How to accept digital payments in Litify

Video: Full walkthrough Complete lifecycle demo, intake through applied payments. Runtime approx. 11 minutes.

Full lifecycle at a glance

Client pays a consultation or retainer from an intake payment link.
Payment imports to Salesforce, clears the link, creates a Litify Payment object.
Intake converts to a matter and the payment follows to the matter.
Time and cost entries are logged.
Pre-bills are generated in bulk, approved, and moved to Bill status.
The bill is emailed with every outstanding bill and any evergreen replenishment amount if applicable.
The client pays all outstanding or pays bill by bill.
Payments post back to the matter and the retainer balance updates.
Apply Payment moves the bills to Paid.

1. Intake and the first payment

The lifecycle starts at the intake record, before a matter exists.

Creating the payment link. From the intake, use the Confido create box to generate a payment link. You select:

The destination bank account. This could be any of your firm's trust or operating accounts. For a consultation fee, switch it to the operating account. For a retainer, you will likely be selecting one of your trust accounts.
The amount the client should pay.

Multi-state firms will see more than the simple operating/trust pair. If your firm is configured with multiple IOLTA accounts, each one appears in the dropdown, so the person creating the link picks the correct trust account for that client.

Delivering the link. The result is a URL. Nothing constrains how it gets to the client. Because it is a plain URL on a Salesforce record, you can email it, text it, display it, or hand it to a client on a computer at the firm. Firms that want this automated build a Salesforce flow off of this process.

How the client pays. The link opens a Confido payment form. The client chooses their payment method, enters their information, and submits.

What happens after payment. The transaction imports into Litify and does three things:

The outstanding amount on the payment link updates to $0.
The payment is applied to that link.
A Litify Payment object is created inside Time and Billing, so the funds are available to normal Litify billing flows.

Converting to a matter. When you open a matter off the intake, select the attorney, and choose a case type, the payment made at intake follows the client through. The client shows the payment on retainer against the new matter, ready to be applied to bills created later. Intake-stage transactions are not stranded on the intake record.

Video: Intake payment link

Video: Conversion to matter

2. Billing and the bill email

Logging work. Time entries and cost entries are logged against the matter as usual. The matter shows the outstanding total.

Generating pre-bills. The Litify billing app pulls every matter with outstanding amounts so you can mass create bills. You set the invoice date and select which line items to include: time, soft costs, hard costs. Generating pre-bills kicks off a back end process that builds them in bulk.

This is built to scale. Firms sending thousands of bills in a cycle run the same process.

Approval. Bills move through whatever approval stages your firm configures before reaching Bill status. Larger firms usually route bills through a series of reviewers.

Sending the bill. Once a bill is in Bill status it can be emailed out using a template. Confido provides a standard template and firms customize it.

What the client receives. The invoice email lists every outstanding bill for that client, not only the one just generated. If the client has three unpaid bills, all three appear. The client gets two options:

Pay all outstanding. One link with the total across every bill.
Pay individual bills. Each bill has its own link.

Which options appear is configurable per matter. If you do not want clients on a given matter paying bills piecemeal, you can turn that off.

Video: Generating pre-bills and sending the bill email

3. Evergreen retainers

An evergreen matter carries a target retainer balance the client is expected to maintain. In the demo the target is $2,500, set on the matter record.

Reading the balance. The matter header shows the target and the current balance. A negative balance means the client has used the full retainer and the firm has continued doing work beyond what the retainer covered. The actual trust balance is zero. The negative figure is the theoretical position: what they owe plus how far short of target they are.

Replenishment on the invoice. When the bill goes out, the invoice includes an evergreen retainer replenishment line alongside the outstanding bills. In the demo the client sees three bills plus the true-up needed to bring the retainer back to $2,500.

Paying it. The pay all outstanding link covers the bills and the evergreen true-up in a single transaction. After payment, the transactions appear on the matter and the retainer balance is topped back up to target.

Video: Evergreen retainer replenishment

4. Website payments

Not every payment starts from an invoice. Firms often post a standing Confido payment link on their website or in an email signature so a client can pay at any time without waiting for a bill.

How it works. The standing link is a single reusable URL. The client enters the amount and their information, and the payment routes to the account the link is configured for.

Where the payment lands. Because the payment did not come from a specific bill, it arrives as an unapplied payment rather than one already matched to an invoice. Someone at the firm assigns it to the correct client or matter.

Applying it. Once the payment sits with the right party, apply it exactly as described in section 2. Select the outstanding bills and use Apply Payment, or leave the funds on the retainer balance if there is nothing to apply them to yet.

Video: Applying unapplied and standing link payments

Structure of the integration

Confido's Salesforce integration consists of two packages:

Confido Core package. Contains the invocable methods for creating payment links and for accepting completed transactions back into Salesforce. Because these are invocable, you can build your own flows and automations on top of them.

Litify package. A separate package that adds functionality specifically to Litify Time and Billing.

The two are designed to be used together, but the Core package works on its own. If there is something you want to connect between Salesforce and Confido, the packages support it.

FAQ

Do I need to be on Litify Time and Billing to use this package? No, you can use the package outside of Litify Time and Billing. The Confido Core package allows you to generate payment links as part of flows and apply payments to your custom payment or transaction objects.

How do I sync this with my accounting system? The integration is designed to conform to your existing accounting platform syncing. If your sync is based on a custom payments or transaction object, for example, you can set up the integration so that Confido payments also create these objects.

Can a client pay more than one bill at once? Yes. The invoice email includes a pay all outstanding link that covers every open bill plus any evergreen replenishment in a single transaction. Individual bill links are also available unless you turn them off for that matter.

What happens if a payment does not cover the full bill? The bill can be partially paid. Apply Payment applies what came in and the remainder stays outstanding.