Create and Manage Expenses Entries

Expense entries in Clio Manage allow you to track and recover costs related to your matters, such as court filing fees and travel expenses. By default, all expenses are recorded as standard expenses without categorisation. If your firm needs to differentiate between expenses paid to third parties (hard costs) and internal costs billed to clients (soft costs), you can enable these options in Settings. If your firm uses the Xero integration, you can also track the real-time payment status of these expenses directly within Clio Manage.

Enable expense tracking for hard and soft costs

By default, Clio Manage does not track expenses as hard costs vs soft costs. If your firm needs to track expenses this way, you can enable this setting.

1. Go to Settings > Billing.
2. Select the Expenses subtab.
3. Toggle Soft and hard costs for expenses.
   • Your changes will save automatically.

Enable linking hard costs to bank transactions

With this feature, you can enable linking hard costs to bank transactions.

1. Go to Settings > Billing > Expenses.

2. Toggle on Link hard costs to bank transactions.

   Note: To toggle Link hard costs to bank transactions, you will first need to toggle Soft and hard costs for expenses to on.

Add new expenses

Expenses track costs related to a matter in Clio Manage. Record these costs and attach receipts to facilitate firm reimbursement and provide clients with clear bill transparency. You can create expense entries from several areas in Clio Manage, including the main Activities page, a matter’s Activities subtab, or the global Create new button.

1. In Activities, click New expense.
   • Alternatively, from the global Create new button, select Expense entry.

2. If you previously enabled tracking expenses as Hard costs or Soft costs, choose the relevant option.

   Note: Learn how to link transactions to hard costs when you record a transaction.

3. Optional: In the Receipt section, click Attach receipt and select a file from Clio of upload one from your computer.

   Tip: With Clio's AI features, you can allow Clio to extract relevant information from the attached file to auto-fill fields in the modal.
   • You can select up to five files to associate with the expense entry.
   • To update the modal fields with values extracted from the last attached file, click Autofill with latest receipt.
   • To remove an expense receipt from the form, click the X button. Removing an expense receipt detaches it from the expense.

   • To include attached receipts on client bills, check the Send receipt with bill box.

     Note: Receipts attached to non-billable expenses will not be sent with the bill.

4. Optional: Under Expense category, select a pre-created category to auto-populate certain fields. If the matter has LEDES billing enabled, select the relevant code under UTBMS Expense code. For the Tax field, choose one of your pre-created tax rates.

   Note: The rate(s) added here are used as the default tax rates, but you can still edit them at the time you generate a bill.
5. If your firm uses multiple currencies and the expense currency is different from the matter’s currency, you may have to select the conversion rate to use (if you chose Billing Settings where the rate is set at the time you record the expense).
6. Complete the remaining fields.
   • When entering the date, you can select a past, current, or future date.

   • You can mark an expense as non-billable by checking the Non-billable box. If you still want the non-billable expense to appear on bills, check the Show this entry on the bill box.

     Note: Tracking non-billable expenses helps the firm track non-billable activities and report on non-billable time using the Matter Productivity by User report. Showing these entries on bills demonstrates the extra value invested in a client's matter.
     Important: Non-billable expenses marked as Show on bill will only appear on bills generated using bulk billing (Billing > New bills). They will not appear on invoices generated using Quick bill.
   • Optional: Select a tax rate or rates to apply to the expense. You have to create the tax rate first in order to select it from the dropdown when you create an expense entry.
     • When selecting multiple rates you can apply subsequent taxes to the pre- or post-tax amount.
7. Save the entry.
   • Click Save entry to save and exit the modal.
   • Click Save and create another to save the entry and clear the fields in the modal to create another entry.
   • Click Save and duplicate to save the entry and keep the fields filled to create additional similar entries.

Track vendor bill status

If your firm uses the Xero integration with the Sync to Xero as bills to pay setting enabled, you can monitor the real-time sync status of your Hard costs and Anticipated disbursements.

1. Go to the main Activities tab or the Activities subtab within a specific matter.
2. Locate the Hard cost entry.
3. View the Vendor bill status field:
   • Hard costs: These entries sync to Xero as Paid bills, as they represent expenses already settled by the firm.
   • Anticipated disbursements: These entries sync to Xero as Unpaid bills. The status updates to Paid once you link a bank transaction to the entry in Clio Manage.

Duplicate and edit expenses

You can edit and duplicate an expense activity from the main Activities page in Clio Manage or from the Activities subtab within a matter. 

Delete and recover expenses

You can delete an unbilled expense from the main Activities page in Clio Manage or from the Activities subtab within a matter and recover expenses from the Recovery Bin. You can also track deleted expenses in the Recovery Bin, a matter timeline, and from the Firm Feed in your dashboard.