Money Movement
Accounts Receivable
Bills that go out on time, an aging report somebody actually reads, and a follow-up process that runs without you having to be the one chasing your own clients for money.
Sound familiar?
- Bills go out late, or not at all, in the months you are busiest
- Nobody knows how much is genuinely outstanding right now
- Clients' retainers run dry and you find out after you have already done the work
- You hate chasing clients for money and so it does not get chased
- Your realization rate is far below what your billable hours suggest it should be
What you get
What changes once this is running.
- Invoices out on a consistent schedule instead of whenever someone remembers
- An AR aging report reviewed monthly, with a specific follow-up list
- Retainer balances tracked, with replenishment requests raised before the money runs out
- Trust-to-operating transfers documented properly when fees are earned
- A realistic view of which receivables are genuinely collectible
Included
What the engagement actually covers.
Invoice preparation and delivery
Prebills prepared from your time and expense entries, sent to you for review and approval, then issued to clients on an agreed schedule. You review the substance; we handle everything around it.
AR aging management
A monthly aging report broken into current, 30, 60, 90 and 120-plus, with the accounts that need attention flagged rather than buried in a spreadsheet.
Retainer and evergreen tracking
Trust balances monitored against agreed minimums, with replenishment requests raised before a client's retainer is exhausted rather than after you have already worked past it.
Earned fee transfers
When fees are earned and properly billed, the trust-to-operating transfer gets recorded, documented and reconciled — with the client ledger updated to match.
Collections follow-up
A structured reminder sequence on the accounts you approve, escalating on a schedule you set. Anything that needs an attorney's judgment comes back to you rather than going out on autopilot.
How it runs
No surprises about the process.
Map the current cycle
Where time gets captured, what triggers a bill, who approves it, how it goes out, and where in that chain things are actually stalling. Usually it is one specific step.
Set the billing calendar
A fixed prebill and invoice date every month. The single biggest driver of slow collections is irregular billing, and it is also the easiest thing on this list to fix.
Run the cycle
Prebills prepared, sent for your review, issued on schedule. Payments applied as they arrive. Aging reviewed monthly.
Work the aging
Each month we bring you the accounts that have moved into a worse bucket, with a recommendation on each. You decide; we execute.
The gap between worked and collected
Most attorneys track billable hours. Far fewer track what happens to those hours afterwards, and that is where the money actually goes missing.
The hour you worked has to survive three separate leaks before it becomes cash. It has to get recorded — time captured the day it happened rather than reconstructed from memory on Friday. It has to get billed — written down at prebill, or not written down. And it has to get collected — paid, and paid within a reasonable window.
A firm can look busy at every one of those stages and still collect well under what it worked. Realization rates in the seventies are common, and most firms with a problem cannot say which of the three stages is causing it. Our realization and utilization calculator will show you where yours is leaking.
Aging is a leading indicator
An invoice at 30 days is a normal invoice. At 90 days it is a problem. At 120-plus, industry experience is that recovery drops sharply, and the practical difference between a 120-day receivable and a write-off is often just how long you keep it on the books before admitting it.
Which is why the aging report matters more than the total. A firm with $180,000 outstanding, nearly all of it current, is healthy. A firm with $90,000 outstanding where half is past 90 days has a considerably worse problem — and a much smaller number on the balance sheet.
Run yours through the AR aging calculator to see what your buckets suggest you will actually collect.
Questions
About Accounts Receivable
Do you contact my clients directly?
Only if you want us to, only on accounts you approve, and always under your firm's name and your approved wording. Many firms prefer that all client contact stays with the attorney — that is completely workable, and in that case we prepare the follow-up list and the drafts and you send them.
Can you handle trust-to-operating transfers?
We record, document and reconcile them. The decision that a fee has been earned and is properly transferable is yours — it is a legal and ethical judgment, not a bookkeeping one. We make sure that once you make it, the accounting behind it is correct and documented.
What about contingency matters with no monthly billing?
Different work entirely, and we handle it differently. The focus shifts to tracking advanced case costs as recoverable receivables, monitoring how much capital is tied up in open matters, and making sure settlement distributions are calculated and recorded correctly when a case resolves.
Will this actually improve collections?
Consistent billing dates and a followed-up aging report reliably help, because the most common cause of slow collections is simply that bills go out late and nobody follows up. What we cannot do is make a client pay who has decided not to, or substitute for the fee agreement conversation that should have happened at intake.
Keep going
Related services and tools.
Ready when you are
Find out what shape your books are actually in.
A 30-minute call is enough to tell whether we are the right fit for your firm — and you will leave it knowing more about your own numbers either way.
- No obligation, no sales script
- Straight answer on whether we fit
- Talk to the person who does the work