Using Mass Billing

Modified on Mon, 27 Jan at 7:20 PM

In this article:

How-to Video
Billing Multiple Invoices at Once

In this article, you will learn more about the Mass Billing process. Mass billing allows you to approve and send out multiple bills at the same time. Each matter that has a client, is marked as billable, has work in progress or any disbursements to be billed, and is not excluded from mass billing is displayed on individual rows of the Mass Billing page. The billing settings are inherited from each matter's billing options.

NOTE: Unlike when creating bills for individual matters, quote settings are applied to each matter without prompting the user. If any of the matters are configured to bill either the WIP or a quoted amount when they differ, these settings will be applied automatically in mass billing. Be sure to check that each matter is being billed for the correct amount. You can click on the names or matter IDs of the matters to open their respective bills and make any last-minute changes.

How-to Video

Billing Multiple Invoices at Once

To do this:

In Actionstep, do one of the following to access the Mass Billing page:
- Click the global Create button and choose Mass Bill from the Billing section. (You may need to click Show all to view all options.)
- Click the main Billing menu and choose Mass Billing.
Enter an Invoice date. By default, the invoice date will be set to the current date. This date is the accounts receivable date and is used to calculate the payment due date. If a fee or disbursement from the WIP falls outside of the selected Invoice date, it will be excluded from the bill.
Enter an Invoice up to date to specify the cut-off date for including fee entries and disbursements.
Select the Bill template to be used for the billing. (This can be changed on a bill-by-bill basis. You can also have different payment terms for each bill as well.)
Click the Payment terms drop-down list and choose the terms you want included.
Review the list of bills for correctness.
Complete one of the following steps:
- Click Bill all to push all the bills to Draft for further review.
- Select which specific bills you would like to push to Draft and click Bill selected. (This allows you to leave some of the bills out of the cycle you are currently processing.)
If prompted, confirm that you want to bill the selected matters.
Once the bills are generated, you are taken to the Draft Bills page.
Select the bills you want to approve and choose from the following options:
- Click Approve to post the bills to the general ledger and move them to Bill Production so they can be emailed/printed and sent to the client.
- Click Preview to generate a PDF preview of the selected bills.
- Click Delete to send the selected bills back to the Mass Billing stage. (This option does not actually delete any data, it just removes the bill from the review stage.)
  
  Once you approve the bills, they are moved to the Bill Production stage. This is the last stage of billing.
Select the bills you want to produce and choose from the following options:
- Click Produce to either print or email the bills to the respective client. (What happens is based on the Matter Billing Options specified for the associated matter.) This concludes the mass billing workflow for the selected bills.
- Click Preview to generate a PDF preview of the selected bills.
- Click Revert to send the selected bills back to the Draft Bills stage.

NOTE: If you select a single bill in this list, you can click Email manually to manually email the invoice to the client. You can also choose Create payment to create a new client receipt and associate it with the bill. Creating a Client Receipt for an Invoice for more information.

NOTES:
• If you're not seeing a matter with WIP you know still needs to be billed, make sure the matter is billable and the matter's billing status is set to Active in Matter Billing Options. Also, make sure the matter is not excluded from mass billing in Matter Billing Options. The matter must not have a bill in draft and must have a billable party (primary participant).

• If you are switching from single-matter billing to mass billing, you may see a large number of invoices in the Bill Production list that have already been manually sent to clients. To clean up the list, you must 1) produce all the invoices, but 2) make sure you have not select for them to go to an email address or be printed. To clear these options, for each record, click the Edit options link in the Options column and change your email/print options.

Please note that once saved, these settings are saved to the matter's matter billing options so you will need to edit these options again if you want the future invoices emailed/printed in mass billing.

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