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Record and Manage Expenses

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Expense activities 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 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.

Important: If you do not enable this setting tracking, all expenses are categorized as standard expenses without categorization options.

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

Tip: If your firm uses Clio Accounting, hard costs recorded in Clio Manage are synced to Clio Accounting. You can view your hard costs as a single table in the main Hard costs tab in Clio Accounting.

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.

Note: When recording soft costs, you can enter up to four decimal places. Other areas in Clio may round values to two decimal places, but the actual rate remains unchanged. Quick bills support two decimal places. 
  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.
  3. Optional: Under Receipt, select Attach receipt. You can select from files already stored in your account or click Upload receipt to upload new files from your computer.
  4. Select up to five files per expense. Once you have selected all receipts to associated with the activity, click Attach.
    Important: Receipts attached to non-billable expenses will not be sent with the bill.
    • To automatically include attached receipts on client bills, ensure the box next to Send receipt with bill is checked.
    • To remove a receipt, click the X button. Removing an expense receipt detaches it from the expense, the file will remain in the matter folder.
  5. Optional: Under Expense category, select a pre-created category to auto-populate certain fields.
  6. 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.
  7. Under Tax rate, choose the applicable tax option.
    Note: The option to Use tax applied to invoice means that the tax setting applied when generating the the bill will be inherited for the expense).
  8. Complete the remaining fields.
  9. Click Save entry.
    • Save and create another: Saves the expense and opens a new expense entry form.
    • Save and duplicate: Saves the expense and opens a new expense entry form with the same details.

 

Record non-billable expenses

Non-billable expenses are expenses your firm does not intend to charge 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. 

Important: Non-billable expenses marked as Show on bill will only appear when generating bulk billing (Billing > New bills). They will not appear on invoices generated using Quick bill.

Note: Receipts attached to non-billable expense entries will not be sent with client bills.

  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

Note: If an expense is generated on a bill, the duplicate button will appear next to the time entry.
  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. Activities.
  2. 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.

Important:

  • All users can delete individual expenses, but administrators can delete multiple expenses at once.
  • Deleted expenses remain in the Recovery Bin for six months and can be restored, but Clio does not guarantee data recovery.

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:

Note: Only administrators can delete expenses in bulk.
  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.

 

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