Money Movement
Accounts Payable
Bills captured, approved by you, paid on schedule and coded correctly — with advanced client costs tracked as the recoverable receivables they are, not buried in your expenses where they quietly destroy your margins.
Sound familiar?
- You are approving individual bills between hearings because nobody else can
- Case costs get advanced and then never billed back to the client
- Your P&L shows expenses that are really receivables, so your margins look terrible
- January 1099s are a scramble because W-9s were never collected
- A large expert invoice lands the same week as payroll and nobody saw it coming
What you get
What changes once this is running.
- Bills paid on time without you being the bottleneck
- Advanced client costs on the balance sheet as receivables, not sunk in expenses
- Every case cost tied to a matter, so it can actually be billed back
- An approval trail on every payment leaving the firm
- A clear view of what the firm owes, before it becomes urgent
Included
What the engagement actually covers.
Bill capture and coding
Vendor invoices collected, entered and coded to the right account and the right matter. Firm overhead separated from client-advanced costs at the point of entry, where it is easy, rather than at year-end, where it is not.
Approval workflow
Nothing gets paid without your approval. We prepare the payment run, you review and release it. The approval trail is retained.
Case cost tracking
Filing fees, expert witnesses, court reporters, medical records, process servers, travel — recorded against the matter, tracked as recoverable, and reported so nothing gets forgotten at settlement or final billing.
Vendor management
Vendor records kept current, W-9s collected, and 1099-eligible payments tracked through the year so January is a report rather than an archaeological dig.
Payables reporting
A monthly view of what is owed, what is due when, and what is unusual — so a large expert invoice does not collide with payroll unannounced.
How it runs
No surprises about the process.
Inventory what you pay
Recurring overhead, per-matter costs, subscriptions, and the irregular large items that cause the cash flow surprises. Most firms find several subscriptions nobody remembers approving.
Set up capture and coding rules
A single intake point for bills, and clear coding rules for what is firm overhead versus what is advanced on a client's behalf. This distinction does most of the work.
Run the cycle
Bills captured as they arrive, coded, queued. A payment run on your schedule, approved by you, released and recorded.
Report and review
Monthly payables reporting alongside your financials, including a case cost recovery view showing what has been advanced and what remains unbilled.
The case cost problem
There is one accounts payable mistake that shows up in law firm books more than any other, and it is expensive in two separate ways.
When your firm advances a cost on a client’s behalf — a filing fee, an expert’s retainer, a court reporter, a medical records request — that money is not an expense. You expect to recover it. It belongs on the balance sheet as an advanced client cost: an asset.
Code it as an expense instead and two things go wrong.
Your financials become misleading. Expenses are overstated, assets are understated, and your profit margin looks worse than it is. For a contingency practice carrying significant advanced costs on open matters, the distortion can be large enough to make a healthy firm look like it is barely breaking even.
You stop recovering the money. This is the costlier one. A cost sitting in a general expense account, untied to any matter, is functionally invisible. When the case settles, nobody produces a list of what was advanced, because no such list exists. The costs are simply never billed back. For firms with real case cost exposure, this quietly leaks a meaningful amount of money every year.
The fix is not complicated. It is a coding decision made correctly at the point of entry, applied consistently, and reported monthly so unbilled costs stay visible.
Timing matters as much as amount
Firms rarely fail because they cannot afford their bills. They get squeezed because of when the bills land relative to when collections arrive.
Payroll is fixed and non-negotiable. Rent is fixed. Malpractice insurance often arrives annually in one large piece. Expert witness invoices show up unpredictably and can be substantial. Meanwhile collections are lumpy, and for contingency work they can be very lumpy indeed.
Knowing what is due over the next sixty days — not just what is owed in total — is what turns that from a recurring crisis into a scheduling problem. The cash flow runway calculator is a reasonable place to start.
Questions
About Accounts Payable
Do you have access to move money out of my accounts?
Not unless you specifically set it up that way, and most firms should not. The standard arrangement is that we prepare the payment run and you approve and release it — the authority to move money stays with the firm. Separating preparation from authorisation is basic internal control and it protects you.
How do you handle advanced client costs?
They are coded as advanced client costs on the balance sheet — a receivable — not as an expense, and each one is tied to a matter. When the matter settles or is billed, those costs are recovered against the receivable. Firms that skip this consistently understate their assets and lose real money to costs that were never billed back.
Can you pay from the trust account?
Trust disbursements are recorded, reconciled and tied to the correct client ledger. The decision that a disbursement is authorised and proper is yours — that is a legal and ethical judgment. We make sure the accounting and documentation behind it are correct, and we flag immediately if a disbursement would overdraw a client's ledger balance.
What about 1099s?
We track 1099-eligible vendors and payments through the year and collect W-9s as vendors are set up, then produce the reporting your CPA needs at year-end. Actual filing sits with your tax preparer.
Keep going
Related services and tools.
Ready when you are
Find out what shape your books are actually in.
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