Client Cover Pages
RTG Bills, our time and billing program for law firms, creates a separate bill for each of a client's matters. When a client has more than one active matter, you may want to summarize the matters and show a total amount. That's the purpose of a client cover page.
Before you can print the client cover page for a client, you must first have printed all the bills for that client. You might have chosen to print the bills all at once, or perhaps you printed them over several days. Maybe you found an error on a bill, canceled the bill, then corrected the error and printed another bill. There is no need to print all of the bills on the same day.
When the bills are printed and you are satisfied that they are correct, you can print a client cover page by choosing Bills, Client Cover Pages from the RTG Bills menu. RTG Bills uses the fee and expense cutoff date to select matters for the client cover page. A matter is included if the cutoff date you specified when you printed the bill is the same as the cutoff date you specify for the client cover page. (Fees and expenses after the cutoff date will appear on the next bill.)
For example, suppose client 3 has three matters numbered 3-1, 3-2, and 3-3. You specified a cutoff date of 2/28/2002 and printed all of your bills. Let's say that bills were printed for matters 3-1 and 3-2, but no bill was printed for 3-3 because there was no activity and no previous balance. When you print a client cover page for client 3, for the cutoff date 2/28/2002, it will include matters 3-1 and 3-2 but not 3-3. The last bill for matter 3-3 did not have that cutoff date, so it is not included.
Client-Level Retainers
RTG Bills Version 2.07 introduces client-level retainers, which can be applied to any matter for the client. Although each bill can show the amount of the client-level retainer that was applied to that bill, the retainer balance cannot be known for certain until all of the bills for the client have been printed. For that reason, the client-level retainer balance will appear on the client cover page.
Furthermore, a client-level retainer can be a replenishing retainer, which means that RTG Bills must request additional retainer payments if the balance falls below a set amount. In order to know how much to request, RTG Bills must calculate the retainer balance after all of the bills for the client are printed. In other words, the request for an additional retainer cannot be on any one bill. So the request for an additional retainer will appear on the client cover page.
Previously, a client cover page was only printed if two or more bills had been printed for the specified cutoff date. In RTG Bills Version 2.07, a client cover page is also printed if the client-level retainer has fallen below the replenishment amount.
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Copyright © 2002 RTG Data Systems