Batch Billing in Credenza Pro Speeds Up the Billing Process

This morning I decided to take a look at the financial status of my client files in Credenza®, my practice management program in Outlook®. I was pretty sure that I had accumulated quite a bit of work in progress time for many of my files, and that I’d also amassed a lot of expenses in long distance telephone calls and travel that I’d done for one client in particular.

Now since it was the beginning of a fresh new month, it was time to take a look at where I was at from a business point of view and see what work I could create invoices for. I usually like to stay organized and send out my bills at the beginning of each month for previous work done during the past month.

In this blog post I’m going to go through the step-by-step process of creating multiple invoices with one click, through Credenza Pro’s Batch Billing feature.

Before even going into Credenza Pro’s Batch Billing feature, I clicked on the Billing tab to check things out. To my pleasant surprise, I discovered that I could see each client file and how much was billed and what was still outstanding. All I needed to narrow down was how much work I could include on the invoice up to the last day of the previous month. I had worked on a couple of files over the weekend, on October 1st and 2nd, and I wanted to be sure that this time wouldn’t be included in the invoices I was about to prepare.

So I clicked on the Batch Bill tab. Right at the top of the page I could designate that only the Matters with unbilled time or expenses up to the last day of September would be included in my current billing. What a time-saver! I could just plug in the last day of the month, September 30, to get a list of all unbilled time or expenses up to that point! Then I clicked Create Invoices, and within an instant all of the necessary bills for September were created – all I now have to do is just send them out through my Outlook email.

This great feature is probably the biggest time saver for people like me, who regularly send out invoices at the beginning of every month for the previous month’s work. Instead of creating bills one by one and going through the Draft Bill screen, I could quickly create final invoices in one single step.

Just to keep it interesting, there’s another way that Credenza Pro lets me do my billing en masse. I can go to the WIP view of the Billing module that lists all of the unbilled expenses and work in progress, and just click on the Batch Bill button at the bottom of the page. This is a great way to get my invoices out when I bill more frequently than once a month – sometimes it’s just better to get an invoice out to a client as work in progress and expenses warrant it.

In the next blog post, I’ll be writing about Credenza Pro’s Collection Assistant, a useful tool that easily helps me follow up with any client on matters with outstanding balances.