Legal Fee Advance Request - Quick Tour
This is a quick tour to illustrate the steps involved
when you want to request an advance from your
client for legal fees. This may be used to request advance
payment from your client for legal fees, such as court costs
and to keep track of receiving and reimbursing the advance.
We will cover:
- Legal Advance Request - Posting
a fee transaction for the requested advance amount.
- Legal Advance Received - Posting a
payment for the amount of the advance when it has been
received from your client.
- Legal Advance Reimbursed - Posting
a payment for the amount recovered and reimbursed to your
client when the debtor makes a payment.
We will create a transaction type to use for each of the
steps outlined above and post the necessary transactions
to a debtor's account.
If you are not familiar with creating transaction
types or posting transactions, before proceeding,
please refer to Transaction Type Basics
and How To Post A Transaction.
Legal Advance Request
The first step is to post the requested advance. This is
charged by posting a Fee transaction for the debtor
whose legal fees you need to cover.
Collect! considers 200 series transactions as Legal
transactions so we will create a Legal Fee transaction type
in the 200 series. The settings for the Legal Fee Advance
Request are shown below. This transaction type may be
used to request an advance from your client to cover legal
fees, such as court costs.
Legal Fee Advance Request Transaction Type
Once this transaction type has been created, we can
post a transaction as shown below to the debtor's
account to request the advance. Notice that the amount
of the advance is entered in the Commission Amount field
as a POSITIVE value.
This sample transaction shown below is requesting a $200
advance from the client for legal fees.
Legal Fee Advance Request Transaction
When the month end statement is printed, the Legal Fee
Advance Request transaction will appear as a commission
amount that the client owes you. This begins the paper trail
for keeping track of the amount that has been requested,
received and reimbursed.
These transactions will not affect your Daily Cash Report.
A custom Daily Cash Report may be used to keep track
of these monies on a daily basis.
If you are able to charge the debtor for the amount
of the legal advance, post a 200 legal fees transaction to
the account, as well. You will need to place the amount of
the advance in the To Us field as a NEGATIVE value. For
more information about Legal Fees please refer to
Transaction Type Sample - Legal Fees.
Legal Advance Received
Next we will need to handle the money received from
the client in response to our request. When the advance
monies are received, we post a payment using the
Legal Fee Advance Received transaction type.
Collect! considers 100 series transactions as Payment
transactions so we will create a Legal Advance Fee Received
transaction type in the 100 series.
The settings for the Legal Fee Advance Received are
shown below. This transaction type may be used to post
the receipt of an advance from your client to cover legal fees,
such as court costs.
Legal Fee Advance Received Transaction Type
Once this transaction type has been created, we can
post a transaction to the debtor whose court costs you are
covering. Notice that the amount of the payment is entered in
the Commission Amount field as a NEGATIVE value.
This sample transaction shown below indicates that
a $200 advance was received from the client as a legal
advance.
Legal Fee Advance Received Transaction
When you generate your month end statement you will notice
that the amount that received is reflected on your statement.
This adds to your "paper trail" on the statement.
Legal Advance Reimbursement
When a payment is received from the debtor, you will
need to reimburse the client for the amount of the
advance. This is taken from the amount collected from
the debtor. For this, we use a Legal Fee Advance Recovered
payment transaction type as shown below.
Legal Fee Advance Recovered Transaction Type
Once this transaction type has been created, we can
post a transaction to the debtor for the amount that has
been recovered.
Below is a sample of posting $200.00 recovered from a
debtor and reimbursed to the client.
Legal Fee Advance Recovered Transaction
When you generate your month end statement, you will
notice that the entire amount of the transaction posted is
credit to your client.
This payment will not be reflected in your daily
cash report. It is necessary to use a specific daily cash
report designed for your advances. This report is available
upon request from Collect! Technical Services and may be
edited for your particular setup.
Summary
We have demonstrated the entire process of handling
a request for a legal advance from your client.
This includes:
- Recording the request as a fee posted to the
debtor's account
- Posting a payment when the advance was
received from the client
- Posting a reimbursement when the funds were
recovered from the debtor
Samples of the legal advance request may be found
in the Demonstration database that ships with Collect!
See Also
- Transaction Type Samples
- Legal Topics
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