5 Billing Best Practices From Top-Performing MyCase Customers – Webinar Recap
Learn how you can use the built-in features of MyCase to easily capture more billable hours, get paid consistently without hassle, and save time week after week.
Capturing, invoicing, and collecting payment on your billable time can be easy if you are using the right tools. Join MyCase Senior Product Manager Sam Mallen to learn how you can use the built-in features of MyCase to easily capture more billable hours, get paid consistently without hassle, and save time week after week.
Watch and learn how to:
- Capture time for all billable activities with Automatic Timers & Smart Time Finder
- Reduce hours spent on invoicing with Batch Billing
- Get paid faster with Invoice Reminders and Secure Payment Links
- Increase your collections with Payment Plans and virtual payment options
All without the need for a third party integration.
Jump to a Topic
6:12 – Capture Time Automatically
Attorneys are often so entrenched in their day to day that it’s easy for billable hours to slip through the cracks. Find out how MyCase customers have increased their billable hours by up to 20% with MyCase Time Tracking features designed specifically to combat the most common billing challenge among legal professionals – whether you bill hourly, on a flat-fee basis, or on contingency.
14:00 – Batch Billing & Automatic Payment Reconciliation
A universal sentiment among legal professionals continues to be that billing takes entirely too much time. But why is that? We’ve found that this can often be attributed to firms managing their billing processes using more than one software thereby jugging multiple data points. In this segment, Sam shares how batch invoice generation on a single platform helps MyCase customers save an average of 10-15 hours a month.
21:50 – Eliminate Common Blockers to Client Payment
Legal clients have varying needs when it comes to billing just as law firms have different needs when it comes to collecting payments. MyCase effectively reconciles the two by offering flexibility in accommodating the financial circumstances of your clients in a manner that ensures you are paid quickly and in full for your services.
33:30 – Automate Payment Reminders & Tracking
Despite your best efforts to accommodate clients with incentives or payment flexibility, delinquent payment is not uncommon. For that reason, MyCase has developed a number of client notification and tracking features to alleviate the pain of getting clients to pay the balance of their due or delinquent invoices.
40:58 – Use an Integrated Payments Solution
All the features in this presentation have one common thread: They all exist within one shared system. From time tracking to collecting payment, MyCase ensures that attorneys can maintain proper records and aren’t scrambling to reconcile their finances.
Transcript
Cathleen Swallow:
Heyy, everyone. Welcome to today’s webinar about best billing practices. We’re going to let everyone trickle in. Today, we’re going to be hearing about some of our highest performing customers and how they get the most from their billing practices.
Cathleen Swallow:
As we’re all getting settled in, we’re going to be providing opportunities to ask questions at the end of the webinar. So, as you go through this webinar, feel free to use the chat to go ahead and type in any questions you may have. As we get started here, I’m going to let everyone come in, we’re going to ask a fun get to know your question. So, get ready for that.
Cathleen Swallow:
If anyone’s not aware of where the chat is, you can navigate to the bottom of your Zoom webinar panel. There’s a button that says chat. Just click that and you’re able to toggle between the host and panelists and then everyone, just make sure it’s set to everyone so we can see your responses.
Cathleen Swallow:
All right, as we’re getting ready here, why don’t we answer a fun question. So, I know all of us have had our working environments change over the past year and a half. So, I’d love to know, do you prefer working from home? Or do you prefer working from the office and why?
Cathleen Swallow:
More productive in the office, Danielle, I definitely don’t have the same experience. There’s just so many fun people to talk to. Home, less distractions. Some people said it’s more productive at home, no coworkers there. A lot of people are saying they use their commute time for being able to do other things outside of driving to the office. Impressed with the people who say they’re productive both ways, that’s awesome to hear. Definitely don’t envy those with the hour-long commute, that’s painful. That time is better spent at home.
Cathleen Swallow:
All right guys, well, let’s get started. I want to go ahead and introduce myself and mention the purpose of this webinar. So, today, we’re just going to be going over things that we’ve heard as we’ve really built out our billing and payments platform to just understand what some of the common best billing practices are, what we’ve heard from others and how they’ve had success in using MyCase, and then just how you might be able to improve your own billing practices to increase efficiency.
Cathleen Swallow:
Like I mentioned, I do want to introduce myself. I’m Cathleen and I head up our product and UX team here at MyCase. I work closely with law firms to really understand the daily challenges that they face. And then, we look to figure out how we can solve those with technology. So, I’ve been at MyCase for about five years now. And I’m constantly surprised by how much work there is to do in a law firm. So, I love talking to you all and just figuring out how we can make that better.
Cathleen Swallow:
Today, I’m going to be facilitating this webinar. And then joining me today is our presenter and inhouse billing and payments expert, Sam. So, Sam works directly with our customers as well to learn all about billing and collection challenges they face and then works with our development teams to figure out the best solutions to those challenges. And then, when he isn’t helping law firms billing flat payment, he can be found on a trail running around San Diego.
Cathleen Swallow:
All right, so as we get started, I want to ask y’all a quick question. You’ll see a poll pop up and you’ll be able to answer this from your computer. So, this first question here is how do you bill your clients. Are you using flat fee, contingency, hourly or mixed? You should see a poll pop up. Go ahead and respond with that. I’m going to give you guys about 30 seconds to go ahead and answer this poll, then we’ll close it and show those results. A couple more seconds here.
Cathleen Swallow:
All right, I’m going to go ahead and end the poll and share these results. So, it looks like it’s mixed with flat fee and hourly. All right, so we are going to go over some of these key challenges we hear our customers mention.
Cathleen Swallow:
And one of the things that we often hear is that customers get so busy with just their daily work that they miss some of the billable hours that they could collect from their clients. And so, Sam, I know you’ve heard this challenge communicated in the conversations you’ve heard with law firms. What types of things do you hear?
Samuel Mallen:
Yeah, and hi, everyone. Again, as Cathleen mentioned, Sam Mallen here with MyCase product team. This is actually one of the overall biggest challenges we do hear from our customer base. And that’s actually true across the board, whether you bill hourly or even if you work flat fee, contingency cases predominantly, you still need to keep accurate records of your work before you book your clients or courts, whatever the types of cases you’re working involve.
Samuel Mallen:
So, in response to this, MyCase was built to ensure that you’re really maximizing the number of billable hours you can capture. In fact, if I move over to the next slide here, we’ve typically seen our customers increase the number of total billable hours captured by up to 20%. And I’m going to actually hop over to MyCase here and go through some of the features that have allowed our customers to do that.
Samuel Mallen:
I’ll start with something simple. The first one here are these timers that are built into the system and accessible from anywhere within MyCase. So, when you’re busy doing work that is potentially billable or work that you just at least want to keep a record of, let’s say as an example, I’m doing some document preparation for my Adams Civil Case, I will click the relevant case, do a simple description here, let’s do the document prep. And as I’m doing this, drafting documents, I’m filling out whatever stock templates I have.
Samuel Mallen:
All I have to do is select this timer. And when I’m done, I’ll pause it, and select Save a time entry. So, obviously for the purpose of this demo, there’s going to be a quick one, only 20 seconds. But when I select the time entry, it will carry over that information to this modal.
Samuel Mallen:
And the cool thing is, as a MyCase user, I already have my default hourly rate saved to the system. So, we will automatically calculate for you based on the amount of time logged and your hourly rate, how much you could potentially charge for this case, or excuse me, for this particular time entry. I’m free to add any additional descriptions here. Or if I have stock saved up activities within MyCase, like case research, consultation fees, court appearances, in this case, document drafting, I can select that.
Samuel Mallen:
And when I’m done, all I have to do is click Save. And that time entry will be automatically filed away to the relevant case and client files. What this does is just ensure that as I’m going on invoicing, which we’ll go over later on, I’m not having to scramble around to keep proper record of all of my entries for all my different cases and clients.
Samuel Mallen:
Now, beyond these generic timers that we have up in the upper right hand corner here, we also have what I’ll call contextualized timers, and I’ll show you what I mean by that. So, let’s go over to the Call Log for an example. Let’s say a customer calls in and I want to keep track, keep record of that call. I would simply click Add Call. Excuse me. Oh, my apologies, I keep, there we go, having a couple internet issues here.
Samuel Mallen:
Once I click Add Call, if you notice in the lower left hand corner here, as soon as I clicked Add Call, a timer started for me. Now, what this does is essentially ensure that I’m not having to actively remember while I’m doing other things that I should be keeping track of this time. If once I’m done with this call, I feel it is worthy of being recorded, and it’s something I’m going to want to bill for, I would simply select this Save and add time entry button here. And this exact same add time entry modal will pop up. And like before, it’ll get filed away to the relevant case and client files that exist within MyCase.
Samuel Mallen:
So, that’s a high overview of the different ways you can keep track time within MyCase. But beyond these, we actually hear from a lot of our clients that they don’t even have time to proactively or actively keep track and remember to click those timers or entering their relevant time entries while they’re busy doing myriad other things.
Samuel Mallen:
I was actually just talking to a criminal defense firm the other week, and now that courts have been open for a few months, it’s kind of just a sprint just to accomplish all the tasks they need to serve their clients. And that’s all right. MyCase will actually in the back end keep track of all of your potential time entries for you using what we call the smart time finder. So, I’ll demo that now.
Samuel Mallen:
I’ll simply collect, excuse, click the Smart Time Finder here in the lower right hand corner. For the purpose of this demo, I’ll also do year to date. And what you see here is a list of any action that I performed within MyCase be it sending a text message, emailing someone from MyCase, sending a message to the client portal, any event, task, really sky’s the limit here.
Samuel Mallen:
All of that, even if you don’t actively save or record a time entry will get logged in this Smart Time Finder, so that at the end of your week, month, quarter, whatever cadence it is that you go through and like to review your time entries, you can go through and say, “Oh, I remember that phone call with Ada Cheng.”
Samuel Mallen:
And I can even click into it to view a description to jog my memory. I didn’t track time for that because it’s existing that in this list here, so I’ll select Track Time. And you’ll be able to save and file a way that time entry with the appropriate amount of time and appropriate billable amounts based on your hourly rate that’s saved within MyCase.
Samuel Mallen:
So, really, with all these features, we allow you to both actively as well as passively track and record all of your potential time entries. So, you’re actually getting paid for all the work that you’re doing. So, with that, I’ll actually pass it over back to Cathleen here.
Cathleen Swallow:
Thanks so much, Sam. We know you guys are super busy and that you’re constantly having to juggle between different activities. But I know billing and invoicing is obviously very important to you as that’s the way you get paid. So, I’d love to just take some time to understand how much time do you actually spend on billing and invoicing each month, you or your staff.
Cathleen Swallow:
You’ll see the poll pop up, feel free to just select the answer that represents best how you guys spend your time on billing and invoicing. And then we will share those results in about 20 seconds here. Great, I’m just going to give it about five more seconds. Go ahead and get your responses in. Again, selecting from the poll, how much time do you and your staff spend on billing and invoicing each month?
Cathleen Swallow:
All right, we’re going to go ahead and stop that poll and share these results. So, it looks like the most commonly chosen answer was 10 to 15 hours followed by 16 to 20. So, again, a pretty significant amount of time each month spent on billing and invoicing each month.
Cathleen Swallow:
So, as we go into the next hurdle, I don’t think it’ll come as a shock that many of our customers are saying that billing and invoicing takes far too many hours per week. They’re spending a lot of time here and time that could be better spent serving their customers or in doing other work that is relevant to the firm.
Cathleen Swallow:
And so, I know Sam’s heard a lot around this. Sam, what are some common challenges that you’ve heard around billing and invoicing? And how much time it takes?
Samuel Mallen:
Yeah, well, first, I’ll say shout out to all the folks in the audience here. You’re going to hear a lot of your billing invoicing faster than what we’ve heard from a lot of folks. There really is a wide range of hours a firm will typically spend on creating and managing their invoices each month, depending on your individual processes and billing structures can also influence things. But pretty universal sentiment is that it’s just taking way too much time.
Samuel Mallen:
What we’ve heard from our current customer base that a firm will spend upwards of 10 to 15 hours conservatively on creating each voices every week or two and that is often exacerbated by having multiple softwares across which your data lives. So, for instance, your work may be tracked in one software, your invoice is generated in another, and you might be receiving payments through a third or even fourth software. So, reconciling all these different data sources and ensuring continuity becomes a bit of a nightmare when it comes to actually creating your invoices and getting them sent out.
Samuel Mallen:
Fortunately, with MyCase and MyCase payments, all this data does live together and invoice generation becomes a lot more streamlined. You can see that on our current customer base, based on feedback from them, we’ve seen average monthly time savings of about 10 to 15 hours.
Samuel Mallen:
So, I’ll hop on over back to MyCase and we will walk you through some of the different ways you can generate and send out invoices within our software. I’ll start simple. I’ll go with a simple single invoice generation and creation here. I will go over to, excuse me, the Billing tab and select Invoices.
Samuel Mallen:
And again, I’m just going to walk through to get started creating a single invoice. So, when I’m ready to create a one invoice, I will select Add Invoice. And what you’re seeing here is just a running list of all of the open cases and clients that have a dollar amount associated with their case.
Samuel Mallen:
So, in order to generate an invoice, all I have to do is select Invoice This Case. And the nice thing about working out of MyCase is that it can be done in a matter of seconds because like I was saying, before all of your different line items from the time you have tracked using those Smart Time Finder options or the timers that we just demoed to the expenses he reported, all of these different line items are automatically tied back to your case and client vitals, so you’re not having to manually compile all these entries together.
Samuel Mallen:
So, as soon as I click, let’s say Invoice This Case, again, for the Adams Civil Case, any information, financial information items that I have connected to the item civil case will automatically be populated within this invoice. So, all I have to do is configure it to the appropriate terms under which my firm does billing payments.
Samuel Mallen:
So, I do on average, let’s so Net 60 firms. I’ll actually pause here and say that you will see quite a few features on this page that we’re not going to get to right now, But we will demo later on such as Auto Apply Late Fees and Automated Reminders. But for the purposes of this demo right now, I’ll just walk through the simple invoice creation.
Samuel Mallen:
So, moving along. Once I set the terms of the invoice, I can scroll through, validate that, everything looks good, that everything I expect to be on this voice is showing. If for whatever reason I am missing anything, I can manually add time entries expenses, make adjustments as needed. And once everything’s ready to go, I simply scroll down, select Save Invoice and the invoice will be generated for me.
Samuel Mallen:
One other item I do want to go through during the invoice generation process and discuss is the concept of automated billing reconciliation. So, we hear from a lot of our clients who have historically used one system to track their time and generate invoices and another system like Square or PayPal to accept payments is that reconciling these items at the end of the month or again, whatever cadence they’re using, is a huge source of frustration and takes up a lot of their time.
Samuel Mallen:
With MyCase payments, when you generate an invoice and enable online payments, as soon as you send out this invoice via link, via either texting, email on the client portal, all options we’ll review later, their payments will be automatically reconciled and paid against these receivables. So, you’re not having to do any of that reconciliation later on. Everything is automatically done for you and everything that’s automatically saved to that case in client file that’s relevant to that invoice.
Samuel Mallen:
So, that’s the generation of a single invoice. Obviously, during certain periods within the month, oftentimes at the very end of the month or maybe on the 15th, depending on your caseload, you’re going to want to send out a lot of invoices and generate a lot of invoices at a single time. And you can do that in MyCase as well via our batch billing feature. So, I will navigate back to this Invoices and Add Invoice page.
Samuel Mallen:
So, previously, I simply selected Invoice This Case for generating a single invoice. Now, what I’m going to do is let’s say, I want to generate invoices for these four different clients, and they’re four separate cases. All I have to do is select those four cases and really go through a very similar procedure that I did for generating the single invoice, which is configuring it to whatever terms my firm uses. Net 60, it’s going to be due on October 25. If I have any legalese terms and conditions, notes that I have saved on all my invoices, I can configure that here as well.
Samuel Mallen:
I’ll keep it simple for now. And all I have to do is click create these invoices and all of those invoices with the relevant line items for each of these cases will be automatically generated. And I can send them out at a later date whenever it’s appropriate based on my firm’s processes.
Samuel Mallen:
So, that is all the different ways that you can generate invoices in MyCase, both as a single invoice and in batch. And again, the main key point here is that by having a centralized billing and payments platform and time tracking platform, et cetera, keeping everything in one centralized location allows us to be a very streamlined couple click process rather than a drawn out process of having to reconcile different items and pull from multiple softwares and data sources.
Cathleen Swallow:
Thanks, Sam. So, one of the things I want to mention is I see a couple of people putting questions in the chat. That’s great. Please continue to do that. We’re going to take those at the end. We’ll respond to as many as we can get to and then if we don’t get to your question, we’ll make sure to have someone from our customer success team follow up.
Cathleen Swallow:
So, as we move on, Sam’s mentioned some great ways to be able to track your time and do simple invoice creation. But then we know that you have needs around getting clients to pay. And so, one of the common hurdles that we’ve heard is that law firms have clients who have different needs when it comes to billing. Some may need to pay over time. Some may prefer to receive an email bill. Some may want it to be printed. Others may wish to have a tax said.
Cathleen Swallow:
And so, we give it a lot of flexibility on how to do that. Based on some of the challenges we’ve heard. Sam, can you share some of the feedback you’ve heard from our clients on what they’re doing in regards to their clients?
Samuel Mallen:
Yeah, yeah. So, at the end of the day, when it comes to actually receiving payments, we hear that there’s a lot of, I guess, you could call a tension between what’s easy and best practice for the firm and what is most convenient for your clients or actually what might even be necessary for them given their particular financial circumstances at the time.
Samuel Mallen:
And because of this, we did bill MyCase to maximize billing, flexibility and configurability and allow you to easily accept payments in a few different ways. And ultimately, what we’ve seen because of that is that our payments, or excuse me, our customers get paid pretty rapidly as a result, usually within three or four days. And a lot of times actually same day. Even among their clients who are not particularly tech savvy, Aaron Feldman from Feldman Law Group, who is one of our longtime customers said, “My bills get paid rapidly, and they get paid in full,” which was quite a difference from the old software so he’s coming from.
Samuel Mallen:
So, on that topic of payment accessibility, we are going to walk through a few different ways that you can get those invoices that you’ve generated either a single invoice or in batch, actually into your clients’ hands.
Samuel Mallen:
So, to do that, I will close out of here and I will actually go back to the Invoices page. And just as an example, I will go to the Esteban Ramirez invoice, second one here. Now, this is an invoice that has been generated. So, actually, this will be a good view to walk through as well.
Samuel Mallen:
Once you save an invoice and generate an invoice, this is sort of the view that your clients can see and that you can read over. It’s very straightforward. It’s legible. It’s, like I said, easy to read. We’ve heard from quite a few of our customers that the number of calls that they have received, trying to clarify how much do they actually owe in a given period, what constitutes their bill, what’s going into their bill, the number of calls they’re getting has dramatically been reduced after they adopted MyCase because the invoices that they receive are very straightforward and easy to read.
Samuel Mallen:
So, I’ll just scroll down here so you can get a view. Obviously, most example, invoices will have a few more line items here. This has a single flat fee for $100,000. This is quite the expensive case here. But going back to the top here, how you would actually get this generated invoice into your clients’ hand. There’s a few different ways you can do that.
Samuel Mallen:
So, the first one I’ll go over is this text option. So, by clicking this phone icon, we will display this modal. Esteban Ramirez is our billing contact. He has a phone number within MyCase. So, will automatically generate that. And will show you a stock message that will be sent to Esteban Ramirez saying, “Hey, this is your payment for XYZ invoice. Click this link to pay now.” They’ll receive that text. All they have to do is make a single click, enter in their credit card information. And that payment will be automatically tied back into MyCase and viewable within their case file and under their client file as well.
Samuel Mallen:
We have very similar process here for sharing via the client portal. For those who might not be familiar, our client portal is a secure way to communicate with your clients, sending important documents, sending messages to them for more secure communication than let’s say email, also, a good way to send invoices. When you share via the client portal, click this button, we will send them to their client portal. They’ll receive an email saying, “Hey, you have a new invoice you have to pay, click here to log in.” And they’ll be able to pay that invoice right then and there.
Samuel Mallen:
Again, also emailing the invoice and we also allow you to print invoices if for whatever reason that is your preferred means of sending them out to folks. Finally, if an individual calls in, they have their credit card in hand and they’re ready to make a payment to you via the phone, you can simply go to this invoice, select Record Payment, and enter in their payment information right here. Esteban actually has a card saved on file, so you won’t even have to type in their credit card information that they’re providing you. It’s already been saved.
Samuel Mallen:
So, those are very quick run through of all the different ways you can actually send out your invoices. Now, once your clients have their invoices, oftentimes we hear our firms will run into a new problem, which is actually getting them to make the payment. Due to various financial circumstances, a lot of times your clients may not be able to make a payment in full upfront.
Samuel Mallen:
Again, for using this invoice as an example, that’s $100,000, most people wouldn’t be able to pay that sort of sum as one lump sum upfront. And that’s okay. With MyCase payments, we do allow you to create for instance payment plans, which allows you to really meet your clients where they are and set up a plan that makes sense for both them and your firm.
Samuel Mallen:
So, in order to create a payment plan, all you have to do is click Edit this invoice. I will scroll down to the bottom here. You’ll see this section called Payment Plans. Very easy, all you have to do is click Enable on. And from here, let’s say you’ve spoke with your client and you say, “You know what, you can’t pay this upfront in full. So, starting on, let’s say September 1st, you can pay …” Let’s say they said they can pay $5,000 a month, you simply type in $5,000 per installments.
Samuel Mallen:
We will automatically calculate roughly what the number of installments comes out to. In this case, 21 installments. They said they’ll be able to pay this on a monthly basis. And for the purposes of this payment plan, that’s all we need. All you have to do is click Apply. And starting on September 1st, they will receive notification with a payment link to pay each one of these installments at the cadence that you have designated here. So, on the first of each month for the next 21 months, they’ll receive a installment for $5,000 they need to pay against.
Samuel Mallen:
Those are our payment plans. I will actually make one more note here. Payment plans are fantastic. They are a great way to help your clients and help your firm get paid. But one of the problems that we heard sometimes comes with payment plans in general is keeping track of cash flow. Sometimes it’s hard to know when is that money actually going to be coming in the door. And we have addressed that problem with what we call the payment plans dashboard.
Samuel Mallen:
So, if I go down to Payment Plans section of my Billing tab, what we show here is various insights on the breakdown of your payment plans financial data. So, in this case, you can filter this data to whatever view you need. This is currently showing over the last 90 days, the average payment plan amount was $706. The planned payments over the next 30 days is going to be $1,905 and one cent. Of those, $500 are on autopay so you can just passively accept those, 1405 have been set up for being manually charged.
Samuel Mallen:
So, you just get a good idea of how much money is going to be coming in the door and what sort of work is going to go into getting those funds. And we will also show you this nice graph here of payment installments over time. So, as an example, looks like both August and November, and May were all good months here.
Samuel Mallen:
So, for November, you can see that 20 plans have installments that will hit in November, totaling $8,395. This view is just a good way to get a quick at a glance understanding of what your financial is going to look like, get a better understanding of your cash flow and how payment plans are tying in to all of that. That’s about it for the payment plans.
Samuel Mallen:
The last little bit I want to go through on the topic of payment accessibility and flexible payments is topic of subscription billing. Now, subscription billing is something we’ve seen become increasingly popular, particularly over the last few years, and especially common across practice areas. But it’s particularly common among folks who work with a lot of business entities.
Samuel Mallen:
And essentially, what it says is that your services can be retained for a recurring set subscription fee on a given cadence, let’s say up to X hours a month, every month for a monthly recurring charge of $3,000. It’s just a simple, easy way to have folks retain your services and get paid.
Samuel Mallen:
So, in order to set up a subscription billing plan with your clients, if that is something that is relevant to you and your firm, all you have to do is go to the relevant client file. Let’s say Sally Adams wanted to set this up with me. I would go to her client file, go to the Billing section here. And click Subscription.
Samuel Mallen:
So, she actually already has subscription plan in place. But let’s say hypothetically, I wanted to get her up and running with one. All I would have to do is enter in her relevant credit card information, the amount that will be charged to her credit card, in this case $2,000, the bank accounts into which I want these funds to be deposited, the start date for this plan, the frequency with which you will be charged.
Samuel Mallen:
And if you’ve set up a specific duration, let’s say we’re only going to maintain this plan for the next six months on a biweekly cadence, that would be 12 total payments. You can also run it in perpetuity if this is just going to be an ongoing relationship for the foreseeable future.
Samuel Mallen:
Once that’s set up, we will simply charge the card based on the parameters you provide us and will also provide similar to the payment plans dashboard, a subscription billing dashboard where you can see the total collected so far up to today is $6,000. Three installments have been processed, nine are still due. And we’ll show you the next payments. The next payment will be charged on the 7th for $2,000. And we’ll also show you the individual transactions here just so you have proper records of all your financials for Sally Adams.
Samuel Mallen:
So, really with these different options, it just makes accepting payments and getting payments from your clients, getting the invoice in their hands a lot more streamlined and making sure that all this data again is living, easily accessible, contextualize within your case info all in one place.
Cathleen Swallow:
Awesome. Thanks for sharing that, Sam. So, we’ve given you a lot of ways to help your clients pay in different options to help them and meet them where they’re at. But sometimes, even despite all that, it’s uncommon or common for clients not to pay, or maybe they pay late. And so, Sam, tell us a little bit about the challenges you’ve heard our customers mentioned about getting payment from their clients.
Samuel Mallen:
Yeah, yeah. It’s not necessarily technically the most time-consuming part from what we hear, but it’s often the most frustrating. I think the phrase it’s like pulling teeth has come up on more than one customer call here, which is it’s the nature of things, but the amount of frustration of tracking down overdue invoices and following up with these folks who haven’t paid you did lead us to bill several features that has helped to alleviate a lot of this pain for our customers.
Samuel Mallen:
And this includes automated invoice reminders, a billing dashboard, as well as agent invoices reports. These different tools, among others, have allowed our clients to save about eight hours a month, typically on client outreach and trying to go through this process of getting paid.
Samuel Mallen:
So, the first of these features that I do want to walk you through is the automated invoice reminders. I gave you a quick preview of it when we were going over the generating an invoice section. So, I will go back to this Invoices screen. You should be very familiar with this particular view at this point. Let’s see.
Samuel Mallen:
So, I will click, again, let’s go to Sally Adams’ invoice, click Edit this invoice. And now, so as soon as you generate an invoice, you’re going to obviously want to select a due date. I’m going to give her a bit more time than just tomorrow to pay. So, let’s do September 30th. Once you select a due date, you will have the option to enable automated reminders. And if I toggle this on, we will actually give you a description of what automated reminders entails here are in app.
Samuel Mallen:
And once an invoice is shared with the client, we will automatically send them reminders for payments along with the payment link, 30 days before it’s due, again, five days before it’s due, on the due date, and five days after the due date if they still have not yet paid. This just automates the process of you having send out these reminders, track down these invoices and manually reach out to them.
Samuel Mallen:
MyCase does that work for you. And we have seen among our customers a huge uptick in them getting paid on time and not having to even engage in this sort of outreach once they adopt MyCase system and leverage these automated reminders.
Samuel Mallen:
But still, even with these automated reminders, every once in a while, you are going to be having someone who still has an outstanding balance and we have built in a few features that even cuts down the work on that end of identifying who still needs to pay me is essentially the question that folks are asking.
Samuel Mallen:
And one of those features is the automated invoices report, excuse me, aging invoices report. For those who aren’t as familiar with MyCase system or MyCase statements, we do have quite a few financial reports here. Unfortunately, we won’t get through all of them today. But I will go over, again, this aging invoices report here.
Samuel Mallen:
All this does is, again, allows you to answer that question of who has outstanding balances with me and to what degree are they outstanding. So, you can filter this by individual clients, by your cases or by lead attorneys, if there are multiple attorneys in your practice.
Samuel Mallen:
For the purposes of this demo, I’ll just create a general report here. And one click and that’s it. We can see each of these individuals who has outstanding balances or overdue invoices with me. It’s a total of five individuals. So, we’re looking pretty good. A lot of folks will say, if somebody’s only 1 to 15 days overdue, I’m not going to do too much outrage. In fact, we still have the automated reminders in place. They’ll be paid at least once more five days after an invoice is due.
Samuel Mallen:
But once it gets the 16 to 30 days, 31 to 60 or 61 plus days overdue in particular, that’s becoming a problem. And now I know that each of these individuals are who I may want to follow up with. I have their invoice number on hand, so I can easily access the details of what’s due. And it just makes the job of outreach a lot easier and cuts down a lot of time that goes into this.
Samuel Mallen:
Now, a similar review that we have to this, but it’s been more of an at a glance view is the via the billing dashboard. So, if I go to, just click Billing. If I scroll down here, for a better view, I’ll just do here today. So, this is quick modal that shows you at a glance where your invoices or outstanding balances are in the invoicing stages.
Samuel Mallen:
So, we see that year to date, we have $447,000, roughly of unsent balances that haven’t actually been generated and sent out to clients. We have 1200 that are running draft stages of invoices, $116,000 outstanding that have been sent, 36,976 in partial payments, 35,000 roughly that have been paid, collected, and about 4192 that are outstanding that they’re overdue.
Samuel Mallen:
If I were to click into this, it will simply provide a very similar view to what we saw the aging invoices report, these five clients. And again, this is just another different way that you can find out who still owes you money, who hasn’t paid. And you can click into their respective files to get their contact information and reach out to them.
Samuel Mallen:
And yeah, in total, those are just some of the different ways that we streamline the process for you and identifying who needs to pay as well as really preventing that issue by enabling automated invoice reminders so that they’re reminded more consistently, you’re not having to do that outreach, and they’re more likely to pay on time and that in a reasonable fashion.
Cathleen Swallow:
Thanks so much, Sam. So, we really care about your billing efficiencies and want to be able to help you guys. So, this last poll is just really for you guys. And we’d love to know, would you be interested in a personal evaluation of how MyCase payments could work for your practice. This poll result won’t be shared. So, just go ahead and respond. And then, we will take the appropriate action based on your response. I’m going to give us about 30 seconds here to just let you respond.
Cathleen Swallow:
Again, this is just letting us know if you’re interested in a personal evaluation of your billing and payments process to see if you can gain more efficiencies. Ten more seconds here and then we’ll go ahead and close the poll and move on to our next part of this webinar.
Cathleen Swallow:
All right, we’re going to go ahead and end that. Thank you so much for responding. As we move on to the next section, we’ve heard a bit today about the different functionality that allows you to move away from using disparate solutions and towards using an all-in-one integrated legal practice management solution. Sam is going to go ahead and summarize those recommendations and walk us also through some final recommendations that he has.
Samuel Mallen:
Yeah, yeah. So, again, we went over quite a few different individual features across the platform, but they all do have one common thread. And ultimately, why they are so beneficial is because they exist all within one shared system, MyCase. The highlighted, automated time tracking, Smart Time Finder, all that directly populates into invoices, which can then be shared out with ease to clients with a single click via text, email, the MyCase client portal. And then the payments that are made against those invoices are automatically reconciled and fed back into the system and live in the context of your case and client files for your records.
Samuel Mallen:
So, at the end of the day, this just ensures that you’re not scrambling around to reconcile your finances. You can maintain proper records. And at the end of the day, you can get paid to begin with. Really, that just frees up your time so you can focus on doing what you want to do, which is practicing law, serving your clients, and overall just making your life a lot easier.
Samuel Mallen:
So, again, to wrap up, as Paul Grass with the Sullivan Law Group said, “If I can integrate our case management and payment processor without paying more, it’s really a no-brainer.” It’s streamlined his firm and it can streamline a lot of other folks’ lives and practices as they continue to integrate these two systems with MyCase payments.
Samuel Mallen:
And that’s the end of our presentation portion. Cathleen, I’ll turn it over to you for the Q&A portion.
Cathleen Swallow:
Yeah, so we’ve got a lot of great questions coming in. If there’s any more that have come to mind, please feel free to type them in. We’re going to go through those. If we don’t get to your question today or it’s something that maybe needs a more in-depth conversation, we’ll save those and have someone follow up with you directly to get help for you.
Cathleen Swallow:
So, Sam, one of the questions I know that came up was around the Smart Time Finder. Could you pull that back up and let us know, how does Smart Time Finder know and suggest what things to bill?
Samuel Mallen:
That is a great question. Let me go back to this, better view here. So, whenever you perform an action within MyCase, there’s a lot of them that can be captured here. It is everything from most communications like sending a text message from MyCase, sending an email from MyCase, sending a message via the client portal, working on documents, let’s see, any events, tasks, there are several others here, recording a call on the call log.
Samuel Mallen:
We make note of all those activities that are happening. And if we see that you perform one of those activities and never associate with a time entry or any sort of billable hour, those actions that you haven’t yet track time for will be displayed in this list view so that whenever you go over create your invoices or want to review your track time, let’s say it’s at the end of the week or at the end of the month, end of quarter, you can go to this list and say, “Oh, these three phone calls with Ada Cheng, this phone call with Sally Adams, this text to Sally, this task for trial prep, I’ve never recorded any billable time for any of these. That was a mistake on my part. I was busy. I just didn’t have time.”
Samuel Mallen:
So, now I can just select Track Time and it will allow you to create the appropriate time entry from these different items that we automatically pulled in and send to the system. Hopefully that answers that question.
Cathleen Swallow:
Thanks, Sam. I think that probably does. So, one of the other questions we got was, can you also do ACH check charges using the record payment button with account info on file?
Samuel Mallen:
Yes. So, we do accept ACH charges. They can submit ACH for making payments.
Cathleen Swallow:
And then if you’re sending out the subscription payment plans, do they automatically get a bill each month or an invoice? Or how do they know that a subscription is upcoming?
Samuel Mallen:
Yes. So, upfront, you negotiate the terms of the subscription bill and the case we went through, I believe it was $2,000 on a biweekly basis, there will be a recording of this. So, you can see if I said that incorrectly or not. So, they will be expecting these bills. And once a charge is made, they will receive a receipt via email showing the charge and what the charge is for based on your negotiation with them for the terms of that subscription payment plan upfront.
Cathleen Swallow:
Awesome. Thanks, Sam. There was another question here around a third party credit card processing service. Are you able to integrate those third party credit card processing services into MyCase?
Samuel Mallen:
Currently, no, we do not allow you to integrate third party credit card processors within MyCase. Everything is run via our MyCase payments platform.
Cathleen Swallow:
And so, for that question specifically, too, we do allow you to automatically or not automatically, manually apply payments towards an invoice, so if you’re running processing outside, you would have to manually take those steps. The beauty of MyCase payments is that it’s all integrated and would apply that automatically.
Samuel Mallen:
Actually, I can really quickly just demonstrate what that means there. Let’s say I’m recording a payment. And for whatever reason, let’s say, they even pay cash or they ran a one-off credit card payment, you can record that as an offline payment. And that will be reflected in the same exact case and client file just as your other payments as well.
Cathleen Swallow:
Awesome. Let’s see here, just looking through some of these other questions. With the smart time feature, it looks like there was another question around emails, does the Smart Time Finder capture any email sent if you’ve tied your email to MyCase?
Samuel Mallen:
Yup, yup. So, similar to when we popped up in that call log modal, when you select the Send Email modal, a little timer in the lower left hand corner will start going so you can either track the time proactively at the time you’re sending that email or if you forget to do that, we will keep record of those emails later on as well to track the time at a later date.
Cathleen Swallow:
Awesome. And there was a question around old invoices. So, currently, this person is forwarding the old invoice to a new invoice using the balance boarding feature. What is a best practice if you have an old invoice balance and a new invoice? Sam, what would you recommend? How do they capture that to make sure the past due reporting stays accurate?
Samuel Mallen:
Got it. So, just to clarify, let’s say you forward an invoice from four months ago over to one that is due now, what would be best practice for keeping a record of that.
Yeah.Cathleen Swallow:
Samuel Mallen:
So, if you are leveraging the balance forwarding just to have one easy receivable for your clients, the forwarded balance will be reflected on the newer invoice so it won’t be shown in our aging invoices reports. We recommend if you are wanting to leverage that aging invoices report, you keep that as its own separate invoice, separate entity and keep it and sort of leave it in the original invoice state.
Cathleen Swallow:
All right, looks like we’ve gone through a lot of these. Can you walk us back through the reconciliation of invoices? So, some of the feedback there is they were mentioning their manager makes them print all the invoices to reconcile with trust. Are you saying that the reconciliation option will assist with having to not print those out?
Samuel Mallen:
So, let’s see.
Cathleen Swallow:
Maybe walk us back through the reconciliation process and then, I help answer the question.
Samuel Mallen:
Yes. So, there’s I guess two ways we can approach this question. Hopefully one of these actually answers the question here. So, when you are drafting an invoice, let’s see, excuse me.
Samuel Mallen:
So, you can either select the accounts to which you want these payments to be deposited, your trust account, and we will display the record that payment under the client file. Let’s see if I go to the Sally Adam or Adams Civil Case. If I go to her billing section, we will show her a whole trust history associated with that account. So, you can easily identify all records transactions that have gone in and out of her particular trust accounts.
Samuel Mallen:
I think another way we could potentially come out this question is see, excuse me, let me … So, if an individual has multiple cases with you, let’s say, you can track their trust history either at the individual case levels to ensure that funds meant for one case aren’t bleeding over to another.
Samuel Mallen:
Or if you only have one case, you can track it at the overall client level. And we will keep similar records of each of those transactions under each of those cases and client files, so they have a full historical record of where every single payments and every single transaction went with respect to your trust accounts and the individual subaccounts for these clients and cases.
Samuel Mallen:
Hopefully, that answered that question. If not, I’m always happy to have one of our CS members reach out to and clarify if you were intending something different.
Cathleen Swallow:
Thanks, Sam. Looks like one of the last questions we have here is around the processing fees. So, is there a processing fee for the client to process payment with MyCase payments on the invoice?
Samuel Mallen:
So, I assume this is asking if we allow to automatically add a surcharge to the invoice or receivable so it’s passed on to the client for payment. We don’t currently have an automatic way of doing that. We have seen folks manually add surcharges either on individual invoices or in batch as an adjustment via that batch billing process. But we don’t currently have an automated way to pass those along to clients.
Cathleen Swallow:
Awesome. It looks like we’ve made it through most of the questions that I think that can be answered in this forum. If we didn’t get to your question, we will definitely follow up. And if anyone has additional questions or would like a walkthrough of any of the steps we’ve identified here, you can always contact our customer success team. And then, for those who submitted questions that weren’t answered, we will have someone follow up directly with you.
Cathleen Swallow:
So, just wanted to thank everyone for their time. Thank you so much for being such great and active participants. We appreciate you all and I’m grateful for you joining. Thanks so much.
