Coding a filing fee to the matter that will repay it
Costs arrive as PDFs from everywhere. A process server invoices per attempt and a court reporter bills per page for an expedited copy. Each has a matter buried in a reference line, and a single invoice often covers several matters. Reading them into coded cost entries with an expense code from the UTBMS set is routine work that Dext and BILL already half do. Settle the treatment first: whether an advance is an expense of the firm or money advanced for the client follows the fee agreement, and it changes the posting.
The same client name is typed into the conflicts database, the practice management system, the document management system and the ledger, and a conflict is only found later if two people spelled it the same way.
A firm organises everything by matter, and the matter record is created by hand from an intake form. That single re-keying step seeds four systems, and because there is no shared identifier between them, every later reconciliation is a name match against human typing.
- Dext
- QuickBooks Online
- Clio
When this is the wrong thing to build
Pick something else if the firm advances few costs, as in most transactional work, where the only pass-through is a recording fee twice a year. This pays where costs are advanced across many open matters and get recovered later out of a settlement or a final bill.
The constraint that shapes it
The conduct rules decide what may be automated here, and they are adopted state by state rather than nationally, so specifics have to be checked against your own jurisdiction. More on how this sector works.
A file arrives. The fields come back typed and checkable. Read what this shape is, or start from one of these.
- Reading dates out of a ratified contract
- Abstracting a commercial lease into dated fields
- Filling an MLS input sheet from the listing agreement
- Reading a nameplate so nobody retypes it
- Reading a year of utility bills into a load calculation
- Getting statements and receipts into one shape
- How do I code a process server invoice to the right matter?
- Are advanced client costs an expense or a receivable of the firm?
- What UTBMS expense code covers court filing fees?
- How do I split one vendor invoice across several matters?
- Where do e-filing fee receipts go in Clio?
Back to law firms, or see how this is priced and scoped.