Billing overview

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Practice CS enables you to bill your clients on screen using a wide variety of billing methods. Whether your firm bills at an hourly staff rate or fixed rate, periodically or on an as-needed basis, Practice CS can accommodate different methods based on your firm’s arrangements with individual clients, and lets you bill using as much or as little detail as you need.

To bill your clients, choose Actions > Billing (or press CTRL+B) to open the Billing screen.

In the billing screen you can perform the following tasks.

Use the Bill Clients tab to select the WIP that you want to bill.

Note: The default name for this tab is Bill Engagements. The name of the tab changes depending on whether you set your user preferences to bill by engagements, clients, or projects. See Setting up user preferences for billing for more information.

  • Mark the Positive WIP checkbox if you want to see only clients with a positive WIP balance.
  • Mark the Negative WIP checkbox if you want to see only clients with a negative WIP balance.
  • Mark both the Positive WIP and Negative WIP checkboxes when you want to see only clients with non-zero WIP balances.

Searching and filtering

To further narrow down the list of items in the billing screen, use the Search and Filter fields at the top of the screen.

Selecting the WIP to bill

Select each client you want to bill. Click the Select All button (or press CTRL+A on your keyboard) to select all items at once. Click the Deselect All button (or press ALT + E) to deselect all items at once.

The Billing Selection pane shows all selected items in the order in which they will be billed. When the list is unsorted, the items will appear in the order in which you select them. Click the Auto Hide button Auto hide button resembles a push pin to show or hide the Billing Selection pane.

Practice CS provides the ability to bill clients together in families. See Client families overview for more information.

Choosing a billing method

After selecting the WIP to bill, choose a billing method.

Detail bill selected

For Clients that require greater control over the billing amounts or invoice presentation, use Detail Bill Selected.

Quick bill selected

Use Quick Bill Selected to quickly bill at a summary level. In the Quick Bill screen, you can enter the billed or the adjusted amount, and the application will complete the carryover field for you. You can also bill individual WIP items, if necessary, by clicking the Expand button displays as a plus sign button and entering the billed and adjusted information for each item.

Standard bill selected

Use Standard Bill Selected to quickly bill the selected clients at their current WIP amount. This will completely bill all selected WIP at its standard amount.

Note: Before the invoice can be created, you must have an invoice format set up for the selected client, and there must be WIP entries available to be billed.

Zero bill selected

Use Zero Bill Selected to bill the selected clients at zero. This will completely bill all WIP amounts selected at zero.

Note: Before the invoice can be created, you must have an invoice format set up for the selected client, and there must be WIP entries available to be billed.

Use the Generate Recurring Bills tab to bill clients who have the same work performed on a regular basis.

Note: To generate a recurring bill for a client, the client’s engagement must be set up on a recurring basis (Setup > Clients > Engagements tab).

See Generating recurring bills for more information.

Use the Integrated Invoices tab to bill clients based on imported invoices from other CS Professional Suite.

Note: This tab is available only if you have marked the Integrate this Firm with other solutions checkbox in the Preferences tab of the Firm setup screen.

This tab displays invoices that have been exported to Practice CS from UltraTax CS. Use this tab to accept or reject these invoices. The invoice date is the date the invoice was exported to Practice CS.

Accepted invoices can be allocated by creating adjustment entries; by partially or completely billing existing work-in-process for the client; or by creating progress bill entries. Progress bill and adjustment entries must be assigned to a staff member, engagement, and activity.

If an invoice is exported to Practice CS for which there is not a matching client in the Practice CS firm database, an error message will inform you that "The client assigned to this invoice is not a valid client." Add the client to Practice CS in the Clients setup screen, and then you can accept the integrated invoice.

If an UltraTax CS invoice is exported to Practice CS, and the invoice has a prepayment assigned to it in UltraTax CS but one does not exist in Practice CS, an error message will appear. You will not be able to accept the invoice until you enter a receipt for the amount of the invoice in Practice CS.

Invoices that you accept in this tab can be viewed in the Review tab.

See Working with integrated invoices for more information.

Note: If your firm requires an approval process for invoices, you can use the Review tab to review and approve invoices before they are posted. If your firm does not use an approval process, invoices are posted as soon as they are saved; however, you can use the Review tab to view invoices and/or make further changes to them after they have been posted.

In the Review tab you can do the following:

Modify an invoice

To modify an invoice, select the invoice(s) you would like to modify, right-click, and choose the appropriate command:

  • Open Selected — Enters the detail bill menu for editing
  • Edit Selected — Allow for editing one or multiple fields of the invoice

See Editing an invoice for more information.

Delete an invoice

Deleting an invoice will unbill all entries on the selected invoice(s), making them available WIP items to be billed again.

See Deleting an invoice for more information.

View the Invoice Journal

Click the Journal button Button displaying the word Journal on it to preview the Invoice Journal report. The report will automatically be filtered for the grid content on the Review tab.

See Viewing the Invoice Journal for more information.

Preview selected

Click the Preview Selected button to view the invoice information before posting or printing.

See The Preview Invoices screen for more information.

Print selected

Click the Print Selected button to print the selected invoice(s) to one or more destinations, including a printer, FileCabinet CS, GoFileRoom, a file, email, or NetClient CS.

See How to print invoices for more information.

Billing videos:

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