Invoicing & payments
How about replacing the old process with paper printouts with a digital invoicing process to save time, paper, and the nerves of everyone?
Smooth creation of invoice material
You can preview your billable legal matters in mass at any time to see what kind of invoices will be created.
The actual invoice is preceded by a preliminary invoice. It makes it easy to edit its transactions and expenses or adjust its price to a certain total amount.
Preliminary invoices can be created either from individual matters or from all billable matters. You can choose to create them according to the invoicing period or until the current date. The preliminary invoices are generated according to the default settings and the customer and/or matter level specifications.
If there are important notes concerning the customer or the matter, the invoicing team will be able to take them into account during the invoice preparation phase. In the list of billable matters, they stand out from the icon. The added note can be read with just one click.
Paperless invoice verification
If the legal matter is large, there are multiple persons working on it and registering their work to be invoiced from the customer. Thus, the invoicing phase also requires more than one person to verify the invoice content.
With CSI Lawyer, there’s no need to chase busy lawyers with paper copies of draft invoices to have them verified. The traditional paper printouts are replaced by a digital preliminary invoice review process. It circulates invoice drafts in a predefined order for verification. When a user has made the necessary corrections and marked the preliminary invoice as reviewed, it moves on to the next reviewer. After the last reviewer has marked the preliminary invoice as approved, it can be converted into an invoice.
Invoices sent as e-invoices
The digital process also covers the sending of invoices. For the Finnish and Swedish CSI customers, the entire invoice material can be transferred to Maventa’s e-invoicing service with one click. From Maventa, invoices are sent as e-invoices to all customers with a valid e-invoice address. In the absence of an e-invoice address, Maventa will forward the invoice to the customer either as an e-mail attachment or as a printout by mail.
If your company uses another e-invoice operator, you can easily create the invoice material and send it manually to the operator.
Other invoice types in use
If you need a prepayment from your customer, it can be charged with the advance invoice. Proof invoices, which are not accountable invoices, enable you to provide a customer with a summary of their transaction status.
In case a customer has multiple legal matters, you can send a summary invoice of the customer’s selected open invoices, to be managed with one payment only. The software also enables you to create the necessary credit invoices and notify slow payers of their overdue invoices with predefined payment reminders.
The software also covers the functionality required to invoice matters covered by legal expenses insurance. Finnish CSI customers also benefit from the functionality to manage legal aid cases.
Managing payments
The easiest way to process customer payments is to import them directly from a banking program as reference data. If a payment has a valid invoice reference number, it is automatically adjusted to the correct invoice without a separate adjustment. If a payment cannot be automatically adjusted, the software offers adjustment proposals to make the adjustment easier.
If you wish, you can also register payments to the software manually. If the amount paid differs from the invoice amount, the software handles both underpayments and overpayments.