Create a Legal Billing Template for Customer Service that Simplifies Your Workflow

Legal billing template for Customer Service

hello everyone hope everyone is doing good I guess most of the people have joined in so we'll get started while everybody hops in uh I hope everyone can see the screen okay let me know if anybody faces any issue while sharing while seeing the screen so first of all I'd like to thank you all of you for joining the today's webinar with our guest speaker Casita Simpson she is the owner and CEO at Simpson and Associates LLC my name is dii and I am the customer success manager at Locus for people who are new to Locus Locus is a legal practice management software that helps attorneys and firms to streamline their practice and manage their day-to-day processes for their clients in today's webinar we will basically be discussing how you can streamline your billing and invoicing processes for your clients and how you can take payments how you can customize invoice templates like everything that is related to invoicing from A to Z we will be discussing this today with Casita now I'll request Casita to introduce herself good afternoon everyone good morning if you're in a time zone that's still morning um my name is Cita Simpson and as Dev said I am the owner and CEO of Simpson and Associates LLC Simpson and Associates is a company that offers Services Nationwide I like to think of us as a legal Tech uh solution to law firms we brid the gap between um technology and their systems we clean up crms like lockas to ensure that you're able to utilize the system efficiently and you have the capabilities to be able to uh set up different automations and workflows and tasks and things for uh recurring events that you have we also offer for pargal services as well and our services are nationwide today I'm really really really excited to have this opportunity to begin talking about um accounting and billing utilizing lockas I have been a lockas user for about two years and I've been in love with the system and I when the opportunity presented itself for me to do this I jumped at it because I think that it's very important for firms to be able to have a really good understanding of how their system can benefit them when it comes to accounting and billing to be able to move efficiently and be smooth with what you're sending out and whether it's in terms of invoices or even something as simple as sending um a a link for someone to be able to make a payment for a trust account or something in that nature um I am going to kick it back over to Dev to say anything further than she wants to say before I begin the presentation awesome thank you so much Cita that was wonderful so before we start off I'll just like to State some rules for the webinar so the Q&A bot is live and our panelists will be available to answer all your questions that you send in we can answer it throughout the webinar or we can take it at the end uh please feel free to drop in all the questions that you have and uh this webinar is recorded So this video recording will be uploaded on our YouTube channel as well as Facebook everywhere so you can access it after the webinar so I'll hand it over to Casita for now so she can start with the presentation C you can take it over and start the presentation thank you all right thank you all right so the objective of today's webinar the objective of today's webinar is to really like I said enhance the efficiency of Financial and bilding operations using the laus legal practice management software this encompasses various activities sorry about that including processing invoices adding expenses to matters monitoring billable hours for specific cases configuring custom rates for different teams and members and all in all being able to uh customize user permissions for controlled access and modification of Financial and billing data the topics that we're going to focus on today are going to Encompass tracking and uh buildable and non- buildable activities add in custom rates for users and matters how to generate and customize invoices streamline invoice payments managing trust payments on lockas invoice overview from lockas client portal setting up automatic reminders workflows to alleviate invoicing Woos and customize user permissions so kick it off we're going to start with uh tracking and billing uh tracking billable and non-billable activities on lockas you can bill your clients on hourly basis flat fee basis as well you can also manage your expenses for clients directly on Locus there are two different types of activities when comes to the locker system um as I said there's billable and non-billable billable just means that you have the ability to charge your client on a flat fee basis or time entry basis and add that to your invoice for non-billable it's going to come in when you want to just be able to show on the invoice the work that you've done but not charge the client for that specific thing so I'm going to go ahead and uh show you what that looks like and we'll be able to walk through that together okay so once you're inside of the Locka system and you have a particular matter that you're billing for one of the first thing that you can do is go to the matter and then once you're inside of the matter you uh have the ability to add a um actually let me to a different person okay so you have the ability to have both billable and non-billable time entries and as you see here there's some entries that are inputed that has the billable type and there's also an entry that has a non-billable type to be able to do this all you would need to do once you're inside of the matter and you're under time is go to add time and you would just add in the information for that particular time entry and once you have the information in here you then have the ability to tag it if it's non-billable you can just tag it as non-billable and then go ahead and save that entry if it were an entry that was going to be billable you would just do the same thing and just do add and then put in that information here and make sure that you put in whatever you've worked on and then you would just save it as a uh regular entry and then you can see both of the both of the options right here where uh there's a billable and then a nonv to take it a step further you also have the option to add it by using the plus sign up here and by hitting the plus sign you can go ahead and add a time entry from anywhere within the locker system and you just put in the same information here whether it was buildable or non bable you make sure that you add in that information now one thing that you will see that's different is that the rate that's here is different than the rate that was on the invoice for that particular matter and that is something that you can do for for your firm within your settings all you to be able to set this up you want to make sure that as a firm inside of your settings you have your information here where you um ensure that the um give me a second here sorry you want to ensure that from a firm standpoint when it comes to the information that you have for the sorry okay sorry about that the information that you have for the rates are inputed here so if it's going to be like a custom rate you would go ahead and add in a custom rate here and it's under and then building build settings and then you'll come here and then you'll do add and then you'll add a name for what you would want this to be in terms of like a a template so I already had one here for probate for us to add one together I'm just going to create a family law one and then you have the ability to add the custom right here and then you can make it for everyone within the firm by just hitting everyone and then adding in the rate so if I wanted to have in let's say 350 for family law cases I have the ability to add that here in the Hing save this will allow you to when you're doing invoices to ensure that the the rate is applicable to the practice area that you're working on another thing that you want to also make sure while we're in settings here is you're going to want to make sure that from a uh practice area standpoint you add in The Firm rate up here so if the firm rate were different than 500 you would add in that hourly right here and then you would also want to make sure that you add in your Target Billings for the year and the work days also in this information here so you're going to want to make sure all of these things are filled in just to ensure that when you're actually working on an invoice or working for um a case in a specific matter that this hourly rate is already plugged in now if it was a custom rate for a specific matter what you would want to do to be able to have a custom rate for a specific matter is go into that matter and then go to the pencil up here at the top and then you have the ability to come into here and if the firm rate were not $500 I apologize if for this case you didn't want to charge $500 you want to charge something less than that you have the ability to come into here and do a custom rate and you can add the custom rate here now you can have a custom rate be for everyone within the firm or if there's specific people within the firm that you want to have a specific rate within for that specific U user type you would then come into here and just add either the team team members information and then plug in the rate or if it's for the entire firm you would do everyone and then plug in that information now I know you saw that I showed you the different templates that were inside of the settings and that's something that you can actually apply here as well by hitting use template and then you can add in and apply the rate now you see here that the practice area up here is probate so I can go ahead and just hit apply and now once I've hit apply you'll see that the rates for the team members automatically populate here for us and this is done again by being in inside of settings and just ensuring that you're adding that information into the build settings area so um again just go to settings and then build settings and then you want to make sure that you add it here under custom hourly rates all right so going back into the uh presentation this was something that I just went ahead and covered being able to show you the billable hours one thing that I also want to make sure that I cover as well is the expenses so we're going to go ahead and do that now so when you're in here if you have a matter that you want to add an expense to all you would need to do is go to the expenses Tab and then you would hit add and if you have like an invoice or something like that um for a specific uh expense that you've exhaust uh covered for a particular matter you would go ahead and add in that information here by just dragging it into the space down here now if it were and then it would bring up the splendo and then you would just plug in whatever attachment you wanted to for that matter one thing you want to make sure that you do as well is that if it's something that you don't want to build of a client for you do have the option here to add it as non-billable and that will make sure that the information just shows up on the invoice but instead of actually moving forward and billing the client for it it's just going to show up as non billable and as you see here this was an expense that was already plugged in by one of the users and it shows that it was avilable and the amount is also so here and you can see that it wasn't invoiced yet but the information is here as to what exactly the person uh worked on that they need to apply the expense for so you also have the ability to add expenses by hitting the plus sign and then going to add expense and then this will give you the ability to add the expense for any matter uh whether it's for the one that we were just in or another one all you would need to do is just click on ADD matter here and then select the matter that you want to add it to and make sure that you add in the rate and you add in the description of what that information is now when you add in non-billable it brings up this window or this popup that allows you to instead uh choose whether you want to display on the invoice or not and so by checking it it's going to make sure that it shows up on the invoice another thing is that you also have the ability to add in expenses for other users if you have permissions to do that within the lock system and you can choose whoever you want to be the person that gets uh assigned to this expense or any expense that you're working on all right so when it comes to um custom rates for users and matters this was something that I did spend a little bit of time on and you do have the ability to add it for uh each user and it can be customized for different types of uh matters you also have the ability to have it be for everyone and you do have the ability to add the custom hourly rate templats which I did just show you just now now we're going to go ahead and cover how to generate an invoice inside of blockers but before I actually have us work on generating an invoice I just want to cover a couple of things that you want to make sure that you have set up already in order to ensure that your invoice is set up properly the first thing that you're going to want to do is make sure that you're in settings and you want to make sure that you have your information inside of the bill settings for the invoice templates now here you'll see that I already have a template created for uh the law for a law office we can actually if you want to create a new one you would just hit add template and you would come into here and if there was a particular color that you wanted to have for your firm you would go ahead and select the color if you have custom colors you do have the option to add hex codes here and this will allow you to add in the different color that you want for your particular uh business or brand you then want to make sure that you choose the kind of invoice theme that you want to go with you can there's three different options that you can choose from and it really just changes the flow of what it looks like some important things to make sure that you pay attention to is the currency if you're working with different people in different areas that work with different currencies you're going to want to make sure that this is uh checked to the proper currency that you're working with and the beauty of having multiple templates is you have the ability to have multiple current types depending on the template so this one is the United States one we're going to leave it as that but if you wanted to have another one you would just go ahead and select it and then when you're naming your template appear here you would just make sure that you insert the name of the country somewhere in there so that you're able to differentiate it when you're working on the invoice another thing that you want to make sure that you have is the default due date this is something that comes in very handy when you're working on uh sending out an invoice because it will automatically show up when the invoice is due and another thing as well is when you're working on sending out invoice reminders if this information is inputed properly with the number of days when it's due that will then better set up the invoice reminders and how they're sent out we'll cover invoice reminders in a bit later on um some other things to make sure that you pay attention to is the bill to information you want to make sure that all of this if you want to have it on the invoice or not you check it off so if you want to have the matter label on there or not you have the option to take it off and you'll see that it goes away up here and if you didn't want to have the issue date or any of this other stuff you would just go ahead and select whether you want to check it on or off that's going to be entirely up to you important to pay attention to though is going to be the company information you want to make sure that you have your company logo in here if you have one and if there's any information here that you don't want on the invoice you make sure that you check it off so that it doesn't show up if you're not a firm that works with flat fees and you want to take that off the invoice you do have the ability to do that and you would just select whichever options you want in terms of what you don't want to have on there so if we took flat fees off you'll see automatically that that whole entire section just then disappears and it's no longer visible on the invoice same thing is going to be for time entries and expenses if you're a firm that only works with flat fees you're going to want to make sure that you keep uh time entries off if you don't really use them expenses the same thing uh other info this would just be like the subtotal ands it will also be at any discounts so if you are not don't really typically give out discounts you can definitely take that off the invoice and you can also ensure that you have terms on there so you have the ability to show the terms or not to show the terms and speaking of terms when it comes to them you have the option to add them in as a default here in the template as well so if you have particular terms and conditions that you offer you want to make or that not that you offer but that you want to ensure that you communicate to your clients you're going to add in that information here and any notes so if you want to say thank you for your business or anything like that you have the options to add that here if you don't want your invoice to show any outstanding invoices that are passed due you do have the option to take the take it off and it will no longer show up and the same thing for the Trust balance if you're not a firm that typically uses trust accounts and have trust balances or work with retainers when it comes to the credit balance the same thing if you don't really utilize uh retainers or take trust payments you and you don't want this on here you do have the options to take that off as well when it comes to the payment summary that's something that typically every invoice should have but if you don't want to have it you can take it off and last but not least the uh trust request this information here if it's not necessary and you don't need it you can take this off so the beautiful thing about these templates is that you can really just customize it as much as you possibly want to and in addition to that you can have as many as you want and just name them differently and here it's important to note that you do have the option to set up an invoice template as a default so that that one if you're going to be using it on a consistent basis you have the option to check it on or off here in order to make sure that the information shows up properly when it comes to the name of the firm and all this information when you're inside of your settings you do have the ability to make sure that that information shows up properly under firm settings and Company info and here the company logo was inserted and the address and all of this in order for the invoice to actually save you have to make sure that you have a logo the business name the address and the business phone number these things are essential if it's not on there the invoice will not save to any of the matters and you won't be able to even send them out all right so now that I have said that let's go ahead and look at how to generate an invoice so you can do this by selecting your matter and then going to um actually I apologize you can do this by going to invoices and once you're in invoices you would then go ahead and select new invoice and then you would go ahead from here here and add in the matter that you want to go ahead and create the invoice for and once you've done that you're going to have to go ahead and select add un invoice activity and that will then generate all of the time entries that we have populated even the non-billable ones as you see here to generate on the invoice any expenses as well and you do have the option to check it on or off and if there were only a specific time frame that you wanted to focus on you do have the option to come in here and just select a particular uh period of time and if you wanted to do a custom range you can even select custom range and you would select the time period that you want to do that for I'm going to go ahead and just select everything here and just add it to the invoice so we can see what that looks like a couple of things to uh point out as well is going to be the invoice options up here at the top as you see the main template that I have as a default is the one that's showing up here I actually have a Trust balance for this particular matter so that information is showing up here and if you turn it on it actually takes out the funds from here and if you don't want to use it you have the option to check it off I'm going to go ahead and hit to use the Trust balance and you'll see over here on the right in these options you do have the option to even customize the invoice as your you are working on it to send it out so anything that you've already populated and saved under invoice templates you have the option to modify them here on the invoice if it was something specific that you wanted to change as a one-off for this particular matter when it comes to the options here you obviously can take off the the Trust balance you can take off the operating balance and all of these things here important thing to pay attention to is the tax information that's here so if you're uh wanting to ensure that your firm takes out taxes you're going to want to make sure that inside of your settings you set this up properly so once you're in Bill settings you're going to want to make sure that you go to tax settings and you have the option here to add in the name and the value of the tax for your particular State now when you're in here if this wasn't already here you would just go ahead and hit add new tax and then you would add in the state and then if I wanted to make this the primary I would just go ahead and take this off so that it's no longer checked and then check off the the option that I want to be primary and save it and then that information will become live on the invoice all right so going back into invoices and you'll see here that the invoice that we were just working on is actually already right here and then once you're here you can actually still go in and edit it if you wanted to make any further changes to it and once we're looking at this you see that down here it does show up that the the Trust balance is being applied here so then the only thing that is remaining as an outstanding balance is $500 in in in payment that's being due so you see here that it actually shows up that they're applying trust I want to actually take us to processing or going over the trust request so you do have the ability to do a trust request by selecting trust requests while you're inside of the invoices section of locus and then if it was a different issue date you can change that here you can also change the due date then you would go in and you would add in the client name and you would add in the matter and then you would add in the amount whatever amount that you would want for the trust amount and then any information that you want to add as a note and then create and here it is this then creates a trust uh request going to this person person now if you wanted to go ahead and right now it's currently in the draft state if you wanted to go ahead and actually move forward with this and send this out all you would need to do is go to send by email and this would send this invoice as a trust request to this client to receive payment if you had a default email that you wanted to put in you have the option to select it here and then you would send this email off and it will send out to that person now if it were an instance where you sent the invoice in another form maybe you downloaded it and you you sent it in another way and you wanted to just Mark the invoice Ascent you have the ability to do that as well and all you would need to do is select the invoice and then come up here to more actions and then Mark it as sent and you'll see here that this was an invoice that we actually marked as sent so this was already taken care of another thing that we can actually do here is also our credit request so if there's an instance where we've been issued a credit we can go ahead and apply that here as well and add in the same in add in the information for that particular client so that we can go ahead and send that out and then you would just add in the amount and then create now we can go ahead and Mark this ascent and then we can come out of here one other thing that we can actually do is go ahead and send out invoices in bulk and in order to do that we would want to go ahead and uh select on this and then do both actions and then we can actually send by email and send all these invoices out at one time we also have the option to mark all the invoices sent here as well if we wanted to mark all them as as being if there were ever an instance where we wanted to add a payment let's say we received a payment in a different form like a check or something or maybe they brought in cash you do have the option to apply a payment for monies received and then it could be a direct payment and you can have it go right into the law firm and then put the source as actually let me go back sorry you would leave it on direct payment and then you would select the option to either do cash and you can even do check and you can even do if it came through as a bank transfer so I'm going to leave it on cash and then if you there was any notes that you wanted to add to this you can add it down here and go ahead and hit add yeah so the balance that she owes is not really much so I'm going to select a different person that actually owes some money so that we can see that here and then the invoices show up so we can just go ahead and put in that she paid $500 in cash and then that go ahead and adds it and now if you wanted to actually see that you can see it here under invoices okay going back to the invoices section here if we wanted to go ahead and add a discount to any particular invoice we can go ahead and do that during the process while we're generating the invoice or after we've generated the invoice if it was something that wasn't sent we can go ahead and do that by opening up the invoice and editing it and then we can add in the discount down here so if it was a discount of $500 we can add it in and U actually I I apologize because it's in percentage we can change it from percentage to Dollars and then once it's send dollars we can put $500 and then it takes it out and then if you wanted to actually keep it on percentage you can change it and maybe put 20% and then that will change it in this format as well and then once you're done and you've added in this information you can go ahead and hit save and then that will actually update to show that the discount is on here and you see it right here all right so I went ahead and I covered how to generate the invoice we've applied taxes and discounts and things to an invoice we've uh worked with trust and credit balances but we've also shown what it looks like when invoices are outstanding so um moving on to another area that I want to talk about and this is going to be how to streamline invoice payments and we can actually add a manual payment which you saw me do something like that already just now and we also have the option to send payments out with a link and to go ahead and work on that I am going to select this one because we received some money by cash and I just want to go ahead and send this out to be able to receive the rest of the money we have the ability to come into here and then go to send by email and then we can send the this to the client and that will then send the invoice to them for them to go ahead and make payments if we want us to send by link we can always go ahead and go ahead and click on the invoice uh payment link and then we can go ahead and copy that and from here we would then just go into the matter and then once we're inside of the matter we do have the ability to go ahead and to send them a email and then once we're in here we can set up an email and send it to them to say please pay if if we wanted to do something a little bit different we also actually have the um ability to do it as a link so uh as a like a hyperlink and we can select it here and then go insert link bring in the link and we can send it off this way and once your signature your default signature is inserted it will go ahead and send it out and now we were able to go ahead and send the link to the CLI to and we see the email here was sent now if we wanted to go ahead and apply a manual payment we did something like that already and remember all we need to do is go to add payment and then we can add in that information here all the invoices that are associated with that particular matter is going to show up down here for us and we then have the ability to add it in in addition to just being able to apply payments in this format if you have some uh payment processor that you use like law pay or gravity legal you do have the option to add in that information under settings and once you're inside of settings you will want to go to absent Integrations and then you would go to online payments and then you'll see the options here to be able to do uh connect a gravity legal payment or a law pay payment and I am actually going to show us what it looks like when we're working with gravity legal to send um uh to see what it looks like on the gravity legal side for the the payment and then process that payment all right so this is an invoice that was set up inside of um lockas and the integration with gravity legal is already applied and so what we want to do here now is we have the ability to go to the um to click on the invoice payment page and or if we click this option we would then just the client you would send this to the client and the client would actually be able to click on the link to be able to do this and this is what they would be able to see once they are inside of the payment page and another way that you can go about it doing it is do um online credit payment and this is also integrated with gravity legal as well so both components are uh integrated so if you wanted to do it internally you can do it on this side by doing online credit payment or if you were sending the invoice to the client you would be able to do that like this and seeing the invoice this is what it looks like on this side and here are some entries that were non-billable so you see that it shows up on the invoice but it's crossed out in terms of not charging any money for it and the client actually has the ability to download it from here and they can save it on their end they can also even download it from here as well now to process this payment they would just go ahead and hit pay and they would and then would Mark the payment complete I'm actually gonna go ahead and do this right now so that we can see what it looks like um give me a moment to insert some information here and while I do that I'm just going to bring us back to the uh PowerPoint screen so that my card information isn't showing up so meanwhile Cita is uh trying to do the payment for us on the invoice basically we have two payment gateways that you can use either LA Pay or gravity you can set up an integration with any one of these and this will allow you guys to take online payments from your clients so basically otherwise the client would have have to pay you via cash check e checks or Bank transfers and you would manually add the payments on lockers so if you want to avoid that manual intervention on the payments you can integrate with laer gravity and any one of these and then when you send the invoices to the clients the payment link will be automatically attached to the email so the clients will just have to click on the link like C showed you and they'll have to just enter their card details and the payment will be done like this all right Z thank you so much for that and then bringing this back up for us you can see here that the payment was actually processed and the client has the ability to download the receipt here and also download the invoice and then showing what it looks like inside of lockas for us here it's going to actually show that the invoice is paid here and that fast as soon as the client makes the payment it shows that the payment was made and it also shows which account the payment was made to so it was made to the operating account and this is the amount of the payment and from our side we have the ability to go ahead and download that invoice and save it if we want us to save it to the matter file for future records or anything like that all right so taking back taking us back into the uh Power presentation when it comes to uh trust payments we do have the ability to ensure that we set this up properly and have trust payments showing up inside of uh the matter files as well so going back into lus and covering that all right yeah so what we want to make sure that we have inside of here is that when it comes to the the invoices for trust payments we can like I said cover it here by creating the trust request and once the trust request is created and we actually receive that money I'm going to mark this one here as paid and then once this marked this page you'll see that within the invoices section here that now the total due has changed and we'll see that the when it comes to the invoice and you should look at it it also is marked as paid so the account has money that's reflected inside of the trust so any other transactions that you work on on the invoice you will have the ability to take it from that trust payment so for example um like if I was to create a a new invoice for this person you'll see now that there aren't anything to invo because everything is already invoiced but if I created like some kind of entry for this person here and I made it a time entry that was uh let's say 3 hours let's say we done something for three hours oh wait I made a boo boo all right I'm just gonna move on uh to the area where we get to deposit the funds so um let's say that we wanted to show up that a payment is deposited we can come into here and there's already like some trust money here already but like let's say we wanted to add that she gave us a check we can add that in here oh but there I need to as you see there aren't any invoices here so it's not even going to actually let me do that so I need to create an invoice for were this particular person before I would even need to do that so um let's see and then Mark it is save and then so now we have the all the entries here for this person so now I would be able to go in and add the payment for this for this particular matter and it's already actually started here so I can go sorry actually sorry sorry sorry I can go here now and add in the information and still because there's a trust account balance it's not bringing up any additional money to be paid so I can actually take out the let me let me slow down sorry um okay let's go back into the invoice for roal okay so Raquel has a Trust balance and if we we pull this Trust balance then it will change rael's amount that she owes the firm and it will deposit this money that she owes as a part of this particular invoice and it's going to be taken away from here so if we use the Trust balance to cover it and then we mark it a save we'll see that now the balance is different so it's taken the money that was deposited to us that that uh Trust balance of $1,500 that we received from her and now the balance is only 15758 so it's taken that money and and credited towards this invoice so it's no longer um viable and so now she owes us money we would we' be able to collect on new money for this particular my person for the firm now if we wanted to set up um one thing to note here is that in order to be able to send out any invoices at all you would need need to make sure that you have your emails synced up with lockas so you're going to want to make sure that your emails are mapped up and that would be the only way that you would be able to do that that's one thing I forgot to cover is that you you're going to want to make sure that you synced up your email so under absent Integrations you will go to email and calendar and you're going to want to make sure that your email is actually connected and you'll see here that my email and calendar is actually already connected with this so that's why I'm able to send out these invoices so one that's one important thing to know that you want to make sure that you do that taking us back into the PowerPoint presentation we're going to now move into another area and we're going to go into setting up automatic reminders for your invoices so earlier in the in this I was talking about um setting up reminder so we're going to go ahead and cover that quickly here so once you're here inside of settings you're going to want to make sure that you are going into your firm settings and once you're in firm settings you could then take it from here and go into your reminders okay and inside of your reminders you have the invoice reminders here and you can come in and 10 days after the due date of the invoice you can have a reminder set up to send out to the client and that's why it becomes important to make sure that inside of your your invoice templates you're ensuring that you have it set up with the right due date so that the system can send out the right the reminders in the right amount of time you do have the ability to set up multiple reminders you can just come down here and do add reminder and you can add an additional one so let's say that you wanted to send a reminder out a couple of days before you do have the option to come in here and click on before and you can send out a reminder maybe three days before the invoice is due to let the client know that they have a bill that's becoming due and you would then create the subject here and add in the information down here in the body if you already have a template though that you wanted to utilize you would then just come in here and select the template from the list of templates and you would just make sure your nameing convention is easy so that you're able to identify that template and then you'll go ahead and populate that invoice inside of the invoice and this is what it looks like so I know that this do 10 days and I know that we were talking about three days before I just wanted you to be able to see what it looks like to be able to add a template to your invoice now if someone made a mistake and just added in a template for a wrong period of time if you just hit the X it takes away that information that information then does not get Sav so it's pretty easy to you know undo something that gets done when it comes to the invoice reminder ERS one thing I want to make sure that I say to you is that if you have a reminder and you realize that you don't need it anymore you do have the ability to come here and hit remove and it's going to ask you if you're sure you're just going to go ahead and say yes and then that takes away that particular U reminder from the list of reminders uh you also have the ability to add task reminders and event reminders as well and you know you can do that up to how you want to so that's going to take care of what it looks like when it comes to an invoice reminder and again one important thing to make sure that I stress to you is that you're really going to want to make sure that when you're working on your invoice templates your templates are set up properly so that the reminders can then follow the way that they need to taking us back into the presentation I'm now going to cover uh a workflow and so going back into the present presentation or actually before I cover works I'm I'm going to no yeah workflows so when it comes to workflows they're easy it's an easy way for you to be able to automate uh certain things and make it efficient when it comes to invoices you do have the ability to set up a workflow if you want to have um someone receive a payment or an invoice to make a payment as soon as you uh set them up as a matter so showing us what that looks like really quickly here I'm going to go ahead and take us back into Locus and to do this you want to make sure that you're inside of automations and when you're in automations you would just do add workflow and it would then take you through the stages of how to create it so I'm going to first show us the one that I had set up and that's right here so when a matter is created the system will then search the system for the client and then create a flat V for that particular uh client and then it's going to actually send uh create an invoice for that particular flat fee and then it's going to send an email out to the client to make them make that payment and this is triggered by the in new matter being created so when you're inside of the workflow to the first thing that you would do is then select the trigger here matters created and if you have the trigger by anyone that's going to make it easy for it to be able to be initiated and started you want to make sure that you always name your workflow because having a name is going to allow you to be able to identify easily and if you have a description you can add that in here once you have that you will then go ahead and hit continue uh there are some entry rules that you can even set up if you wanted to to and you can add conditions but keeping it simple um as long as you create the matter and have it be created as the start start trigger and have anyone you would then go ahead and hit continue and you would then set up where this happen so if it's from the pipeline default and the stage is case assess or whatever your stage would be you would make sure that you have that set up so if you have a different pipeline you would make sure that you select the appropriate pipeline that's applicable for this particular matter type and then whatever stage that follows up first within that particular pipeline you would then go ahead and select that and then you would select continue from here I then had it search for client so then it brings up the option for you to use this Arrow key here with the three dots when you click on it it brings up this use matter value from trigger it brings up all these options and as long as you select matter client it's going to search for that matter client and then you're going to continue to next from here you want to make sure that you have a firm understanding of like what your flat Fe would be for that particular uh client or matter type and you're going to enter that information here so if you know that um you naturally always take a flat fee amount upfront of $10,000 for uh litigation cases for example you would then create this flat fee here and then you would have it be the you would set up your trigger date and it would add the date for that now from here you would then also make sure that you select the matter ID and your matter ID is going to come from the trigger so all you would need to do is Select it here then you would select who the user is that would be uh applying this flat Fe and then you can add any one that's listed under the users here in addition to that if you had a particular category that you wanted to apply you can then add that in here and any discounts that you want to have reflect on the invoice you can have it show up here now this is the description of what that flat feed will look like and then you can hit continue and next from here I had it um add in the matter client as the billing contact and then you can also add in the matter ID here as well here it's not required so that's why I didn't add it here you see the the anything that has a Aster you have to add it and so those are the things that I focused on in addition to that you can add the issue date and then you can also add the due date so if you're your due date deferred from your standard due date for The Firm you can then have the due date be different by adding in it to be whatever number of days from the trigger date so the trigger date is just the date that this automation gets triggered so when the matter is converted that's the trigger date and then you would go ahead and hit continue and next and you have now what what's set up here is an email so you have the option to send an email with the invoice to the client and the invoice link is included so what you'll do is select the person that's going to be the one to send this invoice out then you're going to also set up the the who's going to receive it and you just put in matter client you then also have the option to CC other people if other people in The Firm need to be notified once the invoice is sent out you can add additional recipients here and you can also make if you wanted to blind copy someone you can also add them in here and just go ahead and select the person and it will blind copy them if you wanted to remove anyone you do have the option to hit the cash the trash bin on the right hand side and it takes them off I set this up to be able to be personalized so I added in the first name from the search client trigger and once you hit the use uh client value here you then want to select the first name and then you can add in whatever else you want as a subject I added in on the person's first name again here and then I also ensure that I added in some information um to send the email out with the link so I told them that you know the link is below for them to go ahead and pay their invoice also here you'll notice that the default signature is set up so as long as your signature is set up for the firm the default signature can be save can be applied and then you would go ahead and hit save and you'll see here that we basically walk through everything that encompasses setting up this workflow the last thing that I want to cover today is actually going to be when it comes to sorry the customized user permissions and to go over that all you would need to do is when you're inside of locus you would go to your manage organization and from here you can uh add in the different people that you want to and then you can control what exactly they see so if you don't want someone to see certain kind of of things you would then change their uh their user level here so accounting is something that's huge and invoicing is something that's huge another thing too is the um the team activity so if you don't want them to see everyone else's time entries and their expenses and how they're billing you would then just go ahead and make sure that you select a member because the member wouldn't have the ability to see these team entries and they wouldn't have the ability to see invoicing or accounting or anything like that so that's something that you would want to um figure out internally in your firm to figure out what would make the most sense for you and once you've identify the way that you want your your people to be set up once you're inside of users you you have that option to change to to have it set up properly in here and if you if you wanted to change someone from one level to the next you can go in and just click on it and that will change their role there was one thing that I actually wanted you guys to see for invoicing and I don't think that I got to show you so let me actually show you that really really quickly and that's going to be what it looks like for the client when they receive the invoice if they have access to the client portal and let me actually pull that up for us hold on okay so this is um the client portal here and this is someone that has access to the client portal and once they're inside of the portal if they uh have any invoices that they need to pay all they would need to do is click on make a payment and it will show up here and if they click on their invoice they have the ability to review the invoice here and because uh the this particular uh because this particular one doesn't have the um the payment option here you have the ability to download the invoice and send it off and then if you if it were the case where you're integrated with like a law pay or gravity legal you would have the option to have the person pay the invoice right from here which I showed you guys already how to do but this would be what it looks like from the client exp from the client experience once they have access to the client portal and that pretty much covers everything that I wanted to show today I hope that you guys were able to find this presentation helpful and now I'm going to take it back over to Dev to to say anything final and if you guys have any questions or anything like that I now welcome any questions that you guys may have uh thank you kasita that was really great of you to have us walk through from scratch how to do the invoicing and billing on lockers and uh we do have some questions people have something in the Q&A so let me read it out so maybe uh we can answer it together so first is with Ivan so he says can you keep trust funds at client level if a client has multiple matters so to answer that Ian yes you can have the trust funds at the client level or at the matter level that is completely up to you so people who usually keep at client level are the ones that have uh one client and have multiple cases associated with that client so to just manage that on the client level you will have to directly make a deposit onto the client's trust account and that's it and then it's up to you whether you want to use that client level trust fund on matter one or matter two or matter three that's completely in your hands but yes you can do the trust funds on the client level as well and then we have valy so uh she has a question if you add a flat fee should you add your time as non available I've noticed that if you add your time as available it will add to the flat fee on the matter so Valerie how the invoicing works is whatever time entries and flat fees you create on lus okay and whenever you invoice them whether it's bable or non-billable they will be combined on the uh invoice and they'll be adding up on the invoice so if it's billable all the time entries and flat fees will be added among the invoice if your time entry is non billable and your flat fees is billable then your invoice although it has both the flat fee and time entry but the invoice will only show the amount for the flat fee because your flat fee was billable and your time entry was non billable so it's up to you of how you want to build your clients okay if you want to build them on a flat fee basis then you'll have to make sure that your flat Fe is buildable and your time entry is marked as non-billable so that the time entry is showing on invoice but you're not billing the client for it so you need to decide it of how you want to build the client and then ingly you can shift if you want to make the flat as bable or time which as bable or both but they will eventually add if you make them as billable it will not be like flat fee uh maybe like time entry will be subtracted from the flat fee no it will not do the calculations that way it will only add and I hope I able to answer you if you have more questions you can let us know and then I see on the email reminders that you added custom Fields within the email how do you do that uh Cita would you like to uh show the email reminders of the invoices yeah I can and then um I just showed up the example here of what it would look like if it were like billable and non-billable on the invoice so um really quickly here so if it's a flat fee and it was non buildable you see that it gets crossed out but it still shows up and then also the time entry one if it's a billable one it also shows up here and they're they're both showing up through the balance here down here um the question about the invoice uh em the email oh the email reminders yeah um let me go back okay so the the way that this came up is because I pulled it from the template so I used a template that I had and once I applied it it brought this over so when you're inside of your um templates here instead of automations and your in your email templates you would just make sure that you set it up here so that's how this came up I I added it in here and I added it over and then in this information that's in here all of this came from um these merch felds so all you would need to do like for example this field here that I added in for the the name I just pulled it from merch tags and then I came over here to the contact fields and I pull the contact first name and then I just made sure that I put a comment after it the same thing applies for all of these different fields that I have down here I just went into each one of the merge fields and if it's for the invoice I just C cover the invoice fields and then I just clicked on each one to add it in so that all the information populates on on here once you have the information here it then will will save so that when you're inside of your settings and you're working on your reminders over here you have the ability to just use your template that's why I like using the templates because it makes it more customized with these different tag Fields because when you're just doing it inside of here you can add it but you can't see it all in the same way that you can when you're doing it inside of the other area inside of your automations inside your email template here okay I guess uh lilan maybe we were able to answer your question if you have any further questions uh you can drop a message in the q& then we have a question from Kent so are all the invoices created in a matter viewable by the client in the portal for example if I build a legal Assurance company on a matter will The Client see the invoice in the portal so to answer that K client will only see the invoices in the portal in first case if the matter is or or the lead is shared with the client on the portal second if you have sent the invoice like if the invoice is in the sent status only then the client will be able to see the invoice on the client portal so two things uh are mandatory the matter of lead is shared with the client and the invoice is in send status only then the client will be able to see invoice on the pro um then we have a question is there a way to filter the invoice reminders sent for outstanding balance and Trust request I want to send a different invoice reminder for each invoice and Trust request uh so to answer your question uh the invoice reminders that you create in settings these are default reminders so it's not uh like you can customize uh what reminder goes out for what kind of invoice these reminders will by default work on all the invoices or the trust request that you create so this is not uh like a choice uh for which invoice I use which reminder this is by default so here you cannot customize here you can only customize one thing how and when you want to send the email reminder and from whom the email reminder should go out whether it's from lockers or yourself or someone else from the firm and what email template you want to use or uh the message that you want to customize only these things are customizable otherwise the reminders work by default for all of your clients uh I guess we've covered all the questions anybody else has any further questions about whatever we have just uh discuss today would you like to add anything meanwhile um no I all I really want to say honestly is thank you all for being here and for showing up today and if you have any additional questions regarding anything involving setting up uh your system where whether it's regarding accounting or billing or whether it's an automation or workflow or even email templates anything along those lines you can definitely feel free to get in touch with me I am always available and accessible to answer questions um so yeah just you can get in touch with me and um my information is all the way in the beginning sorry about that but yeah this is my information feel free to send me an email I think that I also uh shared Dev I'm not sure if you posted it or not a contact form but if you want to fill out a contact form the uh I think the let me share the link with you so that you can do that and then you can get in touch with me if you have anything that you want to ask in terms of questions so let me share the link with you guys and again thank you all so so so so so so much for being here today I really really really appreciate it and I really hope that you found everything helpful and um yeah thank you all for your time okay I guess we've covered all the questions so thank you so much guys and thank you so much Cita for hosting this webinar for us and sharing your valuable thoughts on how to uh deal with the billing and accounting for the clients so guys uh I'll start a poll in the webinar so you can uh like choose the topic for the next webinar also you'll receive a survey link after that so maybe you'd like to dat us how the how was the webinar or you would like to share any suggestions you have and then uh uh hopefully we were able to answer all of your questions if anybody has any questions you can reach out to us on support or if you need help uh with building out lockers or building out workflows you can reach out to Casita uh her email is there on the screen or you can reach out to us as well and ask her for your uh for her contact information we will share uh the information with you and she'll help you build out workflows or or any other document templates in tap forms or she'll guide you through the process if you need any help uh after this you will uh get the email with the YouTube link once it's uploaded and the video will be there on our YouTube channel and cas's information will also be there so please feel free to contact her or us anytime you need any help with setting up automations or setting up invoicing on blogs yes and I also share the contact form in the chat so if you guys want to fill out the contact form to get in touch with me or send me an email find me I'm on LinkedIn I'm on Instagram I have a YouTube channel posting weekly about lockas and how to better use lockas so you could definitely find me any way that you want and I I'll help you in any way that I can for sure thank you so much K that's was that was really helpful of you and okay guys I think all your questions have been answered Zan I've answered your question as well so thank you so much guys for taking our time for joining today's webinar hopefully we'll see you next month with a new topic and uh if anybody has any suggestions for the topic they can always reach out to Locus support and we can have a webinar based on that topic and at the end I like to thank Cita for investing so much time and making this web webinar happen thank you so much and we hope to continue webinars and we hope to continue doing webinars with you thank you so much guys have a great day we'll end this webinar now and I'll send you the YouTube links after this webinar in the emails thank you so much guys have a great day