Month end, and the time is missing
Your product records time automatically as fee earners work on documents, then posts the entries to the firm's practice management system. At month end, a partner notices that an associate's time on a matter looks thin. The associate says they worked on it all week. Your support team looks and finds that most of the associate's entries failed to post: the matter had been moved to a new number, and the practice management system rejected every entry to the old one.
Nobody saw the failures. The entries are sitting in your product marked as recorded. The billing team has already sent the client's bill.
Why time entries fail to post
Practice management systems enforce rules on time that make sense for billing, and your product may not know all of them.
- Matters are closed, merged or renumbered, and entries to the old matter are rejected.
- Activity or task codes required by the firm, or by particular clients, are missing or wrong.
- Billing periods are locked at month end, so late entries fail.
- Narratives are required, too short, or contain characters the system does not accept.
- Fee earner identifiers in your product do not match the practice management system.
- Rate limits or authentication problems cause temporary failures that are never retried.
What lost time costs
Unposted time is unbilled time. For the firm, it is revenue that may never be recovered, especially once a bill has gone out. For fee earners, it means missed targets they did not deserve. For you, it turns a feature meant to save time into one that loses money, and firms that discover it will stop trusting any automation in your product. Billing teams end up checking your entries by hand, which removes the benefit entirely.
Failures also cluster in awkward places. Month end is when periods lock and when fee earners catch up on recording, so the most entries fail at exactly the time the billing team is busiest. Client-specific billing guidelines, common with insurers and large corporate clients, add codes and narrative rules that change from client to client, and an entry that is fine for one matter fails on the next.
How we build time posting that does not lose entries
What we build makes every entry's status visible and catches most failures before they happen.
- Validation before posting against the firm's rules: matter open and valid, activity codes required for that client, narrative length and characters, period open, fee earner mapped.
- Matter and code data synced from the practice management system regularly, so validation uses current information, including renumbered and merged matters.
- A posting status on every entry: draft, validated, posted, failed with reason, or waiting to retry.
- Automatic retry for temporary errors such as rate limits or brief outages, with a limit and an alert.
- A failed-entry queue showing the reason in plain language, where the fee earner fixes their own entries and the billing team handles period and matter issues.
- Month-end checks that list unposted entries per fee earner and matter before billing runs, for the billing team to clear.
| Failure reason | Caught how | Fixed by |
|---|---|---|
| Matter renumbered or closed | Validation against synced matters | Fee earner picks the new matter |
| Missing activity code | Validation against client rules | Fee earner adds the code |
| Billing period locked | Validation before posting | Billing team decides |
| Temporary API error | Posting response | Automatic retry |
| Fee earner not mapped | Validation | Admin maps the user |
The next month end
When the matter is renumbered, the matter sync picks it up. The associate's next entry to the old number fails validation immediately with a message saying the matter has moved and offering the new number. They choose it, and the entry posts. Two days before billing, the month-end check shows a handful of unposted entries across the firm, each with a reason, and the billing team clears them. The client's bill includes all the time worked.
Is time going missing?
- Entries in your product show as recorded but never reach the billing system.
- Fee earners find missing time after bills have gone out.
- Failed postings are logged but not shown to anyone.
- Your product does not know about matter renumbering or closure.
- Billing teams check your entries by hand at month end.