Legal Billing

Easy Soft Launches New E-Billing Service (1 of 2)

If you’ve been following the advice in our blog posts, life should be hunky dory. You’re using our law firm billing and accounting software to both capture your billing and expenses, and collect on them in a systematic way – providing a cash flow that’s as steady as your workflow (or better). You’ve even been accepting credit card payments and calculating interest on overdue invoices. Your law firm is set up to thrive – and we’re glad.

Now, one of your clients tells you they need e-bills from now on. Uh-oh.

Never fear: Easy TimeBill is here! Effective today, Easy TimeBill’s optional E-Billing module can produce invoice into an electronic format – while retaining the original paper format for printing / filing purposes.

E-billing itself isn’t new, of course. For years, large corporations such as insurance companies and banks have been converting to e-billing in order to maintain uniformity and institute audit controls. (Scanning isn’t enough: e-billing requires standard formats (as you’ll see below), and often contains different information than on a paper invoice).

For now, the industry standard format is known as Ledes1998B. (As more formats become necessary, we will add them to our billing software.) Once you have licensed the add-on E-Billing module, our legal accounting software takes it from there.

To add e-billing to your Easy TimeBill license (or view a live demonstration), call Easy Soft at 800.905.7638 today.

Posted by Rick Kabra on November 22, 2011 in Legal Billing | Leave a comment
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Better Cash Flow; Happier Clients (Part 4 of 4)

In the last few blog posts, we’ve been emphasizing the importance of solid cash flow management practices. If you’re looking for a tool to ease the way, look no further. Consider our Payment Acceptance Plan, a merchant accounts option for law firms.

An Internet merchant account gives your clients a full range of electronic payment options. They can pay their bill by credit card, debit card, or remote check. You can also set up recurring billing. The funds can pour into your law firm operating account – or your escrow or trust account. You can even get real-time reporting – which allows you to use your desktop, laptop, Smartphone, or tablet PC to accept a credit / debit card payment, and see where your accounts stand. Best of all, the fees are low – and to prove it, we’ll compare them against your current credit card merchant payment plan free of charge. (Just fax us a cover sheet with your latest credit card processing statement: 877.439.7638).

What’s better for you and your cash flow is also easier for your client: rather than write out a check and wait for the proper authorized signature, he or she can simply provide you with a card or checking account number over the phone (or keep one on file). It’s a win-win scenario that simultaneously eliminates your collection frustrations (it practically prints money), and keeps clients more invested in you and your law firm.

By now, we’ve reviewed many angles of your cash flow plan, including retainer collection, billing and time tracking, expenses and expense tracking, invoice reminders, retainer replenishments, and electronic payments.

Together, these tasks would appear to require a full-time bookkeeper or accounting help. That is where law firm accounting software definitely helps. Easy TimeBill is designed to solve these issues right out of the box. It funnels your cash to the right accounts, segregates and tracks client matters, and tells you what you’ve got to work with – so you can rest easily.

Learn more about your law firm cash flow management system by calling us at 800-905-7638.

Posted by Rick Kabra on November 21, 2011 in Legal Billing | Leave a comment
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Do you have a system for Replenishing your Retainer? (Part 3 of 4)

In the past two posts, we talked about the common issues that affect law firm cash flow management. These include not collecting sufficient retainers, not recording time and expenses promptly (i.e. as incurred), and not sending prompt collection reminders.

In this post, we’re going to add one pesky, persistent issue – and that’s replenishing your existing retainer balance. Law firms – especially solo practitioners and smaller firms – commonly struggle with this. You receive your retainer, and then bill from month-to-month, and before you know it, the original retainer has dwindled to zero. The culprit? Not having a system in place to ask your clients to bring their retainers back up to level – outside of hourly billing.

As creators of efficient, easy-to-use law firm billing and accounting software, Easy Soft has a solution: Easy TimeBill. With the selection of a few choices, you can easily set up retainer replenishment invoices – and email them to your clients seamlessly with your monthly invoice.

One way to accelerate your cash flow is to sign up for our Payment Acceptance Plan, or merchant accounts for law firms. As far as cash flow management software goes, it’s crucial to be able to offer a processing service that allows your clients to authorize their corporate credit or debit card or even pay by remote check (once they’ve reviewed your invoice). Get the system, and you’ll never have to wonder if the proverbial check is in the mail.

As a one-time promotion, we’re offering a $249 rebate on Easy TimeBill when you activate on Easy Soft’s Payment Acceptance Plan. We’ll tell you more about this in the next and final post on easing your law firm’s cash flow management: for good.

Find out more by calling us at 800-905-7638.

Posted by Rick Kabra on November 18, 2011 in Legal Billing | Leave a comment
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Operating v. Trust Account 101

Here’s a question that you might remember from your bar exam. There are operating retainers and trust retainers. How do you know where to deposit your funds?

More importantly, once you’ve determined the answer, how do you keep track of it?

Hint: if you’re using generic accounting software, that last bit gets pretty challenging.

But if you’re using Easy Soft’s Easy TimeBill (ETB) and Easy Trust (ET) modules, then you’ve got it made.

You see, ETB and ET are specialized billing software for attorneys that allow you to make spot decisions: seamlessly. You can consider each scenario on its individual merits. And if you change your mind later, press a button, and voila! you’ve switched accounts without having to reinvent the wheel. That’s strong technology at work.

In contrast, generic accounting software – particularly if it’s not made specifically for law firms – only accounts for a single type of account (i.e. an operating account). Or, it might segregate trust and operating accounts across programs. Often, generic software doesn’t specify which type of account you’re dealing with at all. We’ve seen lawyers keep parallel sets of books to separate their trust accounts from their operating accounts.

In a competitive market, seamlessness is what you’re going for. You spend less time on your legal billing, and more time on your clients. Speaking of which, those clients don’t need to know – and don’t care – about your escrow accounting. So making it seamless works better for you…and better for your client relations.

By the way, the answer to that bar exam question is perfectly grey. Usually, earned fees, personal funds, operating funds, and business funds go into your operating account. But not always. For example, what if your client gives you an advance for next month’s work? Where do you deposit it? Are you now channeling funds between accounts?

Go the easy way: with Easy Soft. For more information about our escrow software, call us at 800.905.7638.

Posted by Rick Kabra on November 2, 2011 in Legal Billing | Leave a comment
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Get Your Bills to Talk to You

In recent posts, we’ve talked about how our legal time and billing software helps you get your invoices out, send reminders (if necessary), and get paid.

What we haven’t discussed is an ancillary – but critical – function of our law firm billing software. This function isn’t focused on the client: it’s focused on your business, and on enhancing your firm’s overall bottom line.

The function is analytics. You see, in any billing system, there are multiple parties. The first is your client. The second consists of your Timekeepers (attorneys, paralegals, secretaries). The third are vendors (in Easy TimeBill, we refer to these as “Payees”): expert witnesses, delivery services, contract attorneys, process servers, etc. The fourth are Matter Owners, or the partner or lawyer that oversees any given client or matter.

These parties create different data points, and as with all software, the data can then serve your business, rather than function as a one – way street.

For Timekeepers, yearly compensation is often tied to performance records. And in a law firm, there’s no better way to track performance than with billable hours. Timekeepers and managers alike can print out reports of their hours in any given month, quarter or year, and figure out whether they’re staying productive and on-target.

For Matter Owners, Easy TimeBill can retrieve matter reports. These both filter out other attorneys’ matters, and provide information points – at a glance. Matter Owners can quickly see whether their matters have been profitable, whether clients are paying their bills on time, whether they are staying within budget parameters, and so forth.

What these reports avoid? The need to migrate to another law firm billing software product six months down the road.

To retrieve data, download our law office billing software, and click on “Reports” in the left-hand column. For more information, call Easy Soft at 800.905.7638.

Posted by Rick Kabra on October 24, 2011 in Legal Billing | Leave a comment
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Easy Accounting for Hourly Billers

If you’ve been following our blog for a while, you know how strongly we feel that a law firm using generic, non- legal billing and accounting software is a law firm missing out on an opportunity to be efficient, streamlined, and state bar compliant.

Easy Soft’s legal billing and trust accounting software solves the problem. Easy TimeBill and Easy Trust are popular law-specific programs that meet legal billing and compliance requirements. And they do so no matter what your fee arrangements look like: whether they’re based on hourly, fixed or contingency fees.

Today, we’re going to focus on hourly billers. Family or divorce lawyers, wills, trusts and estates lawyers, general civil and commercial litigators, elder lawyers and commercial bankruptcy attorneys are examples of legal practices that typically employ an hourly fee structure. If your practice falls into one of these areas, then chances are, you receive client advances in the form of retainers, then track your daily billable time across multiple matters. Very likely, you track your expenses as incurred, and generate periodic (say, monthly) bills, and either pay them out of your clients’ retainer balances, or from new money received from your clients. You’ll probably need to juggle funds between your trust accounts and your operating accounts.

Easy TimeBill can handle all of this. You set billing rates for all timekeepers (changeable between matters), track your time and expenses per entry, and generate invoices accordingly. At the beginning of an engagement, you deposit retainers in your operating or trust accounts, then move funds between accounts according to how they are earned. You can generate detailed administrative reports, prepare payment reminders—and even initiate low retainer balance letters and collection efforts: all from the same legal billing program.

For operating accounts, we do recommend using a standard accounting program such as QuickBooks—preferred by CPAs. QuickBooks data entry becomes minimal with need to only enter data on hourly legal fees received (either from new funds or trust funds) and quarterly/yearly account receivables.

As for trust accounting, what Easy TimeBill doesn’t handle, the Easy Trust module will. Our trust accounting software allows you to receive retainers, track trust funds for individual matters, and even print disbursement checks across the proper number of accounts. You can generate required reports, reconcile bank account statements—even perform three-way reconciliations among your trust and operating accounts.

Life becomes easier. That’s why we call it Easy Soft.

To learn more about our billing and trust accounting software for attorneys, call Easy Soft at 800.905.7638.

Posted by Rick Kabra on October 11, 2011 in Attorney Trust Accounting, Legal Billing | Leave a comment
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