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Flat fee services are a vital part of many law firms style of billing. Whether you only want to charge one large fee for an entire case, or break your case down into multiple flat fee services, PracticePanther's got you covered!

Index:

1) Log and review your flat fee services upon completion, rather than waiting until the billing stage.

2) Log a discount ahead of time and include that discount on your bill later.
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3) Review how many discount flat fees your firm has given for a time period.

4) Select a billing attorney per flat fee, allowing for detailed monthly/yearly reporting.

There's a few places you'll be able to log flat fees across the PracticePanther platform.

Click the white "New" button found on the top left of any page, then click "Flat Fee".

Click the "New Flat Fee" button found in your "Quick Create" section of your Dashboard.

Or

Click "More" on the top, then click "Flat Fees" to navigate to your firm's collection of flat fees.

Here we can see the "Multiple Flat Fees" and "New Flat Fee" buttons, as well as a list of all flat fees you've previously logged in this manner.

Here we can see the "Flat Fees" tab which gives us access to the flat fee creation buttons, as well as a summary of all flat fees you've previously logged in this manner for only this contact/matter.

There is also a "Flat Fee" creation button found under the green "New" button as well.

1) After clicking on one of the various flat fee creation buttons mentioned above, make sure to select which contact/matter you want to associate this flat fee with.

2) Fill out the flat fee's details.
​Item: The title of the service being completed. You can create new service titles here, and learn more about creating items here.
​Date: The date the service was completed.
​QTY: How many times would you like to charge for this service right now?
​Amount: How much would you like to charge for this service?
​Total: QTY multiplied by Amount.
​Description: Additional info that appears on your invoices that your client can see.

3) Decide if you'd like this flat fee to appear on the invoice using the "Billable" field.

4) Select the "Billed By" user for this service.
​Note: This "Billed By" field will come in handy later for reporting purposes.

5) Click "Save".

To record a discount as a flat fee, simply change the QTY to be "-1" so the total becomes a negative as well. This amount will be deducted from the invoice once billed.

You may also decide to record multiple flat fee services at a time by clicking any of the "Multiple Flat Fee" buttons.

Simply fill out all the details across each line. You may even record flat fee services across multiple contacts or matters at once!

To add a new flat fee line, simple click "New Flat Fee". 

Pro-Tip: You can click "Set Defaults" to reveal additional fields that will auto-populate your information the next time you click "New Flat Fee".

Whenever you're finished, click "Save". If you have more than 10 flat fee services to log, instead of clicking "Save", click the little green arrow then click "Save & Add More" to refresh the page and add 10 additional flat fee services.

To the left of each flat fee service is a pencil and a garbage can. Clicking these icons will allow you to edit or delete the entry from the invoice, as well as edit or delete the flat fee record saved on the matter.
​Note: It's important to make edits using this pencil so your flat fee reports are consistent later on.

You may also click "+Flat Fee" to create a new flat fee service directly on the invoice and create the record back on the contact/matter as well!

In our reports page here, if you click into the "Flat Fees" section, you can see reports breaking down your flat fees by contact, matter, user, status and even flat fees over a period of time.

1) Click the 3 dots (hamburger menu) found to the right of the total column.

2) Hover over the "Filter" section.

3) Under "Show items with value that:", select "is less than".

4) In the field below, type in "0".

5) Click "Filter".

6) Decide which filters you'd like to use to hone in on the specific type of discounts you want to see.

7) Once satisfied with your filters, scroll to the bottom of the list to see the total dollars awarded via flat fee discounts.

On your Originating Attorney Report, select the "billed by" attorney to review the total dollars they were personally responsible for bringing in to the firm. Review the "Collected Flat Fees" column to review the total dollars they brought in via flat fee services.
​Note: to capture all services by a certain billed by attorney, make sure "Originated by" is set to "Any user".