LexisNexis® PowerInvoice Service is Your Firm's "Power Tool" for Improving Cost Recovery
By Carol Barra
The current economy makes your firm’s cost-recovery and business-management acumen more vital than ever before. Fortunately LexisNexis offers some powerful business tools to assist you as you work with firm management to meet business goals.
Today let’s discuss the PowerInvoice™ service. This service provides secure Internet access to current, comprehensive billing data and invoice images. PowerInvoice maintains six months of billing data and 24 months of invoice images. Access requires an ID and password that your LexisNexis account team can request for you.
When I was a law-firm librarian, I worked with our Billing Department to implement the automatic downloading of the billing data from PowerInvoice into our billing system. I also assisted in PowerInvoice training for the Billing Department staff.
The library was responsible for monitoring use of the LexisNexis services, watching for cost-effective searching and ensuring the firm was recovering all LexisNexis services usage that could be attributed to a client/matter. That task included following up on the weekly “exception” reports the Billing Department provided. These “exception” reports included office general charges and client/matter numbers that were not accurate.
I discovered this task kept me in touch with the research our attorneys were conducting and gave me an additional opportunity to reach out and contact the attorneys. It also helped me recognize which attorneys needed additional training so they could research more cost effectively. Another bonus … it kept management aware that the library did impact firm profitability.
Before we go on, let me go over a few PowerInvoice basics. It will help when I start talking about the specific PowerInvoice report I used to follow up on the “exceptions” report.
When you sign onto the LexisNexis PowerInvoice service, you see tabs for Billing Data and Invoices. Billing Data is updated regularly throughout the month. Invoice data is the actual invoice your organization receives after the monthly billing data is complete.
For this article, let’s focus on Billing Data.
- At the top of the basic Billing Data screen, you see the latest date posted and the most recent invoice available in final format.
- You have a variety of choices on how to retrieve billing data for date ranges. For example, choose standard date ranges, which is the current month. Or select custom date ranges; just fill in the dates you need.
- Once you choose your date range, then select the report type you want. This part is easy because you can click Sample Reports to see examples of each available choice.
- In addition to choosing a specific report type, you’ll be asked to select an account number for which you wish to retrieve billing data.
Note there is a drop-down menu with all of your LexisNexis account numbers. (If your firm has multiple offices, you will have several account numbers. You can determine which account numbers correspond with each office by looking
at an invoice.)
Now, back to managing exceptions—and improving the bottom line.
The report I used most often was the Detail Report (by User/Client) because I wanted to see as much information as possible, including the user’s name, ID, client/matter number, search details (broad category of sources searched like Lexis Legal and Shepard’s Citations Service), search dates, number of searches, online time, printing and linking.
By the way, if you have a subscription contract, you’ll also see the gross cost, the amount of the adjustment based on your contract, net amount, outside-of-contract amount, before-tax total and total with tax. If you do not have a subscription contract, you will not see the adjustment or the outside-of-contract columns.
Often I could determine that the user had transposed numbers for a client/matter, and I was able to send the corrected information to the Billing Department. I was also able to provide the attorney with information that might help in determining if an office general charge should be changed to a client charge. Today attorneys can more easily determine the appropriate client/matter to charge by using PowerInvoice in conjunction with the History log available through lexis.com®.
There are several other PowerInvoice features worth noting, including Enhanced Search, which allows retrieving data for a single user or client/matter, and Custom, which allows you to set rates or percentages for recovery and to rename the LexisNexis services. The Reallocation feature allows you to redistribute or remove non-billable charges.
PowerInvoice is a powerful tool to help you assist management in improving recovery. Your LexisNexis account team, including your LexisNexis Librarian Relations Consultant can help you get the most from it. Just ask them.
Or go to the new LexisNexis PowerInvoice Service Center, now available on the LexisNexis InfoPro Web site. Download PowerInvoice reference literature, get answers to frequently asked questions and find more information on recent PowerInvoice enhancements.
