LEAP Legal Canada: How To Create an Email Precedent for Invoices

Celene:  Hi, this is Celene at Chops Consulting. Today's video is on how to create an email precedent for sending invoices or possibly for anything else. 

So the first thing that you are going to do from any Matter, you are going to go to Forms and Precedents. And then, I've created a folder here under Practice Management called Email Precedents. You can create your own folder, you can save it directly in Practice Management, whatever works best for you. I'm gonna right-click here and I'm gonna say New Outlook Precedent, and then you can choose who the recipient is. In this case, I've set a debtor. I have a separate debtor card, but for the purpose of this, you can really choose any recipient you like. And it's going to basically open a new email. 

So now that this has popped up this is just gonna be your email. I actually use Gmail for, well, pretty much everything. So I don't have one, I just have connected my personal email and I don't have a signature in here, but your signature should pop up. In this case, I'm just gonna paste over my signature for my business email. So there's something there and it looks nice. You don't need to set the who or anything or the to rather cause it's just a precedent. And then what you put in here is really gonna depend on your workflow and how you send out invoices. For example, a lot of law firms, of course, they'll automatically apply any money from the Trust and then they'll send out Trust statement. So in this case, you might say you are sending a Trust statement from and your firm's name. You might have multiple precedents. You might have one where there's an invoice with an outstanding balance. It's completely up to you how you set this. 

In this case, I'm gonna take advantage of the merge field to customize this email. So I'm gonna say dear. And then if you click on the right or if your LEAP bar's here, depending on where it's customized, go to your LEAP bar, and you can insert fields. And what I'm gonna do is I'm going to choose one that's the full name. So in this case my client's full name is, Hold one second. Actually, I'm going to Technical Fields. Yeah, so shouldn't be an accountant. See, this is why you test things. Dear full name, you can choose first name or however you want to have this. In this case, it's Dear Fake Test, cause that's my client's name. I'm gonna put the matter reline. I don't wanna scroll. So I'm just gonna search up here an invoice outstanding for, and then what the, what the reline is. In this case, I never put in my other side so it doesn't have the other side's name. Cause this is also a fake matter, but yours will be more complete. And then basically whatever type of body, right? This is not the most imaginative email I've ever typed, but it's just as an example. And obviously instead of square brackets, you put your email address for e-transfer as your address. And then if you accept credit card payments right now, LEAP has a beta program to integrate it. But if you accept credit payments some other way or you want them to call in, you can type something like you pay credit card, please call Our Office at, and then you know the phone number, right? 

I know some law firms, we've helped them set up a payment portal on their website. So it really depends on how, how you wanna pay or take payments. Then you can say something like, if you have any questions, do not. Again, not the fanciest email I've ever written but it's gonna attach their invoice and everything else kinda looks good. So from here I am going to just save and close and I'm going to call this "Invoice Outstanding Email". Good enough. And now you can see here I have created an Outlook precedent called "Invoice Outstanding Email". If I were to go to under Accounting, Invoice mailing, I want to send an invoice. I have a lot of invoices here. Most of them are to fake emails that I don't want to send an email to cause probably maybe somebody out there is email is "sandy gmail fake.com." Who knows? Or Bob Big developer and I don't wanna bother them. So I'm just gonna do a test one here to one that's myself, my personal email and maybe I'll just, or my business email, and I'll send one to my personal email just so we can, you know, see what a couple of different ones look like. 

You can also say, you know, if you want to make a status, so once, if you have these all as like draft approved and you wanna mark them as final printed sent as you send them, or this is to set to view different ones. And then if you wanna set the status to final printed as you send them, you can do that. If they were at you know, draft approved, you could also see, you know, if you just wanna see your approved ones that are ready to be emailed you know, you kind of have that option here. Then you can select your email precedent. So in this case, I'm going to go to my email precedent's folder. I'm gonna select this one. And then you can pretty much ignore these filters or if you need to filter it, you can. Invoices selected for email is To. I'm gonna hit email, print. 

Now you can see it's sending the emails. I just paused it while it's sending, but now you can see the email completed successfully. So that is good. And then I'm just going to pull up what the email looks like here and it shows exactly what you'd think. Dear Fake Test Client, you have an invoice outstanding. And then it's, you know, again, not filled, but you get the idea. And then you have the Attached Email Here. And just because this one happened to be Fake Test Client for the matter we are already talking about, just coincidentally. I also wanted to show you what it looks like for another for the other one that was sent, it automatically pulled in the name and then it pulled in the reline and then this part is also the same, and the invoice is attached. It's gonna be there again, their invoice with their information. And that's how you do it!