ContactsLaw has a comprehensive set of billing and cost recovery features.

 

 

Products
The basic unit of billing; represents either a tangible item or an intangible cost comprised of work performed on the file.

 

Journals are the foundation of the billing system. With time recording at the heart of any service-oriented industry, ContactsLaw captures your time accurately, concisely and enhances it with contacts and extended notes. Time records are associated with products to further describe the nature of the work.

 

Fixed charges provide a mechanism to record the charges that are traditionally handled by cost recovery systems. They include printing and copying, telephone calls, postage and faxing. Fixed charges are associated with products to more accurately quantify the cost of each deliverable.

 

Disbursements allow members to transparently pass-on costs incurred by the practice on a file. Disbursement payments are used when billing after the expenditure, while Disbursement journals allow billing prior to paying for the disbursement. They also allow disbursements to be recorded using the creditor system. After being recorded, disbursements can be billed or written off.

 

Bills bring together the charges recorded on a file, additionally providing the ability to adjust the amount billed, offer discounts, apply a quote pro-rata, charge interest on overdue amounts and cater for anticipated disbursements. Bills are composed interactively with a real-time preview, then exported for printing or e-mailing.

 

Upfront billing
In addition to traditional time-centric billing, ContactsLaw allows you to bill matters upfront. In this mode, a fixed/quoted price is charged immediately and a billing period is opened. After all work is concluded on the file, the billing period is closed in order to determine the products and disbursements which were included in the fixed price.

 

The debtor receipt activity records payments to files, tracking the specific allocations to bills and bill items.

 

Trust transfers automate the process of transferring funds from trust to general, for the purpose of paying bills.

 

Credit notes provide a mechanism to credit the amount of all or part of the bills on a file back to the client. The credit can remain on the debtors ledger for future application to bills, or can be combined with a debtor refund to reimburse the client.

 

ContactsLaw provides the ability to write off bad debts, which may represent all or part of the balance on the debtors ledger.

 

Should bad debts be recovered (through debt collection procedures), the funds can be applied to the file. 

 

Bills of costs are produced as part of the taxation process, and allow all time, charges and disbursements to be recalculated against a statutory scale. Items can be reassigned to different products in order to model the court scale.