Recording Time in Practice Management for Billing Using Legal Accounting

In this article:

• Recording Your Time
• Understanding Time Entry Behavior Between Practice Management and Legal Accounting

By tracking time spent on various tasks, you can ensure you are compensated fairly for your work while also providing your clients with transparent billing practices. Since (when using the Legal Accounting integration) time-tracking typically happens in Practice Management, you need a way to ensure your time entries are recorded in your billing workflow in Legal Accounting.  

Before you begin: 

• In Legal Accounting, all parties/clients/participants, etc. are referred to as contacts. Additionally, all matters/actions/cases, etc. are referred to as files.  
• When creating a time entry in Practice Management and then sending it to Legal Accounting, Legal Accounting must have an identical contact and file record for the Practice Management information to be copied correctly.  
• To properly link matters between Practice Management and Legal Accounting, the file’s Matter # used in Legal Accounting must be listed in the File Reference field of the matter in Practice Management.
• Users recording and sending time from Practice Management to Legal Accounting must exist in both systems with the same email address.

Recording Your Time

To record your Practice Management time in Practice Management: 

1. Track your time in Practice Management. (See Creating a Time Entry and Choosing the Bill Behavior for Billable Time Entries for detailed instructions. For help understanding how time entries are mapped between Practice Management and Legal Accounting, see Time Entry Behavior Mapping, below.)
2. To send your time for billing, in Practice Management, go to Billing > Bill Preparation. The Bill Preparation page appears. 
3. Complete any of the following tasks: 
   • Click the Timekeeper drop-down list and select the person whose time you want to submit. 
   • Click the Matter drop-down list and choose the matter associated with the bill. 
   • Enter dates you want to bill for in the Date Range fields.  
4. Click Send time for Billing. 
5. When prompted to confirm the export, click OK. The records are exported to Legal Accounting. 
6. In Legal Accounting, review the notification alert to confirm there are no errors with the import. If there were errors during the export, you will see a notification:
   You can click this icon to view the errors so you can make any needed adjustments. See Correcting Time Entry Issues Between Practice Management and Legal Accounting for help resolving them.

Once your time entries have been sent to Legal Accounting, all accounting and billing activities (e.g., disbursements and other general and trust banking-related activities) are managed through Legal Accounting. Meanwhile, all of your practice management tasks (matter and client management, calendars, tasks, etc.) will continue to be managed in Practice Management.

Additionally, time entries in Practice Management are marked with a bill status of Draft, which means you can no longer edit them in Practice Management. Any additional changes will need to be made in Legal Accounting. Time entries in Legal Accounting are added to the client ledger where you can continue to make adjustments until the entries are billed.  

Understanding Time Entry Behavior Between Practice Management and Legal Accounting

The following shows how time entry behavior in Practice Management maps to Legal Accounting:

Related Articles:

• About Actionstep Legal Accounting
• Working with Contacts in Practice Management and Legal Accounting
• Working with Matters in Practice Management and Legal Accounting
• Correcting Time Entry Issues Between Practice Management and Legal Accounting
• Contact and Matter Field Mapping Between Practice Management and Legal Accounting
• Actionstep Legal Accounting FAQ
• Understanding Contact and Matter Syncing in Legal Accounting