Paul W. Carlson, CPA:
Hi, this is Paul Carlson, CPA. In this video, we're going to walk through an invoicing process for Clio. In this scenario, we're looking at an immigration firm that provides services on a flat fee. In the example, we have a new client that pricing for the services are $3,000 for services, $800 for a filing fee, $50 in postage, and we collected $2,000 in advanced funds we're going to deposit to IOLTA. In this video, we're going to create the invoice and record the IOLTA deposit.
(00:31):
All right, so we are in Clio. The first step is to create a matter for the new client. Go matter, new. Client name is a new client and it's a person, not a company, so the client is going to be, "Example Immigration Client C." You should probably use a client's real name. Go ahead and hit create. The matter description will be a nice type description of the services being provided and in this example, we're just going to ignore most of these other settings. Save the new matter. Once we have the new matter created, we're going to create a new quick bill. This firm does not bill on hours, it's all flat fee, so we're going to enter those flat fee amounts into a bill.
(01:32):
We have, it's made out to example immigration client C. First, we're going to add a time entry. We put the services item as a time entry because of the way Clio exports into QuickBooks, so all we need to do is user. The note is going to be a description of the service. Duration, one hour. Doesn't make sense but then we put in the flat rate. And then, for the expenses we'll create two expense entries. This will be I fee of $800 and we'll add postage of $50. We're going to generate the bill. We can view the bill. From the bill so far, we have our immigration services of $3,000, filing fee of 800, and postage of $500. What's missing from this statement is the "out of funds" so cool trick in Chrome is you can duplicate. We are going to go into accounts. We have the IOLTA account. We want to add that IOLTA deposit we received with this new matter, and that was $2,000. And we have example immigration client C and into the same as the matter.
(03:20):
Clio has a nice predictive search tool where you type the beginning and it will fill in the rest for you. Record that transaction where you can go back over to this screen, refresh the invoice, and at the bottom of the invoice we can see the advanced fee deposits being reported into IOLTA. A really nice thing we can do with Clio is we can turn on the statement of account that summarizes the charges on that new invoice, minus the amount in trust, reports to the client exactly how much is left outstanding on the matter. This matches to what we needed so, at this point, we will approve the invoice. And next step would be to download the invoice and create the PDF. All right, so this video walked through a process to create a flat fee invoice for an immigration firm.
