case and the nice thing about working out in my case is that it can be done in a matter of seconds because like i was saying before all of your different lie items from the time you have tracked using those smart time finder options or the timers that we just demoed to the expenses you've recorded uh all these different line items are automatically tied back to your case and client files so you're not having to manually compile all these entries together so as soon as i click let's say invoice this case again for the adam civil case any information financial information items that i have connected to the adam civil case will automatically be populated within this invoice um so all i'll have to do is uh configure it to the uh appropriate terms under which my firm does billing and payments so i do on average let's do net 60 firms um i'll actually pause here and say that you will see quite a few features on this page that we're not going to get to right now but we will demo later on such as um auto applying late fees and automated reminders uh but for the purposes of this demo right now i'll just walk through the simple invoice creation so moving along um once i set the terms of the invoice um i can scroll through validate that you know everything looks good that everything i expect to be on this voice is showing if for whatever reason i am missing anything i can manually add time entries expenses make adjustments as needed and once everything's ready to go i simply scroll down select save invoice and the invoice will be generated for me uh one other item i do want to go through during the invoice generation process and discuss is um the concept of automated billing reconciliation so we hear from a lot of our clients who have historically used one system to track their time and generate invoices and another system like square or paypal to accept payments is that reconciling these items at the end of the month or again whatever cadence they're using is a huge uh source of frustration and takes up a lot of their time with my case payments when you generate an invoice and enable online payments as soon as you send out this invoice via link um via either texting email and decline portal all options will review later uh their payments will be automatically reconciled and paid against these receivables so you're not having to do any of that reconciliation later on everything's automatically done for you and automatically everything that's automatically saved to that uh case and client file that's relevant to that invoice so uh that's the generation of a single invoice uh obviously um during certain periods within the month uh oftentimes at the very end of the month or maybe on the 15th uh depending on your case load you're going to want to send out a lot of invoices and generate a lot of invoices at a single time and you can do that in my case as well via our batch billing feature so i will navigate back to this invoices and add in add invoice page so previously i simply selected invoices case for generating a single invoice uh now what i'm going to do is let's say i want to generate invoices for these four different clients in their four separate cases all i have to do is select those four cases and really go through a very similar procedure that i did for generating the single invoice which is configuring it to whatever terms my firm uses net 60 it's going to be due on october 25th if i have any legalese terms and conditions notes that i um have saved on all my invoices i can configure that here as well i'll keep it simple for now and uh all i have to do is click create these invoices and all of those invoices with the relevant line items for each of these cases uh will be automatically generated and i can send them out um at a later date whenever it's appropriate based on my firm's processes so that is the all the different ways that you can generate invoices in my case uh both as a single invoice and in batch and again the the main uh key point here is that by having a centralized billing and payments platform and uh time tracking platform etc uh keeping everything in one centralized location allows us to be a very streamlined couple click process rather than a drawn out process of having to reconcile different items and pull from multiple softwares and data sources thanks sam so one of the things i want to mention is i see a couple people putting questions in the chat that's great please continue to do that we're going to take those at the end we'll respond to as many as we can get to and then if we don't get to your question we'll make sure to have someone from our customer success team follow up so as we move on um sam's mentioned some great ways to be able to track your time and do simple invoice creation um but then we know that you have needs around getting clients to pay and so one of the the common hurdles that we've heard is that law firms have clients who have different needs when it comes to billing some may need to pay over time some may prefer to receive an email bill some may want it to be printed others may wish to have a tax ed um and so we have given a lot of flexibility on how to do that based on some of the challenges we've heard sam can you share some of the the feedback you've heard from our clients on what they're doing in regards to their clients yeah yeah so at the end of the day when it comes to actually receiving payments uh we hear that there's a lot of i guess you could call attention between what's easy and best practice for the firm and what is most convenient for your clients or actually what might even be necessary for them given their particular financial circumstances at the time and because of this we did build my case to maximize billing flexibility and configurability and allow you to easily accept payments in a few different ways and ultimately what we've seen because of that is that our payments uh excuse me our customers get paid pretty rapidly as a result um usually within three or four days and a lot of times actually same day um even among their clients who are not particularly tech savvy uh aaron feldman from a development law group who's one of our longtime customers said my bills get paid rapidly and get paid a full which was quite a quite a difference from the old software's coming from so on that topic of payment accessibility we are going to walk through a few different ways that you can get those invoices that you've generated either single invoice or in batch actually into your clients hands so to do that i will close out of here and i will actually go back to the invoices page and just as an example i will go to the esteban ramirez invoice a second one here now this is an invoice that has been generated so actually this will be a good view to walk through as well uh once you save an invoice uh and generate an invoice this is sort of the view that your clients can see and that you can read over uh it's very straightforward it's legible it's um like i said easy to read we've heard from quite a few of our customers that the number of calls that they have received uh trying to clarify uh you know how much do they actually owe at a given period what constitutes their bill what's going into their bill the number of calls we're getting has dramatically been reduced after they adopted my case because the invoices that they receive are very straightforward and easy to read so i'll scroll down here so you can get a view um obviously most uh uh example invoices will have a few more line items here this has a single flat fee for a hundred thousand dollars this is quite the expensive case here um but how uh going back to the top here how you would actually get this generated invoice into your client's hand uh there's a few different ways you can do that so the first one i'll go over is this text option so by clicking this phone icon um we will display this modal uh esteban ramirez is our billing contact he has a phone number within my case so we'll automatically generate that and we'll show you a stock message that will be sent to esteban ramirez saying hey this is your payment for xyz invoice click this link to pay now they'll receive that text all they have to do is make a single click enter in their credit card information and that payment will be automatically tied back into my case and viewable within their case file and under their client file as well we have very similar process here for sharing via the client portal for those who might not be familiar our client portal is a secure way to communicate with your clients um sending important documents sending messages to them for more secure communication than let's say email uh also a good way to send invoices uh when you share via the client portal click this button um we will send it to their client portal they'll receive an email saying hey you have a new invoice you have to pay um click here to log in and they'll be able to pay that invoice right then and there again also emailing an invoice and we also allow you to print invoices if for whatever reason that is your preferred means of sending them out to folks uh finally if an individual uh calls in they have their credit card in hand and they're ready to make a payment tv the phone you can simply go to this invoice select report payment and enter in their payment information right right here esteban actually has a card saved on file so you wouldn't even have to type in their credit card information um that they're providing you it's already been saved so those are those a very quick run through of all the different ways you can actually send out your invoices uh now once that your client your clients have their own voices oftentimes we hear our firms will run into a new problem which is actually getting them to make the payment um due to various financial circumstances uh a lot of times your clients may not be able to make a payment in full upfront um again for using this invoice as an example that's a hundred thousand dollars most people wouldn't be able to pay that sort of sum as one lump sum up front and that's okay uh with my case payments we do allow you to create for instance payment plans uh which allows you to really meet your clients where they are and set up a plan that makes sense for both them and your firm so in order to create a payment plan uh all you have to do is click edit this invoice i will scroll down to the bottom here you'll see this section called payment plans very easy all you have to do is click enable on and from here um let's say you've spoken with your client and you say you know what you can't pay this upfront in full so starting on let's say september 1st um you can pay let's say they say they can pay 5 000 a month uh you simply type in five thousand dollars per installment we will automatically calculate roughly what the number of installments comes out to in this case 21 installments um they said they'll be able to pay this on a monthly basis and for the purposes of this payment plan um that's all we need all you have to do is click apply and starting on september 1st they will receive notification with the payment link to pay each one of these installments um at the cadence that you have designated here so on the first of each month for the next 21 months they'll receive a installment uh for five thousand dollars we need to pay against uh those are our payment plans uh i will actually make one more note here uh one of the things the payment plans are fantastic they are a great way to help your clients and help your firm get paid but one of the problems that we heard sometimes comes with payment plans in general is keeping track of cash flow sometimes it's hard to know you know when is that money actually going to be coming in the door and we have addressed that problem with what we call the payment plans dashboard so if i go down to payment plan section of my billing tab what we show here is a uh various insights on the breakdown of your payment plans financial data so in this case you can filter this data to whatever view you need uh this is currently showing over the last 90 days the average payment plan amount was 706 dollars um the planned payments over the next 30 days is going to be 1 905 1 cent of those 500 are on autopay so you can just passively accept those uh 1405 have been set up for being manually charged um so you just get a good idea of how much money is going to be coming in the door and what sort of work is going to go into getting those funds and we will also show you this nice graph here of payment installments over time so as an example looks like both august and november uh and may we're all good months here so for november you can see that 20 uh plans have installments that will hit um in november uh totaling eight thousand three hundred and ninety five dollars uh this view is just a good way to get a quick at a glance understanding of what your financial is are gonna look like get a better understanding of your cash flow and how payment plans are tying into all of that um that's uh about it for the payment plans the last uh little bit i want to go through uh on the topic of payment accessibility and flexible payments is a topic of subscription billing now subscription billing is something we've seen become increasingly popular particularly over the last few years it's especially common i mean across practice areas but it's particularly common among folks who work with a lot of business entities and essentially what it says is that you know your services can be retained for a recurring set subscription fee at a given cadence let's say up to x hours a month uh every month for a monthly recurring charge of three thousand dollars it's just a simple easy way to have folks retain your services um and uh get paid so in order to set up a subscription uh billing plan with your clients if that is something that is relevant to you and your firm uh all you have to do is go to the uh relevant client file let's say sally adams uh wanted to set this up with me i would go to her client file i'd go to the billing section here um and click click subscription so she actually already has a subscription plan in place um but let's say hypothetically i wanted to get her up and running with one all i would have to do is enter in her relevant credit card information uh the amount that will be charged her credit card in this case two thousand dollars the bank account into which um i want this these funds to be deposited uh the start date for this plan the frequency with which you will be charged and if you've set up a specific duration let's say we're only going to um maintain this plan for the next six months at a bi-weekly cadence that would be 12 total payments you can also run it in perpetuity if this is going to be an ongoing relationship for the foreseeable future once that's set up we will simply charge the card based on the parameters you provide us and we'll also provide similar to the payment plans dashboard a subscription billing dashboard where you can see the total collected so far up to today is six thousand dollars um three installments have been processed nine are still due and we'll show you the next payment um the next payment will be charged on the seventh for two thousand dollars and we'll also show you the individual transactions here just so you have proper records of all your financials for sally adams so really with these different options it just makes accepting payments and getting payments from your clients getting the invoice in their hands a lot more streamlined and making sure that all this data again is living easily accessible contextualized within your case info all in one place awesome thanks for sharing that sam so we've given you a lot of ways to to help your clients pay and different options to help them and meet them where they're at um but sometimes even despite all that it's uncommon or common for clients not to pay or maybe they pay late and so sam tell us a little bit about the challenges you've heard our customers mention about getting payment from their clients yeah yeah um it's not necessarily technically the most time consuming part from what we hear but it's often the most frustrating i think the phrase it's like pulling teeth has come up on more than one customer call here uh which is you know uh it's it's the nature of things but the amount of frustration of tracking down overdue invoices and following up with these folks who haven't paid you um did lead us to build several features that has helped to alleviate a lot of this pain for our customers and this includes automated uh invoice reminders a billing dashboard as well as aging invoices reports um these different tools among others have allowed our clients to save about eight hours a month typically on client outreach and trying to go through this process of getting paid so the first of these features that i do want to walk you through is the automated invoice reminders i gave you a quick preview of it when we're going over the generating an invoice section so i will go back to this invoices screen we are should be very familiar with this particular view at this point um let's see so i will click um again let's go to sally adams's invoice i'll click edit this invoice and now so as soon as you generate an invoice you're going to obviously want to select a due date um i'm going to give her a bit more time than just tomorrow to pay so let's do september 30th once you select a due date you will have the option to enable automated reminders and if i toggle this on uh we will actually give you a description of what automator reminders entails here and app and once a invoice is shared with the client we will automatically send them reminders for payment along with the payment link um 30 days before it's due uh again five days before it's due on the due date um and five days after the due date if they still have not yet paid uh this just automates the process of you having to send out these reminders track down these invoices and manually reach out to them um my case does that work for you and we have seen among our customers a huge uptick in them getting paid uh on time and not having to even engage in this sort of outreach once they adopt my key system and leverage these automated reminders um but still even with these automated reminders every once in a while you are going to be having someone who still has an outstanding balance and we have built in a few features that even cuts down the work on that end of identifying you know who still needs to pay me is essentially the question that folks are asking and one of those features is the automated invoices report excuse me aging invoices report uh for those who aren't as familiar with my case system or my case payments we do have quite a few uh financial reports here unfortunately we won't get through all of them today um but i will go over again this agent invoices report here all this does is um again allows you to answer that question of who has outstanding balances with me and um to what degree are they outstanding so you can filter this by individual clients by your cases or by lead attorneys that there are multiple attorneys in your practice for the purposes of this demo i'll just create a general report here and one click and that's it we can see each of these individuals who has outstanding balances or overdue invoices with me it's a total uh five individuals so we're looking pretty good uh a lot of folks will say you know if something's only one to 15 days overdue i'm not gonna do too much outreach i in fact we still have the automated uh reminders in place um they'll be pained at least once more five days after an invoice is due but once it gets the 16 to 30 days 31 to 60 or 61 plays plus days overdue in particular that that's becoming a problem and now i know that each of these individuals are who i'm gonna who i may want to follow up with um i have their invoice number on hand so i can easily access the details of what's due uh and it just makes the the job of um outreach a lot easier and cuts down a lot of time that goes into this now a similar review that we have to this but it's a bit more of an at a glance view is the via the billing dashboard so if i go to oh just click billing if i scroll down here for a better view i'll just do here today so this is a quick modal that shows you at a glance where your invoices or outstanding balances are in the um invoicing stages um so we see that year day we have 447 000 roughly of um unsensed balances that haven't actually been generated and sent out to clients we have 1200 that are only a draft stages of invoices 116 000 dollars outstanding that have been sent um 36 976 and partial payments um 35 000 roughly that have been paid collected and about 4192 that are outstanding that they're overdue uh if i were to click into this it will simply provide a very similar view to what we saw the aging invoices report these five clients um and again this is just another different way that you can find out who still owes you money who hasn't paid and you can click into their respective files to get their contact information and reach out to them perfect and again in total those are just some of the different ways that um we streamline the process for you and identifying who needs to pay as well as really preventing that issue by uh uh enabling automated invoice reminders so that they're reminded more consistently you're not having to do that uh outreach and they're more likely to pay you on time in a reasonable fashion thanks so much sam so we really care about your billing efficiencies and want to be able to to help you guys uh so this last poll is just really for you guys and we'd love to know would you be interested in a personal evaluation of how my case payments could work for your practice this pull result won't be shared so just go ahead and respond and then we will take the appropriate action based on your response i'm going to give us about 30 seconds here um to just let you respond again this is just letting us know if you're interested in a personal evaluation of your billing and payments process to see if you can gain more efficiencies ten more seconds here and then we'll go ahead and close the poll and move on to our next part of this webinar all right we're going to go ahead and end that thank you so much for responding as we move on to the next section um we've heard a bit today about the different functionality that allows you to move away from using disparate solutions and towards using an all-in-one integrated legal practice management solution sam's going to go ahead and summarize those recommendations and walk us also through some final recommendations that he has yeah yeah so again we went over quite a few different individual features across the platform but they all do have one common thread and ultimately why they are so beneficial is because they exist all within one shared system in my case um the highlighted automated time tracking smart time finder all that directly populates into invoices which can then be shared out with ease to clients with a single click via text email the my case client portal and then the payments that are made against those invoices are automatically reconciled and fed back into the system and live in the context of your case and client files um for uh for your records so at the end of the day this just ensures that you're not scrambling around to reconcile your finances you can maintain proper records and at the end of the day you can get paid to begin with um really that just frees up your time so you can focus on doing what you want to do which is practicing law it's just serving your clients and overall just making your life a lot easier so again to wrap up um as paul grass with the sullivan law group said if i can integrate our case management and payment processor without paying more it's really a no-brainer it streamlined his sperm and it can streamline a lot of other folks's lives and practices as they continue to integrate these two systems uh with my case payments and uh that's uh the end of uh our presentation portion uh kathleen i'll turn it over to you for the q a portion yeah so we've got a lot of great questions coming in if there's any more that have come to mind please feel free to type them in we're going to go through those if we don't get to your question today or it's something that maybe needs a more in-depth conversation we'll save those and have someone follow up with you directly to get help for you um so sam one of the questions i know that came up was around the smart time finder um could you pull that back up and let us know how does smart time finder know um and suggest what things to sure that is a great question um let me go back to this better view here so whenever you perform um an action within my case there's there's a lot of them that can be captured here it is everything from most communications like sending a text message from my case i'm sending an email from my case sending a message via the client portal working on documents let's see any events uh tasks there are several others here uh recording a call on the phone and the call log uh we make note of all those activities that are happening and if we see that you performed one of those activities and never associated with a time entry or any sort of billable hour we those actions that you haven't yet tracked time for will be displayed in this list view so that whenever you go over create your invoices or want to review your track time um let's say it's at the end of the week or at the end of the month end of the quarter you can go to this list and say oh these three phone calls with ada chen this phone call with sally adams this text to sally um this task for trial prep um i'd never recorded any billable time for any of these that was a mistake on my part i was busy i just didn't have time so now i can just select track time and it will allow you to create the time appropriate time entry from these uh different items that we automatically pulled in and sensed with the system uh does that hopefully that answers that question thanks sam i think that probably does um so one of the other questions we got was can you also do ache check charges using the record payment button with account info on file uh yeah so you can't uh we do accept ach charges they cancel submit ach for making payments and then if you're sending out the subscription payment plans do they automatically get a bill each month or an invoice or how do they know that um a subscription is is upcoming yes so uh up front you um negotiate the terms of the subscription bill and the case we went through i believe it was two thousand dollars on a bi-weekly basis uh there will be a recording of this so you can see if i said that incorrectly or not um so once uh so they will be expecting these bills and once a charge is made they will receive a receipt via email showing the charge and what the charge is for based on your negotiation with them for the terms of that subscription payment plan upfront awesome thanks sam there was another question here around a third-party credit card processing service are you able to integrate those third-party credit card processing services into my case um i uh curling we do not allow you to integrate third-party credit card processors within my case um everything is run via our um my case payments platform and so for that question specifically too if you guys we do allow you to automatically or not automatically manually apply payments towards an invoice so if you're running processing outside you would have to manually take those steps the beauty of my case payments is that it's all integrated and would apply that automatically yeah actually i can really quickly just to demonstrate what that means there um let's say i'm recording a payment and for whatever let's say they even pay cash or they did why you ran a one-off credit card payment you can record that as an offline payment and that will be reflected uh in the same exact case and client file just as your other payments as well awesome let's see here just looking through some of these other questions um with the smart time feature it looks like there was another question around emails does the smart time finder capture any emails sent if you've tied your email to my case yep yep so similar to um when we popped open that call log modal when you select the send email modal um a little uh timer in the lower left hand corner will start uh going so you can either track the time uh proactively at the time you're sending that email or if you forget to do that um we will keep record of those emails later on as well to track the time at a later date awesome and there was a question around old invoices so currently this person is forwarding the old invoice to a new invoice using the balance boarding feature um what is a best practice if you have an old invoice um balance and a new invoice sam what would you recommend how do they capture that to make sure the past due recording stays accurate got it uh so just to clarify would this be let's say you forwarded an invoice from four months ago over to one that is due now what would be best practice for keeping record of that so if you are leveraging the balance forwarding just to have one uh easy receivable for your clients um the forwarded balance will be reflected um on the newer invoice so it won't be shown in that aging invoices report um we recommend if you are wanting to leverage that aging invoices report you keep that as its own um separate invoice separate entity and keep it and um sort of leave it in on that original invoice state perfect um it looks like we've gone through a lot of these um can you walk us back through the reconciliation of invoices and so some of the feedback there is um they were mentioning their manager makes them print all the invoices to reconcile with trust um are you saying that the reconciliation option will assist with having to not print those out so let's see um maybe walk us back through the reconciliation process and then i help answer the question yes so if um when you're draft there's i guess two ways we can approach this question hopefully one of these uh answers actually answers the question here so when you are drafting an invoice um let's see oh excuse me so you can either select uh the account if you uh into which you want these payments to be deposited your trust account and we will display um the record that payment under the client file um let's see if i go to the sally adam or adam civil case if i go to her billing section we will show her a whole trust history associated with that account um so you can easily identify all records transactions that have gone in and out of her particular trust account i think another way we could potentially come out this question is um excuse me let me so um for uh if a individual has multiple um cases with you let's say um you can track their trust history either um at the individual case levels to ensure that uh funds uh men for one case aren't bleeding over to another or if you only have one case you can track it at the overall client level um and we will keep uh similar records of each of those transactions under each of those uh case incline files so they have a full historical record of where every single payment and every single transaction went with respect to your trust account and the individual sub accounts for these clients and cases hopefully that answered that question um if not i'm always happy to have one of our cs members reach out and clarify if you were intending something different thanks sam looks like one of the last questions we have here is around the processing fees so is there a processing fee for the client to process payment um with my case payments on the invoice so i believe so i assume this is asking if we allowed to automatically uh add a surcharge to the invoice or receivable so it's passed on to the client for payment um we don't currently have an automatic way of doing that we have seen uh folks manually add surcharges either on individual invoices or in batch as an adjustment via that batch billing process but we don't currently have an automated way to pass those along to clients awesome it looks like we've made it through most of the questions that i think that can be answered in this forum if we didn't get to your question we will definitely follow up and if anyone has additional questions or would like a walkthrough of any of the steps we've identified here you can always contact our customer success team and then for those who submitted questions that weren't answered we will have someone follow up directly with you so just wanted to thank everyone for their time um thank you so much for being such great and active participants we appreciate you all and i'm grateful for you joining thanks so much