Capturing disbursement costs to a client’s matter in your Practice Management System is a fundamental requirement for most law firms and legal practices. Disbursements are costs incurred during a matter which are in addition to a solicitor’s fees, such as printing, mailing, telephony, court fees and faxing to name a few.

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The traditional way in which disbursements were calculated was by process of manual reconciliation, identifying costs associated with a matter, then creating the disbursement charges against the matter. This process managed to get the disbursements applied to the matter for billing, but were cumbersome to complete, equating to missed billing opportunities where disbursements were missed or incorrectly calculated.

Some firms still don’t charge disbursements, understanding that the process of recovering the costs is outweighed by the administrative overhead of applying them. This means that the costs associated to the matter and then drawn from the solicitor’s fees, essentially reducing their hourly rate, and increasing their requirement to bill more hours to maintain good profitability.

More recently however, advances in technology have enabled the ability to capture disbursement entries on the fly and create the transaction in the clients matter for billing automatically, particularly related to print, copy, fax and scan transactions.

The disbursement charge will be created automatically against the matter, with the exact details of the type of transaction completed including the number of pages and price.

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The system works using the API (Application Programming Interface) of your Practice Management System to retrieve the open matters list to present to you on your photocopiers screen via the device embedded software. Once selected, the photocopier will scan your document, clean up the image, make it text searchable, and attach it to the matter through the same API. We can also use this function to create the disbursement entry should it be required.

ServiceScaler’s Disbursement Cost Recovery Solution will work for any firm, of any size, using (Almost) any Practice Management System.

Supported Device Manufacturers

• Brother
• Canon
• Dell
• Epson
• Fuji Xerox
• HP
• Konica Minolta
• Kyocera
• Lexmark
• Ricoh
• OKI
• Samsung
• Sharp
• Toshiba
• Xerox

Practice Management Software

Current:

• LEAP
• Lexis Affinity
• Practice Evolve
• FilePRO
• Actionstep

Beta:

• Smokeball
• LawMaster
• BHL Software
• SILQ
• Open Practice
• Thomson Reuters Elite
• iManage
• NetDocuments

To learn more about our disbursement cost recovery solution, or arrange a demonstration and quotation, please contact the team at ServiceScaler today.