Clio offers very extensive Billing capabilities, allowing you to display all Time Entries and Disbursements as line items on an Invoice.
If, however, you are in the practice of attaching a Bill Summary Letter to the line items from an Invoice, this can be accomplished with our Document Automation features.
You will be able to save substantial time by creating a Summary Template, which will pull information from the Matter into a letter for the client.
Templates in Clio pull Matter information via Merge Fields, which are located here: https://app.clio.com/document_template_example
On this page, by entering a Matter in the "Select a Matter" field (1), you can see an example of the information that will populate in a Document created from the Template.
Merge Fields (2) are the items that you would copy and paste to create a Template, and the Value (3) shows you the relevant text that would populate if a Document was created through the Automation process for the selected Matter.
If you already have a Letter that you attach to your Invoices, this can be used as a reference, and any the static text can be replaced with Merge Fields.
For example, where you would generally type in a date for the letter, you can add the Merge Field "<< Date.Verbose >>" which will populate with a date in the manner "August 19, 2014," when a Document is created.
Below, you will find an example of the format for a Bill Summary Letter Template:
Once you have created your Template in Microsoft Word, you will navigate to the Documents page (1) in Clio, find the Templates section (2), and click on the green ‘Add’ button.
This will pull up the ‘Add Document Template’ window.
To upload the Template:
1. Click on ‘Choose File’ within the Add Document Template window. This will allow you to locate the Document from where it was saved on your computer.
2. Choose a Document Category. A number of categories come already entered in Clio, or you can create your own by clicking on Manage Categories.
3. Click the green ‘Save’ button to upload your Template.
Your newly uploaded Document will display in the list on the Templates page.
To create a Document from the Template, navigate to the ‘List Documents’ page (1), click the blue ‘New’ button (2), and choose ‘Document from template’ (3)
This will open the ‘Create A Document’ window, which contains the following fields:
1. Select a Document Template: You will be able to choose any of the Templates that you have uploaded to Clio. In this case, choose your newly created Billing Summary Template.
2. Matter: This will determine the ‘Values’ that are populated in the Merge Fields for the Template. Select the Matter whose information you would like to pull into the Document.
3. Format: You may choose to generate this Document as either a PDF or a Word Document. If you choose the Word format, You will be able to edit the Document after it has been created from the Template.
4. Name: You may edit the name of the new Document, although it will display as the name of the Template by default.
We do suggest generating this file in a ‘Word’ format at this time, as our Document Automation process does not have the capability to pull in the totals from Invoices. You will still need to manually enter Bill subtotals and totals, as well as the Invoice Number, on the Summary letter.
Once the Document has been generated, you can refresh the page and then navigate to the Documents folder for the relevant Matter.
You can Preview and Download the item to a location on your hard drive, so that it can be printed and other information can be added, if this Document was created in a Word format.The populated Template would display as follows:
