How You Can Banish Billing Dread And Speed Up Client Payments

It’s no secret that most attorneys dread billing and timekeeping. The time-consuming and all-too-often antiquated tasks that have historically gone into getting paid have made billing and timekeeping a perfect storm of inefficiency, especially when your billing systems are separate from the systems where you do the rest of your work. 

MyCase, the practice management provider that sets a high bar for customer experience, is changing all that. Imagine if timekeeping, billing, and invoicing were easy and integrated into the same system you use every day to manage your cases. Sound too good to be true?

It’s not. MyCase offers a fully integrated platform designed to allow attorneys to unify their practice from end to end. With MyCase, you use one solution for billing and practice management, at no extra cost, and get paid faster. 

MyCase’s Hassle-Free Payment Solution

With MyCase, your payments platform lives in the same place as your matter management solution.

No more juggling disparate systems – with just a few clicks, you can do most of the heavy lifting associated with billing, including invoicing, automated reminders, payment reconciliation, and more, all integrated in your MyCase subscription at no extra cost.

Stop Losing Billable Time

Billing in MyCase starts with generic timers that you engage whenever you’re doing billable work. Because we all know how rare it is to spend an entire day focusing on a single matter, you can have up to three timers running at once. Just start a timer when you begin working and stop it when you’re done, and MyCase does the rest.

The timers come complete with a standard list of activities like research, document preparation, or phone calls, and incorporate your hourly rate or other fee structure for the matter at hand (customizable for every user). When you click Save and Add Time Entry, MyCase does your time/rate calculation for you and saves your time entry under the designated case and client.

MyCase also has timers that automatically run in the background, proactively logging time that you might miss. This works hand-in-hand with MyCase’s Smart Time Finder, a genius feature that helps you recover billable time that might otherwise be lost.

MyCase records time in the background for a number of routine tasks, including phone calls, emails, texting, and more. It compiles these activities into a handy log, from which you can assign any unbilled time to one of your matters. At the end of the month, you can reconcile all your time from your Smart Time Finder to determine what you do and don’t want to bill. This is an incredibly powerful tool for capturing the kinds of billable time that often fall through the cracks.

Easily Bill Time, Even With Growing Caseloads

The more your caseload grows, the less time you probably feel you have for timekeeping and billing, which is another common way to miss out on billable time. MyCase eliminates this hurdle.

For each matter, MyCase automatically pulls together an invoice with all time entries, expenses, unpaid balances, and applicable adjustments. Simply click Invoices and you’ll see a generated list of all your matters, and within those, everything that’s relevant to the current billing period.

For every invoice, you can set your desired billing cadence and when you want to send automated billing reminders. When it’s time to send out those invoices, you can pull up a list of all your invoices, showing all your billable time for all your matters.

Most firms send out invoices for multiple matters on the same schedule, which is where batch-billing comes in. From your list of invoices, you can select all the outstanding ones you want to send out, set up billing parameters to apply universally to all of them, including due dates, payment terms, and other standard language that appears on all your bills. You can also make batch adjustments, like applying available trust balances or credits, and again have these actions applied across all invoices. 

When you have a particularly large caseload, batch-billing can save dozens of hours on invoice preparation every month between you and your staff.

Make It Easy for Clients to Pay

No one likes dealing with client billing issues or chasing payments. Thankfully, MyCase removes many of the roadblocks that commonly delay payment by giving you no shortage of ways to get paid.

MyCase allows you to bill your clients in whatever manner works best for them, including via email, text, and traditional paper invoicing. Electronic invoices include convenient payment links that allow for immediate direct payment. 

You can also opt to have your clients pay via a client portal built by MyCase that allows you and your clients to securely send invoices, documents, messages, and payments, entirely within the MyCase system. You can also just receive credit card payments over the phone if that’s the way your clients want to proceed. MyCase allows you to save a credit card on file for each client, which you can simply select to record a payment and have it tied to the relevant matter.

When payments come in, they’re automatically linked with the proper case and client file, where you have a continuous feed of all financial transactions with that client, so there’s no guesswork or manual recording when it comes to reconciliation.

Ideally all payments would go through the formal invoicing process. In some cases, though, on-the-fly payments just make things easier. If you need to collect a payment, such as a retainer, on the go, MyCase gives you a universal payment link your client can use to pay via credit card. The payment will be recorded in MyCase and you can worry about reconciling it to an established matter later. You can also embed the link as a Pay Now button on your website or include the link in an email signature. When a payment comes in, simply select the relevant account in MyCase where you want it to be recorded, click Reconcile Account, and you’re good to go.

Have a client who can’t pay large invoices upfront? MyCase gives you the flexibility you need to work with your clients’ various financial circumstances. When you’re creating an invoice in MyCase, you have the option to set a payment plan for your client, designating how much is to be paid at what interval, and MyCase will automatically calculate installment payments over the appropriate number invoices for that client. Every time an installment payment is due, MyCase will send a notification with a payment link to your client. 

MyCase includes a payment plans dashboard to help you track cash flows.

This is a visual display of when various payments are due and what amounts should be coming in at different dates going forward.

MyCase can also account for subscription service plans. You can set it to bill your client, for example, $5,000 a month for the next eight months. These payments are charged to a credit card on file and automatically recorded on a designated day, such as the first of every month. You’ll always be able to see the total number of processed or pending payments, so you can know at a glance where your engagement stands.

With all the available billing and payment options, MyCase is a win-win: your clients receive bills that are convenient and easy to pay, and you have clear financial records that are integrated right with your matter management system.

Track Delinquent Payments

In a perfect world, with all the current billing and payment methods available, your clients would pay on time every time. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case.

To help avoid delinquent payments, MyCase allows you to set up automatic reminders on whatever cadence you prefer before you send out an invoice. For payments that still don’t come in on time, MyCase gives you valuable insights via the Aging Invoices Report.

This report shows you every invoice that’s outstanding and how long it’s been outstanding. Within the report, you can filter by client, individual case, responsible attorney, and more. The report is an excellent way to have a clear understanding of the current state of invoices across your firm, so you can determine which delinquencies you want to act on first.

As an added bonus for managing your firm’s income, MyCase includes a Timesheet Calendar that allows your attorneys to set billable hour goals, which can then be tracked to see whether they’re being met or not. 

A Better Way to Bill

Whatever your biggest billing hurdles are, whether it’s missing potential billable time, the inability to keep up with billing, getting clients to pay, or collecting on delinquent payments, MyCase gives you the tools you need to conquer them, right in the same system where you manage your matters.

Even better, you have access to an award-winning success team and a dedicated payments onboarding team to make sure it’s all smooth sailing, and it’s all included in your MyCase subscription price.

Stop dreading billing and start getting paid faster with MyCase.