Interim Invoicing

In this article, you will learn more about 'Interim Invoicing' within Actionstep.

 

Overview - What is Interim Invoicing?

Interim invoicing is where you would like to invoice a user for a set amount out of the WIP that you have available to bill. Often this will be to collect the funds that are currently available in trust or general retainer but nothing else. Through this process, the aim is to create an invoice for the set amount while leaving the remaining WIP and its value complete. 

Getting Started

To create an interim bill, you would run Actionstep billing as per normal. You will then want to exclude fee or time records from your bill until you are left with an amount that just falls short of what you would like to bill. 

Untick the tick boxes beside fee entries to remove those items from the bill.

Often the time records that are available do not equal the amount that you would like to bill. In that instance, you may need to split one fee entry into two fee entries. The easiest way to do that is to create a new fee entry that for the amount you are short on and then alter the original time entry to reduce it for the amount of the new invoice.

Information:

Example: Let's use an example to illustrate this point. You have ten time records worth roughly $200 each in unbilled time and wanted an interim invoice of $1,500. You would create the invoice as normal and exclude time entries till you are just under the amount we want the interim invoice to be for. 

In this case, we untick beside the three most recent boxes reducing the amount to bill to $1,400.
We want to split the third to last entry into two, one that will make up the remainder of what we want to bill and one that will stay as WIP to be added to the next bill we produce.  I am going to take that third to last time entry, copy its description  and make note of the time keeper and the date.
Now I create a new time entry. In the new time entry, I will set the date, and user to be the same as the original. I will paste in the description.
Before saving the time entry, I will use a rate label of a fixed fee so that I can set an exact amount for the time entry. I will also, not record any time against this entry, we will explain why below. Save to finish the new time entry.

Now that the new time entry has been created, I am going to open the original time entry and reduce it by a set amount so that it offsets the new time entry I created. 

I open the record, change the rate label to fixed fee. And change the amount. The new time records was for $120.08 so I am reducing this record by that amount.

Now the invoice is ready to be saved as a draft or finalized.

Reporting

We have created a new time entry for a fee earner by following the process above. However, because we did not record any hours for the time in the new time entry, and we left the original time on the original time entry, your reporting will not be effected.

Measuring a users time vs their billed amount will be the same as they still record the same hours.

Measuring the amount billed by each fee earner will not be effected as the total billed by that fee earner will remain the same.