Trust payment requisitions enable your staff to make trust payment requests for the matters they are assigned to. Any request made by staff will still require approval by the designated personnel (e.g., bookkeepers or firm owners).
Set up trust payment requests
- Navigate to Firm Settings in the Smokeball web app.
- Select Staff & Users and then select the Approvers tab.
- Toggle Activate Approvals for Trust Account Payment Requests on.
- Optional: Grow/Prosper+ firms can also toggle on Enable Notifications in the Native (desktop) App.
- Use the checkboxes in the Approver column of the table to designate who can approve trust payment requests.
- You can also use the dropdown menu to select a default approver.
Make a trust payment request
- Navigate to the Transactions tab on a matter.
- Select the Request Payment button.
- This button replaces the Trust Payment button after you enable the trust payment request feature in Firm Settings.
- Complete all the mandatory fields in the Request Trust Payment pop-up window. You can choose to submit the request to multiple approvers to help ensure compliance with your firm's policies.
- You can only submit the request to up to 10 approvers.
- Requests are sent to approvers in the displayed order on the Request Trust Payment window.
- Once the request is submitted, the funds are automatically protected and unavailable to use.
- Select Submit.
Important Note: Firm Owners will be prompted with the option to bypass the request process after selecting the Request Payment button.
Review and approve a trust payment requests
Approvers will be notified when there is a pending trust payment request to review in the Notification Center of the native app or in the Pending Payments filter on the Accounts View of the web app. Note: Approvers clicking on the notification from the native app must be logged in with their credentials on the web app in order to view the request.
Click on a request on the blue Review link under the Actions column to approve or deny the request.
When you first select Pending Payments, the default filter under the Show heading is Mine to Action. With this filter, you will only see requests that are pending with you for review/approval. You will not see requests if you were the requester or the next approver in-line. Select All to view all requests across all matters and see who is the current approver. Select Created by me to only see payments you have requested.