The month-end WIP report
At the end of each month the cashier or practice manager runs a WIP report and emails it to the partners. It is long, sorted by matter number, and shows every matter with recorded time. Partners scan it, pick out a few big numbers, and send emails to fee earners asking them to bill.
The fee earners mean to. But drafting a bill means reading through months of time entries, rewriting narratives the client will understand, and deciding what to write down. It is a job for a quiet afternoon, and there are not many of those.
Why billing waits
Most matters could be billed on an agreed schedule: monthly, at stages, or when WIP reaches a level. That schedule is usually in the client care letter, not in the system, so nothing prompts the bill when the trigger is reached.
Drafting is the other barrier. Time entry narratives are written for the fee earner ('tel att', 'consid docs'), not for the client. Turning thirty of them into a readable bill takes time, so the job waits until the WIP is big enough to feel worth the effort. By then the client is less happy to see a large bill.
| Reason billing slips | What would help |
|---|---|
| Billing arrangement lives in the letter | Arrangement stored against the matter with a trigger |
| Narratives written for internal use | Drafted client-readable summary to edit |
| WIP report is one long list | Per fee earner list sorted by what is due |
| No view of the whole cycle | WIP and unpaid bills shown together by age |
What unbilled time costs
Unbilled WIP is money the firm has earned and not asked for, and it is funding the practice in the meantime. The older it gets, the more of it is written down, because clients push back on large bills covering work from long ago.
Late bills also cause disputes. A client who gets a bill every month knows what to expect. One who gets a single bill for six months' work often queries it.
How we build billing prompts and drafts
- Billing arrangements on the matter: we record each matter's agreed billing basis (monthly, staged, threshold, on completion) from the client care letter or a short form.
- Due list: each fee earner gets a weekly list of matters where a bill is due under that arrangement, sorted by value and age, with anything overdue at the top.
- Draft narratives: for each due matter, a language model turns the unbilled time entries into a short client-readable description of the work, grouped by stage or task, for the fee earner to edit.
- Draft bill: the edited draft goes into your practice management system as a draft bill through its API, including unbilled disbursements, for the fee earner and accounts to finalise in the usual way.
- Lock-up view: partners see WIP and unpaid bills together by matter, fee earner and age, so they can see where money is tied up at each stage.
The draft is a starting point. Fee earners decide what to bill, what to write down and what the narrative says.
What billing week feels like afterwards
The fee earner opens a short list of bills due, each with a draft narrative already written, and spends their time on judgement rather than rewriting time entries. Bills go out on the schedule the client agreed. Partners stop sending chasing emails based on a spreadsheet, because the list does the chasing.
Clients receive smaller, regular bills that are easier to understand, which usually means fewer queries.
Recognise any of these?
- The WIP report is a long export that partners skim.
- Interim billing arrangements are only in client care letters.
- Fee earners put off billing because drafting narratives takes too long.
- Large bills covering many months lead to queries and write-downs.
- Nobody sees WIP and unpaid bills together by age.