Costs Button

Click on the Button to review settings for cost funding and recovery:

Funding Preferences:

Use this selection box to establish how to fund cost charges, client expense charges and non-recoverable costs charges. Transactions can be paid from:

Client Advances: This method will pay costs from future cost funds credit to the claim or clients Trust Account.

Note: If this is your only selected funding option and there are no future cost funds, you will not be able to post any cost transactions. To avoid this, pick a secondary funding option.

Advanced from the Firm Account: This method will pay costs from the firm operating to be reimburse or invoiced at the time of remittance.
Current Debtor Payments: This method uses debtor payment monies currently available in the Trust account.

Note: If this is your only selected funding option and there are no debtor payments, you will not be able to post a cost transactions. To avoid this, pick a secondary funding option.

You can choose to use one, two, or all three of these sources. If you do not wish to use one of the sources of costs funds, click next to the source and select "N". This will prevent the program from using this cost fund source towards cost expenses for this client. For the sources you wish to use to fund cost expenses, order them preferentially by clicking next to the item and selecting "1" for primary source, "2" for secondary, ...

Recovery of Advances by My Firm:

For transactions that were funded by the Firm Account, you need to establish the method you would like to recover your funds. The system provides three methods to recover your firm monies advanced for costs:

Withhold from Debtor Payments: This method will take debtor payment funds from the Trust account and reimburse the firm at the time of remittance.
Withhold from Client Advances: This method will take client credit and future cost funds in the Trust account to reimburse the firm at the time of remittance.
Invoice Client: This method will generate an invoice to bill the client for costs advanced by the firm.

Select the primary method you would prefer to recover your costs by clicking and selecting "1". Select your secondary method by clicking and selecting "2", ... If you would like the system to prevent from using one of the three methods of cost recovery, click next to this method and select "N".

Note: If you pick to reimburse the firm account for COST/CEX/NRC advanced from debtor payments and/or client advances and there is not enough funds to reimburse the firm, an invoice will be created even if you have an N set for Invoice the Client.

Conditional Costs:

You have the option to use "conditional costs" for any client. Conditional costs allow the firm account to advance costs on a claim. These costs cannot be recovered from the client, either through client advances or invoice to client. The firm account can only be recovered with debtor payment funds paid on that specific claim. To use conditional costs, click in the conditional costs check box:

Note: Once Conditional Costs have been set it is difficult to remove this option. Please be sure this is the option you need before selecting it. If you have questions, please contact the Technical Support Department.

Click the button.