Using AutoTime for Family Law

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AutoTime is an extremely powerful feature for Family Law firms since it automatically records your activity in Smokeball, compiles all your activities, and creates a time entry ready to review and bill through Smokeball Billing. AutoTime can also provide matter profitability information.

Since AutoTime already tracks time spent on calendar events, documents drafted and reviewed, emails sent, received, or reviewed, etc., you can focus more on servicing your clients than remembering to manually log every activity you are doing in Smokeball. This means less time trying to remember everything you did or spending extra time on evenings and weekends going back and logging time.

If you are charging a flat-fee for uncontested divorce matters, you'll have powerful business intelligence to revise fee agreements to ensure profitability on all matters.

How to utilize AutoTime for Family Law Firms

1. Set up your default billing rate and make sure to "mark my time entries as billable" under the billing tab in Staff and Users.

  • When calculating the annual cost, take into account all expenses including rent, salary, and other bills. If unsure, try adding 10-15% to salary as a starting point.
  • Smokeball will track all your Smokeball activity (documents, emails, calendar events, etc.) in Activity Intelligence and create billable entries for invoices in Smokeball Billing. To learn more on how time is tracked, review the Activity Intelligence articles.

2. There may be some activities Smokeball does not track like impromptu tasks and anything else done outside of Smokeball.

  • Add an Activity for any activity not captured by Smokeball already. You can add activities on the mobile app as well.
  • The activity will be captured by AutoTime and added to your daily entry.

3. If your rate changes on a matter- by-matter basis, you can override your default hourly rate on a matter basis under the billing tab in matter info. You can also override default rates for specific staff members on each matter as well.

4. Manually enter and track expenses on the Time & Expenses tab of the matter.

  • You can also set up Activity Codes for quick entry of expenses.

5. Time entries will be automatically tracked daily and added to the Time & Expenses tab.

6. Performance Reporting under Activity Intelligence will show you matter profitability based on activities completed or time spent.

Did you know...

  • If charging a flat fee on uncontested matters and sending an invoice through Smokeball Billing, create a fixed fee entry for your flat rate. Similar to expenses, activity codes can be created for flat fee matters.

  • If you want to show all your activity completed for flat rate matters, you can mark entries as non-billable and show them on an invoice. Below is an example of what the invoice could look like:
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