Generate Bills for Billing in Clio

In Clio Manage, there are two methods for creating bills—quick bill and bulk billing. With Clio’s quick bill feature, you can generate a bill for a specific matter directly from the matter. With bulk billing, you can generate bills for different matters.

Generate quick bills

You can generate a quick bill for any billable matter—including closed matters—with unbilled time or expense activities. Once time and/or expense entries are appear on a generated bill, they cannot be changed. To make modifications to an activity after generating a bill, you will need to delete or void the bill. Follow the steps below to generate a quick bill.

1. Go to a matter and click Quick bill under the Financial or Grants and activities section. You can also go to a contact, click the down arrow next to Edit for any of the contact's matters listed in the Client's matters section and then select Quick bill.

2. Optional: Click the x next to an activity to exclude it from the bill you are generating.

   Note: Excluding activities when generating a bill does not delete the activities from Clio and they can still be included on a new bill.
3. Optional: Click Add a time entry or Add an expense entry to create and add new activities to this bill.
4. Optional: Click Show options to modify the bill issue date, due date, choose the level of detail to include on the bill, apply tax, or skip the bill approval process. Learn more about these options below in Bill generation options.
5. Click Generate Bill.

Generate bills in bulk and multi-matter bills

With Clio’s bulk billing feature, you can generate multiple bills across matters and clients or generate a single combined bill for a client's matters. You can generate a bill for any billable matter(s) with unbilled time and/or expense activities. If a matter has non-billable time entries and/or non-billable expense activities the matter will only appear in the bulk billing feature if at least one of the activities are marked as needing to show the entry on the bill. Additionally, any matters with time entries of duration zero minutes/hours will not appear in the bulk billing feature's list, bit entries with any time duration billed at a rate of $0/hour, will appear. 

1. Go to Billing and select New bills.

2. Use the check boxes to select all the bills you want to generate.

   Tip: Use the Filter to narrow your results to a specific subset of matters that you want to generate bills for. You can filter your list by client, matter, responsible attorney, originating attorney, the date range of the activity, the currency, whether the bill is a split invoice, and custom fields.
3. Click Generate.
4. Enter the required information in the modal. Learn about your different bill generation options below.
5. Click Generate bills.

Bill generation options

When generating new bills, you have several options available for you to select from to customize the bill. Below is a summary of these options. You can select these options as you generate the bill, while viewing the bill draft, or by clicking Edit after you have generated the (draft) bill.

• Issue date: This is the date that the bill is issued. You can select any past, current, or future date.
• Due date: This is the date that the bill is due. You can manually select a date or check the box for Use contact’s grace period to calculate the due date. With this selection, the due date is contingent on the grace period specified in the contact’s payment profile.
• Detail level: This refers to how activities appear on the bill:
  • All details: Each activity is listed as its own line item for full transparency.
  • Activity summary: Activities are sorted by activity category, which means that activities in the same activity category are combined on the same line.
  • Aggregate: Activities are sorted by time and expenses, which means that activities of the same type are combined on the same line.
    • All items aggregated: The bill will show only one combined total for all activities.
    • Aggregated by type: The bill will show two combined total, one for time and one for expenses.
    • Only services aggregated: The bill will show one combined total for time entries. Expenses will be listed on their own line items.
    • Only expenses aggregated: The bill will show one combined total for expenses. Time entries will be listed on their own line items.
• Refine descriptions with Manage AI: Check this box to automatically polish your time and expense narratives for clarity and professionalism. Refined entries will be highlighted in blue for easy review. For more information, see Manage AI: Automate Billing and Expense Entry.
• Other options:

  • Combine multiple matters for one client into a single bill: If a client has multiple matters with billable activities, you can check this box to ensure that all of those matters and their activities will appear on a single bill.

    Note: You will not be able to combine multiple matters for a client into a single bill if multiple currencies are involved across the multiple matters.
  • Include unbilled matters with a zero balance: When this box is checked, a bill will be generated for matters with a balance of $0 (for example matters with time entries marked as non-billable that should still be shown on the bill for transparency to the client).
  • Apply tax: The bill will apply the primary tax you specified in your settings.
  • Apply secondary tax: The bill will apply the secondary tax you specified in your settings.
  • Skip the bill approval process: The bill will move directly to the unpaid state. You can accept payment on the bill without requiring approval from another user. Learn more about bill states and approving bills.
• Change bill theme: This affects the format that the bill invoice appears in. Learn more about bill themes here.
• Invoice signature: You can select the Clio user at your firm whose signature should appear on the bill. By default, the firm member who is the responsible attorney on the matter will be selected. You can also select None to remove a signature from the bill even when the bill's theme is set up to include a signature.
• Notes: If your bill theme includes notes, you can make adjustments to the note templates.
• Activities: You can select if you want the bill to show all activities, only time entries, or only expenses.
• Notify members of your firm: This allows you to select firm members who will receive a notification when the bill is generated. By default, this option is hidden but can be turned on in settings. See the section below on Firm notifications to learn how to enable this section. Once enabled, you can choose to notify each firm member by email and/or an internal message.

Track progress of bulk billing actions

In Clio, the billing Job Status subtab allows you to monitor the progress of bulk billing actions. These actions include generating bills for multiple clients, approving and applying trust funds, and deleting draft bills. You can track the job status of a bulk billing action and troubleshoot errors if they occur using the steps and error descriptions below.

1. Go to Billing and select the Job Status subtab.
2. Scroll to view the date, action type and current status of past bulk billing actions.
   • Click on the hyperlink to view detailed results for each action.
3. Optional: Click the Today dropdown to filter job statuses by Today, Past 2 Days, or Past 7 Days.
4. Optional: To clear a specific job status log, click the three dots next to the action. To clear all logs, click Clear all.

Enable firm notifications on bills

In your user settings, you can enable a setting that sends notifications to firm members of your choice when a bill is generated. You are not required to use this feature regardless of whether it is turned on. To turn on firm notifications:

1. Go to Settings > Billing > General.
2. Scroll down to Bill notifications.
3. Check the box next to Display notification section during bill generation.
4. Click Save changes.