A quick bill converts one matter's unbilled time and expenses into a client bill in a few steps. You generate the bill from the matter, adjust which activities appear, and set the bill's options before generating. The generated bill enters your billing workflow, ready to review, approve, and send.
Note: You can generate a quick bill for any billable matter with unbilled activities, including closed matters. You cannot generate a bill for a non-billable matter. Once activities appear on an approved bill, they are locked. To change an activity, delete or void the bill.
Generate a quick bill
- Go to a matter and click Quick bill under the Financial section. You can also go to a contact, click the down arrow next to Edit for a matter in the Client's matters section, and select Quick bill.
- Optional: Click the x next to an activity to exclude it. Excluding does not delete the activity, and it will appear on a later bill.
- Optional: Click Add a time entry or Add an expense entry to add activities to this bill.
- Optional: Click Show options to set the issue date, due date, detail level, taxes, or to skip approval. See the options below.
- Click Generate Bill.
Understand bill generation options
You can set these options as you generate the bill, while viewing the draft, or by clicking Edit after generating the draft.
- Issue date: The date the bill is issued. Choose any past, current, or future date.
- Due date: The date the bill is due. Set a date, or check Use contact's grace period to calculate it from the contact's payment profile.
-
Detail level: How activities appear on the bill:
- All details: each activity as its own line item.
- Activity summary: activities combined by activity category.
- Aggregate: activities combined by time and expenses.
- All items aggregated: one combined total for all activities.
- Aggregated by type: one total for time and one for expenses.
- Only services aggregated: one total for time entries, with expenses listed individually.
- Only expenses aggregated: one total for expenses, with time entries listed individually.
- Refine descriptions with AI in Clio Manage: Polishes time and expense narratives for clarity. Refined entries appear in blue for review.
- Combine multiple matters for one client: Puts a client's matters on a single bill. This is not available when the matters involve multiple currencies.
- Include unbilled matters with a zero balance: Generates a bill for a matter with a £0 balance, such as non-billable activities shown for client transparency.
- Skip the bill approval process: Moves the bill directly to the unpaid state so you can accept payment without another user's approval.
- Invoice tax: Preselects your default tax rates. Expand the list to choose a different rate, or click + Add tax rate.
- Change bill theme: Sets the format the bill appears in.
- Invoice signature: Selects the firm user whose signature appears, defaulting to the responsible solicitor. Select None to remove it.
- Notes: Adjust the note templates when your bill theme includes notes.
- Activities: Show all activities, only time entries, or only expenses.
- Notify members of your firm: Notify selected firm members by email or internal message when the bill is generated. Enable this section in settings first.
Up next
Generate Bills in Bulk: Generate bills across many matters and clients at once, and enable firm notifications on bills.