*********NOTE* - Due to changes in terminology, all references to Bills have been changed to Invoices, and all references to Billings have been changed to Time Entries in the Guide below. At some point, the Video above may also be updated. *************

Flat Fee Services are just what they appear to be – Services that you add to your Matters that have a specific Fee attached, a specific charge to your Client. But you can also track time to your Flat Fee Services like anything else so that you can see how much time you spend on specific Tasks associated with the Flat Fee Service.

But here’s the cool thing about telling the system that a Flat Fee to which you have been logging time is Completed – Curo365 will then calculate the time spent and show you what your Rates would have been, had you actually been Billing time to the Client instead of charging them a Flat Fee. If these Rates are lower than your Actual Rates, then it looks like you could (maybe even should) be charging more for this Flat Fee Service. Rates too high? Bring the price down and increase the value of the Flat Fee Service for your Client.

Using this system to analyze your time spent in a Flat Fee Service can ensure that your Clients are getting the best bang for their buck and that you aren’t leaving money on the table.

If you’re not sure about Flat Fee Services in general, click here, and if you don’t know how to apply time spent to an existing Flat Fee Service, click here. For everything else, read on!

To begin, let’s access a Flat Fee Service from a Matter. Choose a Matter from the Matters Entity on the left side of the screen.

Next, choose the Matter.

And then Double-Click on one of your Flat Fee Services (one to which you’ve already applied time).

Let’s look at a couple of things right off the bat on this page. The first thing that we notice is a bar at the top with an alert that our Time Entries are approaching the cost of the Service. This means that our total Time Entries are getting pretty close to what we’re charging for our Flat Fee Service. It will also let you know when you’ve gone over.

Note also that our Flat Fee Service is for $123, which means that our Billed time must be approaching $123.

Next, we see our Time Entries associated to this Flat Fee Service. Note the time spent. A quick mental calculation tells me that our charged time so far is $100.

Now that we have a pretty good idea of what to expect when we Complete this Flat Fee Service and we can see where our numbers are coming from, let’s move on to the next step.

If we look on the top left of our action Ribbon, we see the Complete Service option. Let’s click it now.

*NOTE* - If you don’t see the Complete Service button, your Ribbon may have loaded incorrectly. A Hard Refresh (Ctrl + F5) has resolved this every time, so give it a Refresh and you should see if after that.

*VERY IMPORTANT NOTE* - You CANNOT Complete a Flat Fee Service unless that Flat Fee Service has first been added to an Invoice, so be sure to Generate the Flat Fee Service onto an Invoice BEFORE attempting to Complete it.

And choose Yes.

So before we look at our adjusted values, let’s remind ourselves of our initial values and compare them. Before we Completed the Flat Fee Service, we see that our Total Amount fell short of the cost of our Fit Fee Service.

But now that we’ve Completed the Flat Fee Service and we see that our values have been adjusted to match the Actual cost of our time.

Using this method, we can see that we charged the Client a bit over what our time is usually worth, and if this trend continues on this Flat Fee Service, we could decide to reduce the cost of our Flat Fee to ensure that the Client is not being overcharged.

Conversely, if the Adjusted Amount is consistently less than our usual Fees, we might consider raising the price of the Flat Fee Service to match the actual time that you’re putting into it. Either way, use Flat Fee Service Completion to make the best call!