Billing Software and Business Account Different Types to Suit Every Business Need

Billing software has established its unique place and crucial role in enhancing modes of business today. The rapidly increasing local and international business is rendering billing software as indispensable in business, especially in view of the enlarging commerce and requirement of easy and speedy billing functions. You now have special software separately for almost all branches of business. Here are a few of the important ones.

Time and Billing Software: Invoice and Billing software, used mainly in marketing, accounting and law firms, features three essential factors like tracking time, billing the hours of work, and categorizing, and integrating both separately for each project. The developers of these software packages normally include additional features like widgets for time tracking and bells and whistles for scheduling and management of documents. They have also ported an accounts receivable module, and are adept at integrating with type of standard accounting packages.

Legal Billing: Billing Software developers developed special programs for legal billing, by including several features like large bill grouping and trust accounting and reporting, besides other healthy billing and invoice capabilities. Larger law firms could demand a comprehensive software solution to include case scheduling, references to legal research and document management.

Medical Billing Software: Unlike one would normally expect, medical billing software does not resort to hourly based billing, but instead relies on Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) Codes, which are exclusive medical billing codes. When the doctor submits his bills for payment to the insurance company, they will pursue the CPT codes, approve, deny or downgrade them to adapt to their fee schedule.

Inventory Based Billing: This software has wide-ranging use mainly for wholesalers, manufacturers and retail companies who bill when selling inventory. The pricing of the inventories determines the quantum of bills generated by the software. This software has to deal with diverse types of prices like specific price, varying prices or the system will use a markup amount for its billing function. Sometimes, the system will use a markup price above the cost of the item.

Recurring Fees Billing Software: There is no specific software for this niche, which includes regular standard or monthly service billings to customers by home maintenance industries or monthly or annual maintenance IT firms who have recurring bills of the same amount for their customers during each billing cycle. Most such service companies use the time and billing software to do their billing with the help of a special module for recurring fees that they integrate into the software. These companies can also try Name-brand accounting systems software that is ideal for billing of recurring fees. Larger companies and multinationals may go for a third-party billing service that takes on the responsibility for generating the invoices for them.

Arvind Maurya
http://laxmisoftware.comwww.laxmisoftware.com
arvindkum75@gmail.com

Why the Right Billing Software Matters to Law Practices

Your firm can choose from an array of commercial billing software packages but it's important that you choose a product that provides features needed by the legal industry. Generic business software works great for a generic business. However law firms have specific billing conditions that only dedicated attorney time and billing software can satisfy. One such requirement is matter-based billing.

Matter-Based Billing

Common business software is capable of handling client billing, and may even be able to handle multiple billing models such as both hourly rates and flat fees. The problem with using these packages for a law firm is that they break down billing by client and not by assignment. In the legal field, attorneys must separate each matter into a separate billing.

Let's say John Doe is getting a divorce. He wants you to handle that but also wants to update his will and other paperwork to reflect the dissolved marriage. The firm accepts the divorce case at an hourly rate with a retainer and the simple will at a flat fee. These two cases must be kept separate. In particular if the estate planning ends up incurring extra expenses to be billed to the client, the office cannot take that from the retainer for the divorce case.

The Problem of Generic software

A clever lawyer might decide to try to fake it using general time and billing software. You set up each matter as a separate "client", so you have "John Doe-Divorce" and "John Doe-Will". That allows you to keep billing separate and there is no danger of funds from one matter being used in another. All done.

Except that if Mr. Doe calls about his divorce, someone answering the phone and looking at his records might not realize there is also a will matter. Even worse, you might incorrectly link matters. So when Jane Smith calls about her divorce you see "Jane Smith-Will" and assume that's her case as well. Unfortunately it's a different Jane Smith and you just gave confidential information to a stranger.

Law-Specific Software

Legal billing and accounting software keeps matters separate while still relating them to the same client. The billing for each matter is handled independently, so an invoice would go out for the will expenses without touching the divorce retainer. However all matters are linked so users can see a client's entire package of services at a glance without the risk of assuming two people with the same name are the same person.

Arvind Maurya
www.laxmisoftware.com
arvindkum75@gmail.com