What is Aiwyn Billing?

The Aiwyn Billing Module is used to draft bills more efficiently by consolidating relevant information and data into a single view, in order to provide a faster, more streamlined workflow.

Included in this article:

• What does Aiwyn Billing do?
• What does Aiwyn Billing not do, YET?
• WIP Types & Terminology
• How is Aiwyn Billing structured?
• How does Aiwyn Billing work?
• Who can use Aiwyn Billing?

What does Aiwyn Billing do?

• Allows firms to draft bills more efficiently by pulling in all relevant information into one place, including:
  • Engagement letter(s)
  • Fee structure and schedule
  • Current job metrics vs. prior job metrics
  • Past invoices

• Provides a central place to manage the approval workflow between various stakeholders.
  • Approve or request changes to a bill.

• • Manage roles on a bill: Biller, Reviewer, Approver, Sender.

• Audit log displays changes made to a draft bill by various parties.

• Create WIP bills, progress bills, or “Advanced” bills which are a combination of both.

  • For each job on a bill, users can select which fee allocation type to use (WIP or Progress). Expenses can be added to any bill type.

  • Quickly write up or down time and expense WIP on a bill, either on the individual line item, or in aggregate. Auto-calculate adjustments by changing the the bill amount,

• • Aggregate WIP by job, client, service line, staff, task code, and more.

  • Export data from any table

• Robust permission allow firms to tailor who can access the billing module, and what they can see and do within the billing module.
  • Decide whether to allow billing managers and job partners to create new bills, edit existing bills, or just review and approve bills created by the finance team.

What does Aiwyn Billing not do, YET?

• Write back to the source PM system (currently investigating)
• Generate or send the actual invoice PDF from Aiwyn
• Additional business rules to determine bill flow: min real, max write up, auto-drafting bills- all to correct behaviors and maintain compliance
• Allow users to move WIP between clients or jobs
• Relieve WIP against previous progress bills
• Split WIP between bills (we do support WIP that has already been split in the source PM system)
• Customize terminology to match firm’s PM system (e.g., rename “Job” to “Engagement”)

WIP Types & Terminology:

WIP is an individual billable item of work. The easiest way of thinking about WIP is the building blocks of an invoice. Oftentimes, people will call Time, WIP. For example, in the Billing Module, we have 3 tabs: WIP, Progress, and Expense. The WIP in this context means time so be aware of what context WIP is being used. It could mean all WIP or just Time.

• Time (WIP in Aiwyn) - (The WIP type most people are used to) is a measure of billable time. For example, if you hire a caterer for 3 hours at 150 dollars per hour. This would be Time in our system. Time is one of the two ways to bill a job (the other being Progress) in the Billing Module, and eventually, all Progress will be reconciled to Time (unless a unique workaround is used by the firm).
  
• Progress - (Another type of WIP that is common within the Billing Module) is the idea of billing in advance and then reconciling the bill with a Time entry later. For example, think about paying 1000 dollars upfront for a service before they have even logged any time or work. Think about this as a Progress WIP that will be tied to the Time once it is logged. 
• Expense - (Very similar to Time in structure but not in concept) is a billable addition to an Invoice. For example, if you take a client out to dinner, this would be an expense. The easiest way to think of these is as add-ons to the bills. All jobs can have expenses and expenses can be added to both Progress & Time Jobs. 
  

How is Aiwyn Billing structured?

A Manager and a Partner role are associated with each job. These two roles are associated with 2 of the 4 steps in bill generation: Reviewing and Approving the bill.

A WIP or Expense line item represents a single time or expense entry into the practice management system. For any job selected when creating a bill, the WIP line items within that job will display on the next screen after "Create Bill" is selected.

Below is the hierarchy of a bill's components in Aiwyn:

The basic unit is Time (WIP) or Expense. Time and Expenses are added to jobs, which is the next level of the hierarchy. A given set of jobs are selected when creating a bill and those jobs are billed on a bill (invoice).

How does Aiwyn Billing work?

The Billing Processes article will guide you through how to use Aiwyn Billing to create different types of bills.

Who can use Aiwyn Billing?

Aiwyn Billing has robust and intuitive permissions settings that are designed to adapt our software the their best practices. During implementation, your Aiwyn implementation manager will work with you and your IT team to decide the best permissions structure for your firm.  

The Permissions article will help you understand more about what those options are.