Prebills: Turn your pains into gains

How law firms can improve billing speed and cash flow

Client invoices communicate work value, document your service team’s deliverables, and initiate cash flow for professional services organizations. To create a client-ready final invoice, many firms go through a laborious, manual prebilling process, quantifying total hours and adjusting time narratives to conform to client terms. This process involves multiple stakeholders and often the busiest rainmakers, whose time would be better spent helping the organization grow.

In contrast to firms that use a manual process for prebilling, organizations using Intapp Billstream enjoy an efficient digital process, reporting that their billing reviews are up to 50% faster than before implementing Intapp Billstream. These firms also reduce the time professionals spend on prebilling and billing by up to 40% — enabling busy rainmakers to focus on their clients.

Another advantage of Intapp Billstream is that firms using it achieve a positive change in their revenue flow by simply establishing digital prebill workflows. One international firm that used to bill $50M in the last few days of the month now bills $3–5M per day, dramatically changing the pace of their cash flow.

Intapp Billstream makes prebilling timelier and more accurate by enabling legal professionals to:

1. Establish a monthly prebill review process to ensure discipline and timely decisions on work in progress
2. Set expectations for each reviewer so there is clear ownership and prioritization
3. Distribute and access prebills digitally as soon as they are created
4. Delegate or collaborate electronically on joint prebill reviews to facilitate immediate changes
5. View client guidelines when entering and editing time records
6. Carry out reviews with quick, clear actions and suggested edits, allowing rapid changes

7. Establish consistency in review and approvals workflows while allowing for necessary flexibility
8. Demonstrate financial impact and allow ad hoc analysis to expedite approvals
9. Have continuous visibility into prebill progress — even when on the go, eliminating bottlenecks
10. Audit all changes through the prebilling lifecycle to understand decisions and inform future practices
11. Save time with ongoing, automated clean-up of time and expenses for compliance and validation errors, reducing the need for multiple reviews
12. Continuously monitor WIP on matters, and initiate prebills on demand to facilitate timely billing

In the competitive legal market, minimizing revenue leakage and maximizing profits through a clean and compliant invoice is a significant advantage. And making prebilling efficient and effective is imperative — not only to drive the best use of legal professionals’ time, but also to help your firm and service team make a positive impression on clients. With Intapp Billstream, you can facilitate easier work-to-cash processes for your firm’s busy professionals. And Applied AI is further improving and accelerating how these 12 capabilities operate, providing more suggestions and automation to expedite prebilling.

Learn more about how organizations that have adopted Intapp Billstream, as well as Intapp Time and Intapp Terms, have achieved compliant time and billing while modernizing their business operations and supporting their growth.