Sistava

Time Recording and Billing

AI for Law Firms

Capture the work you actually did

Time recorded from memory at the end of a week is always lower than time worked. The gap is pure lost revenue and it is one of the largest leaks in a small practice.,Your assistant reconstructs from the record: correspondence sent, documents drafted, calls held, so the timesheet starts from what happened.,It also runs the billing cycle, which is the other place small firms lose money, by delaying bills until the work is a distant memory to the client.

Benefits

How It Works

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At a Glance

From evidence
Not Friday recall
Per matter
Narratives drafted
Prompt
Bills, not quarterly catch-up
Chased
Without the awkwardness

Time Recorded From Memory Is Always Short

The universal pattern in fee-earning practices is that time reconstructed at the end of a week understates the work done, typically by a meaningful margin. The short phone call, the email that took fifteen minutes to get right, the ten minutes spent finding a document: individually forgettable, collectively substantial, and all of it unbilled. This is not a discipline failure so much as a limitation of recall, and starting the timesheet from actual activity rather than from memory closes most of the gap without asking anyone to be more diligent.

Late Bills Get Questioned

A bill arriving three months after the work meets a client who has moved on, no longer remembers the anxious phone calls, and sees only a number. The same bill sent promptly meets someone for whom the work is recent and the value obvious. Delayed billing therefore costs twice: cash flow first, and then write-offs from queries that prompt billing would never have generated. Small firms delay bills for understandable reasons, usually because raising them is a job nobody has, and the cost is larger than it appears.

Fixed Fees Still Need Time Data

Firms moving to fixed fees often stop recording time, on the reasonable-sounding basis that it no longer determines the bill. What it still determines is whether the work is profitable, and without it a firm cannot tell which matter types make money and which are quietly subsidised. Fixed-fee practices that abandon time recording tend to discover a loss-making category only when overall margin drops enough to force an investigation, by which point they have done a lot of it.

FAQ

Does it record time automatically?

It reconstructs a proposed timesheet from actual activity for a fee earner to confirm and adjust. Recorded time is a professional record that has to be accurate, so it is confirmed rather than generated and posted.

Will clients query the narratives?

Less often when they are specific and prompt. Most billing queries come from vague narratives on bills that arrive long after the work, when the client no longer remembers what was happening.

What about fixed-fee matters?

Time recording still matters there, for profitability rather than billing. Firms doing fixed-fee work without recording time frequently cannot tell which matter types are actually profitable.

Does it take payments?

It raises and tracks bills and chases the late ones. Client money handling has its own regulatory requirements and stays entirely with your existing systems and processes.