Easy Accounting For Hourly Billers

By Author: Mayank Kapur
Total Articles: 278
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If you've been following our blog for a while, you know how strongly we feel that a law firm using generic, non- legal billing and accounting software is a law firm missing out on an opportunity to be efficient, streamlined, and state bar compliant.
Easy Soft's legal billing and trust accounting software solves the problem. Easy TimeBill and Easy Trust are popular law-specific programs that meet legal billing and compliance requirements. And they do so no matter what your fee arrangements look like: whether they're based on hourly, fixed or contingency fees.
Today, we're going to focus on hourly billers. Family or divorce lawyers, wills, trusts and estates lawyers, general civil and commercial litigators, elder lawyers and commercial bankruptcy attorneys are examples of legal practices that typically employ an hourly fee structure. If your practice falls into one of these areas, then chances are, you receive client advances in the form of retainers, then track your daily billable time across multiple matters. Very likely, you track your expenses ...
... as incurred, and generate periodic (say, monthly) bills, and either pay them out of your clients' retainer balances, or from new money received from your clients. You'll probably need to juggle funds between your trust accounts and your operating accounts.
Easy TimeBill can handle all of this. You set billing rates for all timekeepers (changeable between matters), track your time and expenses per entry, and generate invoices accordingly. At the beginning of an engagement, you deposit retainers in your operating or trust accounts, then move funds between accounts according to how they are earned. You can generate detailed administrative reports, prepare payment reminders—and even initiate low retainer balance letters and collection efforts: all from the same legal billing program.
For operating accounts, we do recommend using a standard accounting program such as QuickBooks—preferred by CPAs. QuickBooks data entry becomes minimal with need to only enter data on hourly legal fees received (either from new funds or trust funds) and quarterly/yearly account receivables.
As for trust accounting, what Easy TimeBill doesn't handle, the Easy Trust module will. Our trust accounting software allows you to receive retainers, track trust funds for individual matters, and even print disbursement checks across the proper number of accounts. You can generate required reports, reconcile bank account statements—even perform three-way reconciliations among your trust and operating accounts.
Life becomes easier. That's why we call it Easy Soft.
To learn more about our billing and trust accounting software for attorneys, call Easy Soft at 800.905.7638.

Author Bio

Easy Soft specializes in helping law firms automate their processes with legal software. Easy Soft has automated software solutions for virtually every practice area, from case management, document assembly and time & billing, to legal billing and accounting software.