Digita Practice Advanced 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, Digita Practice Advanced 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
to show or hide the Billing Selection pane.
Digita Practice Advanced 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.
For Clients that require greater control over the billing amounts or invoice presentation, use Detail 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
button and entering the billed and adjusted information for each item.
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.
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.
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:
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
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.
Click the Journal button
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.
Click the Preview Selected button to view the invoice information before posting or printing.
See The Preview Invoices screen for more information.
Click the Print Selected button to print the selected invoice(s) to one or more destinations, including a printer, Digita FileCabinet, a file, email, or Digita NetClient.