Reprints of Invoices, Prebills, Voided Invoices - Accounting Records Retention and Backup

At times we have questions from firms on best practices for client accounting records retention. These notes are not meant to be definitive, and every firm is different; however, an understanding of what is available in Orion regarding original Invoices, reprinted Invoices, voided Invoices, Prebills, and Fee Listing reports in terms of accounting backup can be important.

All Orion initial printouts of Reports or Invoices may be printed or exported to Excel, PDF, RTF, and HTML formats for storage purposes. These options are available as part of the standard printing routine. You may print out any Report or Invoice and save it as a file in standard folders or profiles in a document management system. Each firm's record retention policy is unique to that firm's requirements. Understanding how various documents are used in Orion can help with determining what your firm decides to store.

Invoices:

Orion allows you to reprint an Invoice at any point in any invoice format "style." What this means is that you may reprint an Invoice in a different layout, if needed, without having to go through the process of voiding an Invoice and recreating it.  You may also make text changes to Fee or Expense descriptions, client addresses and reprints of Invoices without having to void them. Orion locks down hours and amounts billed at the time of printing the actual Invoice. You must void a bill to change the total services or expenses listed on it.

You also have to be aware if you have made any revisions to text on the Invoice since it was first printed. This can include changes to client addresses.

You also need to be aware if reversals of payments have been done on an invoice since the original printing. If you are presenting Invoices with payments in the footer section of the Invoice (something that most firms do), on an Invoice reprint, if a reversal of a payment has been done, the payment will NOT show on the reprinted Invoice.

For the above reasons, many firms keep a hard copy of the original Invoice.

Voided Invoices:

Voided Invoices will display on the Billing Manager screen when you use the Filter button and filter for voided Invoices. Orion stores the voided Invoice Number, Client-Matter Number, Client-Matter Name, fees billed amount, expenses billed amount, interest billed, costs billed, responsible attorney, and the total amount of the original bill along with a few other fields. It does not store a "copy" of the voided Invoice.  Orion does not allow you to "reprint" the actual voided Invoice. Once an Invoice is voided, the Fee Entries associated with the Invoice are placed back in WIP and there is no longer an Invoice Number associated with those Fee Entries

Some recommendations for keeping copies of voided Invoices are:  1) manually stamp them with a VOID stamp prior to voiding them in the system, 2) export them to Word with a VOID stamp, or 3) use a special Void Invoice Style that prints VOID on the Invoice.

Prebills:

The Prebill is simply a printout to facilitate the billing process. Orion does not require a Prebill be printed in order to generate an Invoice. The Prebill can have important information on attorney instructions that the firm wants to preserve. Some firms scan these documents that have handwritten notes on them, and some firms allow for editing PDF versions that can be stored. A temporary record of the Prebill is stored on the Prebill Manager screen until you regenerate or delete it. There is one Prebill record per Client-Matter at any given time. If you require documentation for attorney handwritten instructions on what was done to produce Invoices such as individual notes on write ups/downs or application of retainer funds, you may want to consider keeping hard copies of Prebills or scanning them into a document management system.

Some firms store scanned copies of marked up Prebills, original Invoices, and voided Invoices in a document management system as part of accounting file backups.

Fee Listing:

Some firms store a print out of the original fee listing reports as a record of original entry of fee data.  Orion maintains an audit trail if a fee record is changed from initial entry, however this audit trail is more technical in nature and can be difficult to read. If a firm needs the "raw" time entries at the time of original entry it can be important to decide if these print outs need to be kept. Some staff and attorneys use this as a cross check against what goes in on Prebills and Invoices. However, normally the prebill print out itself will suffice. The Fee Listing, like the Prebill, provides an original record number that can be used to track back to the original fee record.

If you need to "see" for records purposes an original invoice, original voided invoice, or the attorney's designations for write ups and downs on prebills and how that affected the final invoice production, the firm would need to formulate a policy for how to handle storing these printouts either in hard copy form or using a document managment system.