Finding Your Way Around Financials

The Financials area is where the firm’s money lives, the work you have done, the bills you send, the payments you take in, and the trust funds you hold. It is one area split into several tabs, each handling a different stage of the same journey: a task becomes billable work, billable work becomes an invoice, an invoice gets paid, a trust payment gets swept to your operating account, and every one of those movements is recorded. This page is the map; each tab has its own detailed guide.

The Tabs

• Work in Progress is your unbilled work, the time and expenses sitting on cases that you have not yet put on an invoice. It is your billing to-do list, and the starting point for getting paid. See Work in Progress.
• Invoices is where you turn that work into bills, draft them, finalize them, send them to clients, and track what is owed. See Creating and Sending Invoices.
• Trust Sweep is the controlled way to move money you are holding in trust over to your operating account once you have earned it and invoiced for it, done in reviewable batches. See Trust Sweep.
• Transactions is the complete ledger, every payment, refund, transfer, and adjustment across both your trust and operating accounts. It is the system of record you reconcile against. See The Transactions Ledger.
• Payments Dashboard is where you watch the money moving through Outlaw Payments, the deposits, payouts, statements, and disputes from card and bank payments. See The Payments Dashboard.

How the Tabs Fit Together

The order of the tabs is roughly the order money travels. Work piles up in Work in Progress; you bill it on Invoices; the client pays; if the payment landed in trust, you move it across on Trust Sweep; and every step shows up in Transactions as a permanent record. The Payments Dashboard sits alongside, showing the processor side of any payments your clients make electronically. You can read more about how these pieces connect across the whole app in How Outlaw Fits Together.