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InfoPro Home > Professional Development > Monthly Column
PowerInvoice™ and the LexisNexis InfoPro Resource Center
By
Carol Barra,
Librarian Relations Consultant
Good news for those of you who are tasked with cost recovery in your law firm:
The LexisNexis Librarian Relations Group has recently added a “Resource Center” for LexisNexis PowerInvoice™ to our InfoPro web site at http://www.lexisnexis.com/infopro/powerinvoice/. This Resource Center is easily locatedunder “Research Tools for Librarians” at the top of the page.
Developed in part due to feedback offered by our librarian customers, this new Resource Center is one central place to find the following information:
- An overview of the PowerInvoice™ service;
- Frequently asked PowerInvoice™ questions;
- A PDF of the “PowerInvoice™ Service Quick-Reference Guide”. (The title “quick reference” is somewhat of a misnomer as the Guide provides complete and detailed instruction for making the best use of the PowerInvoice™ service. This Guide is an in-depth manual on how to use PowerInvoice™ effectively-- from the simple retrieval of invoices to a more sophisticated analysis of the Billing Data);
- Information on new enhancements to the PowerInvoice™ system;
We will be using this Resource Center to share information on ongoing enhancements and changes to the PowerInvoice™ service. For example, recent enhancements have included:
- Open invoices: The Statement of Account feature within PowerInvoice™ is now called Open Invoices;
- Payment History: A new feature called Payment History has also been added to PowerInvoice™. This feature gives you access to all of your account activity over the past 24 months, including all invoices, payments, and prior credits. You will see a search box which allows you to limit your results by date, account number, check number, activity type (invoice payments, credits), and item number, If no search criteria are chosen, you will retrieve all results from the past 24 months;
- New user interface: with a lexis.com look-and-feel that eliminates the need to scroll, it now allows you to fully utilize PowerInvoice™ from a single screen;
Why should you care about this powerful LexisNexis business tool? The LexisNexis Librarian Relations Group understands that not everyone needs to see the invoices for lexis.com usage, or the invoice inserts that provide information on the enhancements being made to PowerInvoice,™ but we recognize that it is important for everyone to have access to the information when and if they need it.
I want to share with you the top ways I used PowerInvoice™ while I was at my firm.
Basic Billing Data provides access to six months (plus the current month) of LexisNexis billing data.
- Choose the standard date range which covers one month, or a custom date range of your choice;
- Choose one account number, several account numbers, or all account numbers;
- Choose the report that will best meet your needs, such as Account Summary, Summary by Client/User/User ID, or Detail Report by Client/User, etc.;
My choice depended on what information I needed at the time. If I wanted to retrieve billing data for the current month to review usage in a particular office, I chose the account number(s) for that office. If I wanted to retrieve billing data for all offices, I chose “all” account numbers. If for some reason I needed to look at billing data from an earlier month, I chose a custom date range.
The report formats that I used most often were the Detail Report by Client/User or the Detail Report by User/Client. These reports provide the user’s name, ID, client/matter number, details of the broad category of sources searched like Lexis, Shepard’s, dates of searches, number of searches, online time, printing and linking.
Enhanced Billing Data provides additional ways to access the most recent six months of LexisNexis billing data.
- Choose the standard date range which covers one month, or a custom date range of your choice;
- Choose one account number, several account numbers, or all account numbers;
- Choose user name, one or several LexisNexis users;
- Choose user ID number, one or several LexisNexis user ID’s;
- Choose service name such as Lexis Legal Services, Shepard’s, etc.;
- Choose client/matter number;
- Choose type of charge such as Document Linking or Alerts;
- Choose the report that will best meet your needs;
The Enhanced Billing Data tab allows you to retrieve just the information you need. You can retrieve all of the usage for an individual user for a specified period of time. This can be very useful to be sure that Summer Associates do not leave the firm before the corrected client/matter information has been added to the billing database from which client bills are generated. If a partner questions the cost effective searching capability of a new associate, information on their usage can be retrieved. A report on all non-billable client/matter numbers can be retrieved. For example, if the bankruptcy department has a special non-billable number they use for work that cannot be billed to a client, the usage information can be retrieved for just that number. Another report I was often asked for is a list of all usage for a particular client/matter number for the most recent month, so that the partner responsible for sending out a bill on a matter that had been closed was sure that all charges for usage of lexis.com had been pulled into the billing system.
The Custom feature allows the firm to customize the LexisNexis billing data to reflect the firm’s policies for recovering the portion of the research costs that will be passed along to clients. These cost recovery options let your firm establish recovery rates on a service-by-service basis before sending the billing data to your office billing system. One useful feature available under Custom is the ability to rename any LexisNexis service to a more descriptive name that your clients can understand. For example “Primary Legal Research” could appear rather than “Lexis Legal Services”.
The Reallocation feature allows you to identify, redistribute or remove completely non-billable research charges.
The LexisNexis PowerInvoice™ Service is a powerful tool to help your firm maximize the recovery of costs associated with research done on lexis.com. As the librarian, you can show your value to firm management by proactively monitoring usage of lexis.com and helping your Billing Department make use of a tool that provides an easy, automated way to move the billing data from PowerInvoice™ directly into the billing system used by your firm.
For further information look for the PowerInvoice™ Resource Center on the InfoPro web site, http://www.lexisnexis.com/infopro/powerinvoice/ or contact your LexisNexis account team or Librarian Relations Consultant for training.
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