Overview
A "soft cost" expense refers to an expense that is not directly related to the production or delivery of goods or services. It is a cost that is difficult to quantify or measure precisely, and typically includes intangible items such as time, effort, and opportunity costs.
There may be certain matters where your firm would like to apply an internal cost which is a percentage of the billed fees. ZenCase recommends creating a soft cost percentage for the invoice fees to account for these type of internal costs.
Generate Pre-Bill To View Percentage Of Invoice Fees Soft Cost
The percentage of invoice fees soft cost will only be available on pre-bills. You can add, modify, or remove the percentage of invoice fees soft cost on a pre-bill, however you cannot manually add an expense that does not currently exist on a pre-bill.
Go to the Unbilled list page by clicking on "Unbilled" from the left sidebar navigation.
Search or filter for the matter number or name.
Select the row item and click "Generate Pre-Bills" button.
You should be re-directed to the Pre-Billed list page.
Click on the pre-bill number or go to the Actions column, click the three dots "..." and click "Edit Pre-Bill".
You may need to refresh the page to view your newly generated pre-bill.
Under the Matter section in the Expenses table, you should see an expense automatically created for you that is the percentage of the total fees on the pre-bill.
You will see the Rate column say "[X[% of fees" which represents the expense soft cost for the percentage of invoice fees.
You can edit the expense as needed to adjust the percentage of invoice fees.
Congratulations! You have successfully applied an internal soft cost for the percentage of fees of the invoice.
Note that modifying the pre-bill by adding or removing charges or even applying discounts will automatically update the expense soft cost amount to reflect the new percentage of fees on the pre-bill.
You can also add an expense soft cost for the percentage of invoice fees to any existing pre-bill by clicking the "Add Expense" button on the pre-bill details page when viewing a specific pre-bill.
Related Articles
Let us know if you have any questions!