Argus Law Suite Billing Process

Billing client/matters for services and expenses advanced is the most important aspect of Argus. It allows you to bill with precision, speed and timeliness. Through the Task and Report Wizard there are many options for selecting the client/matter that get billed. Client/matters may be selected individually (or by range), all client/matters that are part of a billing group, all client/matters that belong to a particular managing attorney (or range of managing attorney) Argus has three distinct billing processes:

Process 1 (Enforce WIP, Enforce Draft Billing)

Is the most involved and gives you the most information. It is broken into three steps:

From the task wizard run Work in Process task.
From the report wizard run the Work in Process report. This can be run in client/matter order or working attorney client/matter order. Use this report to make sure that everything for a client/matter worked on in the current (billing) period is being picked up, conversely it might not be desirable to bill some time & expense entries. A lot of firms will circulate the WIP report to individual working & billing attorneys to approve what should be billed.

From the task wizard run the Draft Billing task.
From the report wizard print the Draft Bills. Multiple formats are available – select the format that matches what the final bills are going to look like. The Draft Bills are also referred to as pre-bills by some firms. These look exactly like your final bills except that the word DRAFT is printed across them. These can be previewed for accuracy and format.
From the task wizard run the Bill Transaction task.
From the report wizard print the final bills.

Process 2 (Enforce Draft Billing)

This is a two-phase step.

From the task wizard run the Draft Billing task.
From the report wizard print the Draft Bills. Multiple formats are available – select the format that matches what the final bills are going to look like. The Draft Bills are also referred to as pre-bills by some firms. These look exactly like your final bills except that the word DRAFT is printed across them. These can be previewed for accuracy and format.
From the task wizard run the Bill Transaction task.
From the report wizard print the final bills.

Process 3 (Straight Billing)

This is the simplest billing process. It doesn’t require the creation of a Work in Process or the running of Draft Billing. Simply run the billing and all billable transactions for the period range date will be picked up.

From the task wizard run the Bill Transaction task.
From the report wizard print the final bills.

Depending upon the billing method only those transactions that have been Work in Processed will be Draft Billed and then only the Draft Billed transactions will appear on the final bill. A transaction that has either been Work In Processed or Draft Billed may not be altered in anyway, these transaction are deemed to be locked. A Work in Process or Draft Billed status can be reset by clearing Draft Bills and/or Work in Process status by running an appropriate task from the task wizard.

The billing process can also be scheduled via the Scheduling Wizard to run at some off-time. The output can be sent immediately to a printer; it can be spooled to a file for later printing; sent as an attachment with an e-mail to a specified recipient; the output can be stored in a Crystal Report format or as a Microsoft Word Document.