Release Notes January 2025

We’re thrilled to share the latest updates to bilabl in January 2025, packed with new features, enhancements, and improvements designed to make your experience smoother and more efficient. Here’s what’s new in this release:

1.  Improving billing adjustments

We've enhanced the billing experience by renaming "Deductions" to "Adjustments" and expanding its functionality. Now you can:

• Apply both positive and negative adjustments to the billing, giving you greater flexibility in creating accurate billing statements.
• Add multiple adjustments to a single billing, simplifying complex billing scenarios.

This update ensures you have more control and precision when managing invoices, catering to a wider range of billing needs.

2.  Introducing the minimum fee billing type

We’re excited to introduce a new billing type: Minimum Fee. This update will allow you to:

• Set a minimum charge for a matter, ensuring you bill a predefined amount even if the actual time spent is less.
• Automatically charge based on actual work if it exceeds the minimum fee.

This addition ensures fair and flexible billing, especially for matters with variable workloads, giving you more confidence in your billing practices.

3.  Customizable time rounding increments for improved accuracy

To better align with the evolving needs of law firms, we now offer customizable time round increments. This feature allows you to set specific time intervals (e.g., 5, 10, or 15 minutes) for rounding logged time.

This update ensures consistency and accuracy in time tracking, making it easier to align with client billing requirements or internal policies.

4. Flexible hourly rate management: plan changes and track updates with ease

Now, you can set an effective date for hourly rate change of the specific users, which would be useful in case you want to plan the hourly rate of the users in advance. This would allow you to:

• Specify when a new hourly rate should take effect for the users in advance.
• Maintain a clear record of rate changes, making it easier to track and apply updates.

This update provides greater control over hourly rates, ensuring alignment with client agreements and ease of management for your team.

5. Introducing review timesheet for better billing management

We’ve added a new "Review Timesheet" to the billing section, making it easier to manage timesheets with the following benefits:

• Bulk timesheet actions: Select and remove multiple timesheets at once, saving time and simplifying the process.
• Advanced timesheet view: A new table view allows users to filter, search, and sort timesheets directly in the billing section, making it easier to review and organize data.

These updates are designed to help you work with billing more efficiently and enhance your experience with timesheets.

Other improvements

In addition to the major updates above, bilabl has implemented several improvements and bug fixes to enhance the overall customer experience:

• Adding billable amount data to the timesheet: the timesheet now includes more data in the billable amount column, allowing you to quickly see the amount that can be billed to your clients based on logged time and hourly rates.
• Enhanced approval request view: you can now quickly view which client or matter each request belongs to in the reference column.
• Set task budgets in tenant settings: you can now set task budgets directly in the tenant settings, allowing you to define budgets for each task from the start.
• Import matters with multiple currencies: when importing matters to our system, it is now feasible to import matters with multiple currencies (HKD, THB, MMK, etc.).
• Restriction on editing billed timesheets: timesheets included in any billing (even in draft status) can no longer be updated or edited. Only unbilled timesheets remain editable, ensuring consistency and preventing discrepancies in the billing.
• Bulk move timesheets to another matter: You can now quickly move multiple timesheets from one matter to another, saving time in managing your data.
• Simplified retainer billing types: we have merged the "Fixed Retainer" and "Hourly Retainer" billing types into a single "Retainer" billing type to simplify billing processes.
• Support the negative value in cost/expenses: You can now enter both positive and negative values when adding costs or expenses, which provide greater flexibility in cost adjustments and support more cases in billing creation.
• Other bug fixes and enhancements: support to search client/matter/billing/payments with the long text and special characters, fixing the prospect value currency display in client profile, enhancing some reports such as the account receivable aging or performance by staff, support to remove the budget per years…

We’re Here to Help!

If you have any inquiries about our products or features, please do not hesitate to contact our support team at support@bilabl.io. Additionally, we are open to any feedback or suggestions that could further improve our product.

Thank you for choosing bilabl – we’re committed to making your experience better with every release!

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