General Retainer Balances Carried Forward

I need to extract a report of those matters only that have General Retainer Balances arising out of Retainers Carried forward during prior billing. I don’t want all matters with General Retainer balances.

Where can I get that report?

Hassan

There is no distinction between an overpayment and a general retainer, unless you put your retainers into the trust account.  You can run a WIP report and under the "other" tab  uncheck everythihng except retaihners, which will give you both.

 

 

I managed to extract a report from pclaw to give me exactly what am looking for-matters with Retainers Carried Forward.

Please give us the details for this report.  This information may come in handy ... I count on all you guys for all the little tid bits that are in amongst all the variables.

Under Reports>Client Ledger click on the Advance Search Button and under field box select "Explanation", under Comparison select "Equal To" and under Compare To type in "Retainers Carried Forward" (this narration auomatically appears if there are unused general retainers carried forward during billing). You can select which matters (Archived, Active, Inactive) to run the report for under the Matters tab. The Client ledgers printed won't give all entries - only entries related to retainers carried forward with their invoice #s tagged. At least this gives all relevant matters that could be looked into later.

Hassan,

I'd like to offer an option regarding the date range.  Your original question was to isolate Retainers created as of the last billing.  If your Billing A/R date is the same for all invoices in the billing cycle, you may want to use the A/R date as the report start date.  Using 1/1/82 will produce all matter that had a retainer credit at some point and eventually billed because you are only filtering on the narrative Retainers Carried Forward.

Just a thought.  Kudos on your creativity!

Cindy

The report can be filtered further without having to remember date ranges. One can add a further line under Advance Search filters - "Invoice Number" "Is Blank". This will produce all matters that have unused General retainers created at Billing that have not been billed out to date.

The above report is useful as it may indicate errors at Billing which have not been picked up by the billing staff. Normally at the Pre-Bill stage of a billing run, the amounts to be transferred from Trust to General immediately prior to billing to be applied at Billing may have been incorrectly determined - either the Trust Transfers are higher than the charges to be billed or there have been errors made at Fee changes and changes to Disbursements amounts at "Prompt for changes to Billed Amount" stage. These anomalies should be picked up when final bills are produced before signing off. The bill token "Retainer Balance" which is standard on all or bill templates is useful in this case. However from my experience of reviewing other firms accounting data, this oversight is common.

Thanks