What's The Matter? Billing

By Author: Rick
Total Articles: 277
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What’s the Matter? Billing

If you’re the kind of lawyer whose clients come to you with a single matter or case, then for you, there isn’t much of a discrepancy between client and matter billing. You treat them as one, and your escrow accounting follows suit.

But let’s say you’re the kind of lawyer that has corporate clients assigning you multiple matters - all very similar. Say you’re collecting bills on behalf of a utility or cell phone company. The company (your client) has 1,000 unpaid accounts. You successfully collect on all accounts - leaving you with 1,000 different checks.

Now: the state ethics rules want you to keep matter funds separate. So where do you keep these payments, pending transfer to your client? Are you going to cut 1,000 different checks for each, and deposit them into separate accounts? What about your fees? Are you going to require your client to divide that into a separate amount for each matter? How would you even do the math?

You can cut a single check to your client, but you need to annotate the check with reference numbers for the accounts that have been ...
... satisfied. You can receive a single check (for your fee) from your client, but in nearly all cases, your rules require you to track and segregate each matter - on a matter level. Generic accounting programs aren't designed to handle these specific challenges, or to move money around seamlessly. Even many law firm billing software programs don’t always support the circumstances at hand.

What you need is software which is both granular enough to itemize all matters in your record keeping, and yet flexible enough to translate the actual monies into a single check for or from your client. That’s where our legal trust accounting software comes in.

Easy Trust allows law firms to cut a single check, and charge it to thousands of matters. Your client gets clean records, and no one has to spend all afternoon at the bank writing or depositing checks.

Easy? You bet.

For more information about our specialized legal billing and accounting software, call Easy Soft at 800.905.7638.

It provides complete escrow accounting software with built-in escrow accounting rules that prevents human errors at the time of data entry itself. For example, client ledgers cannot be over-drafted