All Collections
Invoices & Billing
Getting Started
Best practices of approving pre-bills in PracticePanther?
Best practices of approving pre-bills in PracticePanther?

Create pre-bills that both attorneys and billing personnel and review in making sure everything is correct.

AJ Sacher avatar
Written by AJ Sacher
Updated over a week ago

Note: our batch billing feature is only available within both our Essential and Business subscription plans. To learn more about what each of our subscription plans have to offer, click here to find out.

When creating Pre-Bills we're going to first need to understand how to do batch billing, which you can learn how to do by clicking here.

Below you will find a start to finish tutorial covering everything you will need to know regarding Pre-Bills in PracticePanther. Jump to the topic of interest by clicking on a title in the index below. Alternatively, you can watch the video below.

Index: 

Creating the Pre Bill

1) Begin batch billing using this guide.

2) Before saving your bills make sure that the retainer options are turned off as to not affect financials when creating Pre-Bills.

Reviewing the Pre-Bill

1) Click "Invoices" at the top of the screen to start the reviewing process.


2) Change "Billed Date" filter to "Created Date", then change the date filter to "Today" or whenever the bills were generated.


From here we can decide how we want to review the pre-bills. There are two options, paperless or traditional. Paperless helps saves money and time, while traditional requires printing out the invoices and handing them over to the attorney and reviewing them.


Traditional

1) After selecting your Pre-Bills with the check boxes on the left, select the blue gears at the top and choose "Download". You may want to select a certain user using the "Assigned to" filter on the top of the page if you only want to download these invoices per user.


2) Confirm the download of the PDF files.


3) This will download a zip file containing the PDF version of the Pre-Bills to review.

4) Open the PDF file and click the print icon to initiate the print screen window.

5) Take these printed invoices and allow your attorneys to review them by hand.
​ 

This process should be completed by the attorney or user so they can review their own Pre-Bills.

1) Change the "Any User" filter to the attorney/user reviewing their Pre-Bills.

2) Change the "Billed Date" to "Created Date" and change the date to "Today" or whenever the bills were generated.


3) Now that we've filtered all of the recently created Pre-Bills, we can now go into the Pre-Bill and review without having to print! We advise following this guide to easily open each invoice in a separate tab.


4) Review the information on the invoice.


5) If there are any changes you'd like there to be made, you can easily notate them on the bottom of this invoice page as seen below.

6) Simply type in your edit requests, then click "Save" for each one. Easy!

Finalizing and Sending

  1. After selecting all the Pre-Bills we can apply a batch payment.


2) Choose which retainer account you wish to apply, then click "Pay invoice using retainer/credit".


3) Now choose if you want to "Print" the invoices or "Send" them via email, now that they've been finalized.

What Happens Now?

You can now rest easy knowing that your invoices have all been reviewed, corrected, and finalized. 

Enjoy!

Interested in learning how to batch invoice your Overdue clients? Click here to find out how!

Did this answer your question?