Record and Manage Expenses

Expenses in Clio Manage help you track costs related to matters, such as court filing fees, expert witness retainers, and travel expenses. By default, all expenses are recorded as standard expenses without categorization. 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.

Enable expense tracking

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

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

Add new expenses

In Clio Manage, you can record expenses to track costs related to a matter. Expenses can be created from different areas in Clio to fit your workflow. You can create a new expense entry from the main Activities page, the Activities tab within a matter, and the global Create new button in the top right corner of Clio Manage

1. In Activities, click New expense.
   • Alternatively, from the global Create new button, select Expense entry.
2. If you previously enabled hard and soft costs, select Hard cost or Soft cost.
3. (Optional) Under Expense category, select a pre-created category to auto-populate certain fields.
   • Learn more about expense categories.
4. (Optional) If your firm uses UTBMS codes, select the relevant UTBMS expense code.
   • UTBMS (Uniform Task-Based Management System) codes help standardize expense tracking for improved analysis and billing.
5. Under Tax rate, choose how to apply tax to the expense:
   • No tax.
   • Primary tax, secondary tax, or both.
   • Use tax applied to invoice (this inherits the tax setting chosen when generating the bill).
     • Learn more about setting up tax rates.
6. Complete the remaining fields, including:
   • Date: Select a past, current, or future date.
7. Click Save entry.
   • Save and create another: Saves the expense and opens a new entry form.
   • Save and duplicate: Saves the expense and opens a new entry form with the same details.

Record non-billable expenses

Non-billable expenses are expenses that your firm does not intend to charge to a client. By default, these expenses are recorded at $0 and do not appear on invoices, but you can choose to display them on a bill when creating an expense entry. 

1. Follow the steps for recording an expense.
2. Under Billable status, select Non-billable.
3. Optional:To display the non-billable expenses on a bill, select Show on bill.
4. Click Save expense.

Duplicate and edit expenses

You can duplicate or edit an expense activity from the Activities page or the Activities subtab within a matter.

Duplicate expenses

1. Go to Activities and find the expense you want to duplicate.
2. Click the down arrow next to Edit and select Duplicate.
3. Make any necessary changes
4. Click Save entry.

Edit expenses

You can edit an unbilled expense to update details such as the amount, date, or description.

1. Go to Activities.
2. Find the activity you want to edit and click Edit.
3. Make any necessary changes.
4. Click Save entry.

Delete and recover expenses

You can delete an unbilled expense from the Activities page or the Activities subtab within a matter.

Delete a single expense:

1. Go to Activities.
2. Check the box next to the expense you want to delete.
3. Click Delete.
4. When the warning prompt appears, select Delete entry.

Delete multiple expenses:

1. Go to Activities.
2. Select the first box in the table’s header to select all activities.
3. Click Delete.
4. When the warning prompt appears, select Delete entry.

Recover a deleted expense:

1. Go to Settings > Recovery Bin.
2. Click Filter and search by Activity.
3. Click Recover to restore the item or Delete to permanently remove it.