Who:	Provider Operations + Accounts
Why:	While work continues on the Engagement, the Provider can make interim claims for payment (Part Payment Claims) against the Engagement Order. After submitting the claim, a matching invoice must be uploaded for approval by the Client.

Before you begin

• A Payment Claim cannot be submitted while a request for budget variation or extension of time request is being processed. See topics Request Variation on an Engagement Order and Request for Extension of Time for details on completing these requests and returning the Order to Work In Progress)

Overview 

IMPORTANT: Managing Payments and Budget Variations It can negatively impact your Star rating if the budget on your Engagement is exceeded. It is therefore wise to submit part payment claims up to but not exceeding the existing budget. Then submit a variation request, if required, to have the budget increased. If the expected cost of work is unknown by the Client, they may create an Engagement with a $0.00 Approved budget. It is advisable to submit you budget variation request to set the budget as soon as possible. This ensures that you are in a position to submit claims for payment without incurring KPI breaches.

 

The following procedure describes how to:

• Create a Payment Claim;
• Add and edit items on the Payment Claim;
• Remove items from the Payment Claim;
• Attach and submit the associated Invoice for approval;
• Submit a subsequent Payment Claim.

Procedure

IMPORTANT: The items and costing on the Payment Claim must correspond to an Invoice exported from the Provider’s financial/accounting system. 1.     Export the required Invoice from your company’s financial/accounting system and save it in a location where it can later be uploaded into LPG (Use the invoice number as the filename.)

 

To Create the Payment Claim, do the following:

Find and open the Matter for which you want to submit a claim for Payment.
The Matter screen appears.

See the user guide Searching for Orders and Matters for other ways to access the Matter and Engagement Order.

1. If the Engagement tab is not already selected, click the Engagement

 

N1 - IMPORTANT: The Status must be WORK IN PROGRESS – OPEN for a claim for payment to be submitted. If a different Status is displayed (e.g. CUSTOMER RESPONSE TO VARIATION REQUEST), when you click the Action button you will not go to the Order In Progress screen and the Submit Payment Claim button will not be available.

 

N1 – Take note of the Approved $ (total amount budgeted for this Engagement) and the Budget % (percentage of the allocated budget used so far). Exceeding the Approved $ limit can negatively impact your rating with the Client. See important notes at the start of this procedure on managing part payments and budget variations.  A Budget % of 0.00 (as in the example shown below) indicates that no payment claims have been submitted yet.

3. Assuming the Status is at WORK IN PROGRESS – OPEN, scroll down and click the Action

The Order In Progress screen appears.
N3 – The Items tab on the Engagement Order lists all items added to the Engagement Order as well as  all items added to any associated Deliverable Orders.
N4 - The Consumed By column indicates which Order the item was added to. In the example shown below there is an for disbursement costs associated directly with the Engagement Order (B11890), a Deliverable Order for Advice (B111891) against which two items were uploaded.

4. Scroll to the bottom of the Order In Progress screen and click the Submit Payment Claim
The Submit Payment Claim screen appears.

NOTE: Deliverable Orders for documents only generally contain a single item representing the document that the Provider must submit. Deliverable Documents are fixed at $0.00 (N5).  You cannot claim for payment on them. A $0.00 Claim does need to be submitted as part of the action of closing the Deliverable Order but this is done in a separate procedure. See the User Guide entitled Close a Deliverable Order & Submit Claim for details. The Disbursement item was added to the Engagement Order when, the order was created. Leaving the Claimed Qty as 1 (N6) indicates that you are claiming payment for this item.

5. Blank lines need to be inserted into the Order to include the claimable items. Do the following:

a. Scroll to the bottom of the Submit Payment Claim screen and select the number of blank lines you want to add to the items list.
A warning message is displayed indicating that added items should be approved by the Client.

Note:  The warning message may look different depending on the browser that you are using. However the content of the warning will be the same.

 

b. Click the OK
N7 - The specified number of blank lines is added to the bottom of the Items list.

6. To add items to the Order do the following:
a. Click the Find icon on one of the blank lines.
The Find Item screen appears.

NOTE: The list is not limited to items that are relevant to this Claim. For example, there may be Deliverable Document items listed (N8). You could add one of these to the Claim but you would be unable to specify a Rate for the item (because deliverable documents are not claimable items:  Type = Fixed, Rate = $0.00).

 

b. To find an Item in the list, enter the Item Id or Description in the search field.
c. Click the Submit
The list of items is filtered to display only the items that match the search criteria.

d. Click the item Id in the result list.
The Find Item screen closes and the Item is added to the list in the Submit Payment Claim screen.

e. The description of the item is displayed, including any rules that relate to the item. The price type (Fixed, Capped, At Cost, Variable) identifies whether you can change the rate and the unit of measure (per job, each, per hour, etc) tells you the basis on which the rate is applied.  The rate for Fixed Price items cannot be changed whilst the rate presented for Capped items is the highest rate that can be charged for that item – you reduce the rate, if required.

f. Every item is associated to an item type for cost grouping purposes. For some items, you might be able to select for a list of item types, click the drop down box and select the Item type.

g. Enter the Unit Rate and Claimed Qty for this Item.

h. If required, enter additional notes about the item being claimed.

N9 – If you add the same Item more than once to the Claim, a warning message is displayed. This does not necessarily indicate a problem. For example you may need to itemise fees for the same item in two different locations (e.g. District Court and Magistrates Court).

7. Repeat step 7 for each item that needs to be added to the Claim.

8. To remove an item from the list, select and delete the Item ID. Then click elsewhere on the screen or press the Tab key on your keyboard.
The line will be reset to a blank line (Unit Rate, Claimed Qty and Item description are removed).

Submitting a Credit Note:

9. If a Claim has been submitted and invoiced but the Provider realizes they have overcharged, a Credit Note must be submitted. See the user guide Submit a Credit Note for details.

Complete the Payment Claim:

After following the steps above to itemize the Payment Claim, do the following to complete the Claim:

10. Scroll to the bottom of the Submit Payment Claim screen and enter the Docket Start Date (format dd/mm/yyyy) or click the Calendar tool to select the date.

11. By default today’s date is entered in the Docket End Date. If necessary change the date.
The Docket Start Date and Docket End Date specify the date range covered by the claim and associated Invoice.

12. Click the Submit Payment Claim button.
A notification message appears indicating the total of the Claim and that the Engagement Order cannot be completed or further payment Claims submitted until this Claim is processed.

13. Click the OK
The Claim Submitted Successfully screen appears.

14. Click the Back to Worklist

The display returns to the screen from which you started the Claim for Payment. In the example shown in the steps above, the procedure started from the Matter screen. So the display returns to the Matter screen with the Engagement tab selected.

N1 - Payment Claims are automatically approved without Client interaction. For this reason the message “No payment claim record found” is displayed. The Claim has already been moved forward to become an Invoice.

N2 - An entry now appears in the Invoices list with Status NOT YET SUBMITTED.

N3 – Until the Invoice is submitted the percentage of total budget used (Budget %) and total amount invoiced to date (Invoiced) are not updated.

N4 – The Invoice should be submitted before further actions are taken on the Engagement.

IMPORTANT: Submitting the Payment Claim is only the first stage of the procedure. The next stage is to upload and submit the corresponding Invoice that was exported from the Provider’s financial/accounting system. See steps below.

To upload and submit the Invoice (exported from financial/accounting system):

1. Click the Acquire button (or Action button) next to the Invoice.
The Submit Invoice screen appears with the Invoice Items tab selected.
N1 - The items that were specified in the Payment Claim are displayed.

2. Scroll to the bottom of the Submit invoice screen and enter the Invoice #.
IMPORTANT: This must match the filename of the Invoice you are about to upload.

3. Optionally enter an Invoice Message that describes the Invoice you are submitting.

4. Click the Submit
The Submit Invoice screen appears.

5. Click the Choose File
The Open window appears.

6. Find and select the Invoice file that was exported from the financial/accounting system (in step 1 of this procedure), then click the Open

7. The display returns to the Submit Invoice (Upload Attachment)
N1 - The selected file name is displayed next to the Choose File button.

8. Enter a Description that will identify the uploaded file.

9. Click the Upload

N2 - A message is displayed indicating that the invoice was successfully submitted.
N3 - If desired, the LPG-generated Invoice can be viewed by clicking the View/Print Invoice button.
N4 - If desired, the uploaded Invoice file can be viewed by clicking the View Attachment button.

10. Click the Back to Worklist 

The display returns to the screen from which you started processing the Invoice. In the example shown in the steps above, the procedure started from the Matter screen. So the display returns to the Matter screen with the Engagement tab selected.

N5 - The summary is updated showing the total invoiced so far.

N6 – The uploaded Invoice # is displayed and the Status is changed to AWAITING APPROVAL. A new Payment Claim can at this point be commenced if required.

NOTE: The Invoice is now with the Client for them to approve it and initiate payment. Until the Invoice is approved, you cannot close the Engagement. See user guide Close Engagement Order and Final Payment for procedure.  A new Payment Claim can be started while the Invoice is awaiting approval.

 

Make the Next Payment Claim:

The procedure is the same for each subsequent Payment Claim that is made against the Engagement Order. However, each time a new Payment Claim is started, the Items list shows the cumulative quantities from previous Payment Claims.

N1 - In the example shown below the Unit Rate and Quantities of the item claimed on the first Payment Claim are carried forward onto the second Payment Claim.

For items that have been claimed on previous Payment Claims, rather than adding new lines you can edit the existing lines carried forward from the previous Claim by adding a new Claimed Qty.

In the example shown below:
N2 – Because this Item is “At Cost at $0.00” the Unit Rate can be set as required. In this case an additional 4 hours at $250 is being claimed.  If you wish to submit subsequent payment requests for this item but want to claim for a different rate, it is recommended that you add a new line so that it is very obvious that different rates have claimed and it is clear how the current value for the item has been calculated in each case.
N3 – Because this Item is “Capped” the Unit Rate cannot be changed but Qty can be claimed (N4).

N5 - Once the Payment Claim is processed, the new Invoice at Status NOT YET SUBMITTED is added to the list of Invoices for this Engagement Order (on the Matter screen).

N6 - When the Client approves an Invoice the status changes to APPROVED. The Action buttons (Action, Release, Acquire, Takeover) are no longer visible because there are no further actions to be taken on the Invoice.
N7 - The Invoice number changes colour to blue indicating that it is now a link. Click the Invoice number to view the LPG-generated tax invoice.

N8 – The Invoice status then moves to PAYMENT IN PROGRESS.

N9 - When the Client initiates payment of the Invoice (via their financial/accounting system) they will update the Invoice status to PAID AND CLOSED.