Comprehensive Guide: Bill Settings, Bill Themes, & Payment Profiles

Bill Settings

Topics

Locating Bill Settings
Overview of Billing Options
Core Bill Settings

Locating Bill Settings

To locate your bill settings, click "Settings" in the left navigation menu.

Then click on the "Billing" link in the Clio Settings column.

Overview of Billing Options

The Billing settings screen contains four tabs:

Bill Settings

This tab contains the core bill settings and is where you will specify:

• Firm Logo
• Default Currency
• Taxes
• Time Rounding options
• Bill States options
• Enable draft Bill Notifications

These core bill settings are detailed below.

Bill Themes

Bill Themes allow you to define what information should appear on your bills and how your bills should look. 

• Common Bill Theme options are detailed in the "Bill Themes" section of this chapter.

Payment Profiles

Payment Profiles allow you to specify the payment terms to be applied to your clients, including:

• Payment grace period
• Interest percentage and frequency
• Early payment discounts

• Steps for creating and applying Payment Profiles are detailed in the "Payment Profiles" section of this chapter.

UTBMS Codes

These codes are useful for those firms that submit electronic invoices in LEDES 1998B format.

For instructions on how to enable UTBMS codes in your Clio account, see the "UTBMS Codes" article.

Core Bill Settings

Firm Logo

Logo images that are uploaded to Clio can be displayed on your bills and help reflect your brand.

Ideal logo dimensions have a ratio of 5.5 units of width for each unit of height, however the system will attempt to appropriately size the image to fit according to standard bill dimensions. 

Logos should not exceed 2 megabytes in size and must be one of the following file types: JPEG, PNG or GIF.

Default Currency

Clio allows you to bill clients in many different currencies. Currency can be adjusted for the firm, or it can be adjusted on an invoice-by-invoice basis.

Clio only supports one default currency.

Taxes

If your jurisdiction requires that you collect taxes, you can specify default primary and secondary taxes. You can then choose to apply those taxes when generating bills. 

1. Tax Name
   Give your primary and secondary taxes a name to help you identify them easily.
2. Tax Rate
   Enter in the percentage rates for your applicable taxes. Note that Clio supports tax rates with a percentage of up to eight (8) decimal places.
3. Secondary Tax Rule
   Choose whether your secondary tax should be applied to the pre-tax amount or post tax amount.
4. Apply Secondary Tax
   Check this box to enable the use of a secondary tax. By default, this box is not checked.

When generating a bill, you will also have to check the tax options in the Generate Bills window. 

Time Rounding Options

Clio allows you to round time to the nearest two decimal places and/or to the next minute increment. 

Examples:

• To bill time in 10ths of an hour, set the minute increment to "6". 
• To bill time for every quarter hour, set the minute increment to "15".

Non-Billable Time
Hourly entries in flat rate or contingency matters are automatically set to non-billable allowing you to track time using a normal billing rate. You can disable this below to leave the non-billable checkbox unchecked and instead use a rate of $0.00 by default.

Bill States Options
For small or solo firms that do not require a pending approval workflow, the "Pending Approval" bill state can be removed by checking the "Hide Pending Approval" box.

For those firms that need the ability to edit the line items on approved bills, you can enable this by checking the "Allow editing of approved bills and trust requests".

Enable Draft Bill Notifications

For those firms with a draft bill approval workflow, you can enable draft bill notifications. 

Draft notifications allow you to select a Clio user to be notified by email or secure message whenever you generate a bill.

For more information about working with draft notifications, see the "Draft Notifications" article.

• Next topic: Bill Themes

Bill Themes

This chapter contains brief details on commonly used Bill Themes options.

For more information about working with Bill Themes and customizing your invoices, see the "Customizing your Bills" collection of articles.

Topics

Bill Themes Basics
Display Options
Localizations - Language Options
Line Item Table Options
Account Balance Options
Changing the Bill Theme on a Bill

Bill Themes Basics

Clio's Bill Themes allow you to determine what information should appear on your bills and how your bills should be styled. 

To access Bill Themes, go to the Billing settings screen and click on the "Bill Themes" sub-tab. 

The "Default" theme will automatically be applied to all your bills. You can edit the default theme or create a new theme. 

To edit the default theme, click on the thumbnail image. 

The Edit Bill Theme screen has three main areas.

1. The left-most box lists the top level customization categories. 
2. When you click on a top level category, the main settings area will display further categories and customization options. 
3. Below the options area is a live preview of your Bill Theme. The area that you are currently customizing will be outlined with a blue box.

Display Options

You can customize font, spacing, tables, and alignment in many of the bill theme categories. You can use these options to brand your bills with your firm colors and general feel.

Firm Logo or Image

To adjust how your firm logo or image is displayed on bills, go to "Firm Information" > "Logo".

Here you can set the logo orientation, height, and spacing; or you can hide it altogether.

Localizations - Language Options

You can change some of the wording that appears on your bills from the "Localizations" category.

For more information about changing the wording on your bills, see the "Localizing Your Invoice" article. 

Line Item Table Options

You can customize the line item tables on your bill by going to the "Matter" category.

"Line Items" options allow you to customize what and how charges are displayed in the table, including:

• Splitting time and expense entries onto different tables
• Including/excluding Activity Descriptions from line items
• Displaying subtotals and discounts

"Orderings" options allow you to specify which columns should be visible on the bill tables. 

Account Balance Options

The "Statement of Accounts" category allows you to add account balances and outstanding balances to your bills.

"Summary of Accounts" allows you to add an outstanding balance calculation to your bills. This equation can optionally include the client's trust balance.

"Client Account" allows you to add trust and operating transactions to the bottom of your bills.  

• Select "Account Details" to show individual transactions.
• Select "Account Summary" to only show account balances.

Changing the Bill Theme on a Bill

To select the theme that should be applied to a bill, click the "Change bill theme" button on the bill preview. 

• Next topic: Payment Profiles

Payment Profiles

Payment Profiles allow you to specify the payment terms to be applied to your clients, including:

• Payment grace period
• Interest percentage and frequency
• Early payment discounts

Creating a Payment Profile

The default Payment Profile will be applied automatically to all of your clients unless you specify otherwise. 

To edit the default profile, click on the "Edit" link. Or, to create a new profile, click "Create a payment profile". 

In the "Edit Payment Profile" window, enter your payment terms. 

Applying a Payment Profile on a Contact Card

If you have created custom Payment Profiles other than the default profile, you will need to apply those profiles to your clients on their Contact cards.

When adding a Contact to Clio or when editing an existing Contact, scroll to the bottom of the Contact form to the "Contact Billing" section. 

In the "Payment Profile" field, select the profile that you would like to apply to all Matters and bills for this client. 

Next Chapter topic: Billing Workflow