Template for attorney bill (invoice)

There is an Attorney's invoice template in QB but none of the QB templates will have a "different" first page. Maybe you are thinking of a cover sheet?

You control how you show the hourly timesheet entries for invoicing. When you invoice the time using Add Time & Costs, there is a button in the upper right corner, Options, and this is where you control if you want to include Notes, for example (you only need to set Options once if you will always invoice with the same setup).

The template you use must include the column for Service Date if you want each task identified. And the service items often need subitems, one for each timekeeper name, and you select the service items to this sublevel on the timesheet data entry, to get this to show on invoices.

Thanks, and maybe I'm looking for something that just doesn't exist but I'm having a hard time accepting it.  Before I went to law school, I worked as a "Billing Clerk" in a law firm.  All the bills I sent out looked a certain way.  After law school, when I worked for a firm, we billed our time and, of course, reviewed the bills, and they all looked the same.  Later in my career, I worked for an insurance company, and I reviewed every bill from every lawyer that provided service for the company.  The bills all looked basically the same as what I had always seen.

So now that I am on my own, with 20 years behind me, I want to create bills that look like the industry standard that I have gotten used to.

By tweaking the templates, I can create a "first page" (not cover page) that looks close to what I want.  It has the company info, the client info, and separate columns for date, description, and time.   Adding in a column for the initials of the timekeeper is still a work in progress for me.

I do not want the total to appear until the end.  If it is a month's worth of time entries, it will probably be about a 4 page bill.  The total should not appear until the end.  Also their should be a timekeeper summary, a "payments received section", a separate section for expenses/costs, and an aging summary all at the end (last page).  Likewise, my complete company information, should not be displayed at the top of every page, that (in my opinion), looks ridiculous.

Have I been lulled into believing that these features are standard on "all" attorney bills?  I certainly have never seen a bill from an attorney that looked like a standard QB invoice.

While writing this, I Googled "law firm bill sample."  Here's a software provider that displays several samples.  They all look basically like what I'm talking about.  http://legalmaster.com/lm01012.htm.  

Currently I am using a different 3rd party software (rtgsoftware.com) to generate my bills, and then going through the tedious process of "double entry" for all the pieces that need to be in QB.  I understand how to enter time into QB, and all the other information is there, so it seems there must be a way of formatting it in a more "lawyerly" fashion.  With all the attorneys out their using QB, I'm sure I can't be the only one experiencing this problem.

Thanks again for your help.

I can address a few more of your issues.

I don't know how you are trying to get the initials of the timekeepers on the invoice. If you use subitems, you can select all the time for, say, me, and then you use a Subtotal item. Then you select all the time entries for yourself, and use a Subtotal item. Then you select all the expense items that are to be reimbursed, and you use a Subtotal Item. Each of these Subtotal items can be generic or explicit. For instance, you can create a Subtotal item for me, and in the description you enter the very specific text you need to have appear when used to subtotal my time.

When I worked for an architectural firm, I always put the expenses and costs to be reimbursed on a separate invoice, so I could apply payments and retainers very specifically, as you do in trust accounting. Also, if a customer wasn't paying in full, the expenses could not be liened for but our service invoices could be submitted for the lien.

As far as controlling first page and last page, you can't get different header info from QB designs. It will be repetitive.

For Payments Received, the only provision for an invoice is to show payments applied to it, specifically. That's because the invoice is a sale, it isn't an account summary. You can add the fields Job Total Balance and Customer Total Balance, which does show the current balance from the perspective of the whole customer account and includes this invoice's balance. However, the real way to show a summary, charges and payments, and show aging, is to run a Customer Statement. When you have a client for whom you are handling multiple issues, the Statement is the thing to use as a cover sheet as it will list all activity, categorized by matter. Assuming you are using Customer for client and Job for matter.

I have seen some structured invoice requirements and part of making that work is how you set up and use the Items. Part of that is how you enter your data at your original transactions. Part of that is how you invoice it. Part of that is the invoice template that is used.

It might be possible to create a separate template for page one and switch to this when printing the first page. .. then, print the rest using the other template.

This might work. . .?

Laura D