Allow attachments to billing items - ex. receipt from foreign associate

[GeorgeJ4336]

Some of my clients demand receipts to justify expenses greater than a predetermined dollar amount. When I incur an expense, such as paying a foreign associate or a USPTO fee, I create a billing item.

1. I wish I could attach documentation in support of the expense to the billing item for later reference.

I like the predefined templates in the billing items for USPTO fees. I've added templates for paying a foreign associate, paying for shipping documents, paying for patent drawings, etc. So, creating billing items is easy. Furthermore, billing items carry over into bills generated by AppCol, and these bills (with expenses) carry over into Quickbooks, which I use for accounting.

2. It would be nice if any attachments to billing items would automatically get attached to billing e-mail messages generated by AppCol.

However, as it turns out, I don't send bills to this client (the one that wants receipts) from the AppCol billing module, because this client wants me to upload its bills as LEDES files through Thomson Reuters Legal Tracker. AppCol generates the LEDES files without a problem, which is nice.

However, when I upload a LEDES file, I have to go back to the e-mail file and try to find the receipt(s). It would be better if I could have attached the receipt(s) to the billing item in the first place.

3. It would be great if the billing module made it easy to download any attachments to billing items, so I could then upload them to Legal Tracker.

Thanks,
George

[gregg_appcoll]

Thank you for the input. These are good ideas. We will pass this onto engineering for consideration.

• AppColl Support

[MarkW5689]

@GeorgeJ4336 To piggyback on this:

(1) there could also be a button similar to downloading NPLs for a generated IDS but for downloading associated billing item attachments for invoices.

(2) when a billing item is automatically generated from a task, the billing template can include an option to bring over associated files. For example, when we receive an invoie from a foreign associate, we create a task to pay it. We don't currently--but could--upload the invoice and associate it with that task. Then when a billing item is automatically created when the pay invoice task is completed, the invoice can be associated automatically with the billing item.