From Sign-Up to Your First Invoice

This guide takes you from the moment you sign up to a finished invoice sitting in your client’s inbox. It is the whole loop that Outlaw is built around, do the work, track the time, bill it, get it sent, and you can run it end to end in your first session. The good news is that most of the setup other software makes you grind through is already done for you, so there is far less to configure than you might expect.

You can do everything below on your free trial, which starts automatically and does not ask for a card. And you do not need Outlaw Payments (our built-in card and bank processing) to bill a client or get paid; more on that at the end.

What Sign-Up Already Did

When you created your account, Outlaw set up the things that usually take a day of configuration:

• Your firm is created, with the name and business address you entered, and your 30-day free trial is already running.
• Your hourly billing rate (the one you typed during sign-up) is saved to your user, so the time you track is billed at the right rate from the very first task.
• A full working vocabulary is seeded for you: dozens of task categories (Client, Administrative, Financial, and more) and well over a hundred activity types (Phone Call, Drafting, Meeting, Court, Research, and so on), plus the standard roles and the dropdown options you will see throughout the app. You do not have to build any of this.

So you land on your dashboard with a system that already knows how to track and bill time. There is essentially one thing to add before you can open your first case.

The One Thing to Set Up First: A Case Type

A case type is your practice area, Family Law, Estate Planning, Personal Injury, whatever you actually do. Outlaw does not guess these for you, and a case needs one, so creating at least one is the single piece of setup standing between you and your first case. It takes a minute: open Settings, go to Case Types, and add the practice areas you handle. A case type can also carry its own default rate and numbering, but none of that is required to start; a name is enough.

A Two-Minute Check: Firm Info and Invoicing

These two settings pages already have sensible defaults, so this is a quick review rather than real setup, but they are worth a glance because they shape what your client sees.

• Firm Info holds your firm’s billing name and logo, the name that appears on the invoice and the subject line of the email. Make sure the billing name reads the way you want a client to see it.
• Invoicing controls how invoices look and add up: the billing increment and rounding for time, your payment terms, an optional tax rate, and the letterhead on the printed invoice. The defaults are fine for a first invoice; change them only if you already know you want something different.

Add Your Client

Now the work itself. Start with the person you are billing. On the Contacts page, add your client as a contact; all Outlaw truly requires is a name, though adding their email now saves a step when you send the invoice later. The full walkthrough is in Working with Your Contacts.

Open the Case

With a client in place, open a case for the work. On the Cases page, create a new case and fill in the few fields Outlaw marks as required, including the case type you just made and the client you just added. The case is where the work and the money for this engagement live together. By default the time you log here is billed at your hourly rate; a case (or its case type) can set a different rate if you need one. See Working with Your Cases for the list page and The Case Page for everything a case holds.

Track Your Time

In Outlaw, a task and a time entry are the same thing: you plan a piece of work as a task, and when you start it the clock runs and the time is logged against the case. This is the idea the whole app turns on, and it is worth two minutes to read in Tasks and Time Entries Are the Same Thing.

To bill your first time, add a task to the case (a case has its own tasks area, or you can create one from the Tasks page), give it a title and due date, and start its timer as you work, or enter the time directly if you are recording it after the fact. Make sure the task is billable; Outlaw sets that for you automatically when the work is client work. The task’s fields, the timer, and the billing options are all covered in The Task Page, and creating and managing tasks in Working with Your Tasks.

Review What You Can Bill

Logged time that has not been invoiced yet is your work in progress. The Work in Progress page is your billing to-do list: it shows the unbilled time and expenses waiting to be turned into an invoice. Open it, find your case, and confirm the time you just tracked is there and looks right. This is the moment to catch a stray entry before it ever reaches the client.

Create the Invoice

From that unbilled work you generate a draft invoice, review it, and then finalize it. Finalizing is the meaningful step: it locks the invoice as the bill of record and stamps the time and expenses as billed (Outlaw assigns the invoice number for you automatically). The full process, draft to finalized, is in Creating and Sending Invoices. For the ethical side of what is and is not fair to bill, see What You Can Bill.

Email It to the Client

Finally, send it. From the finalized invoice, open the Email Invoice(s) dialog. This is where you specify the email addresses the invoice goes to: Outlaw starts with the email saved on your client’s contact, and you confirm it, correct it, or add anyone else who should receive a copy (this is why saving the client’s email earlier is worth the few seconds; if it is blank, you simply type the address here). Then choose whether to send a short narrative summary or the full line-item detail, and send.

Outlaw renders the invoice to a PDF, attaches it, and sends it under your firm’s billing name. The message is delivered through Outlaw’s own email system on your behalf, not from a mailbox of your own, so there is no mail server or email account to connect to send it. The one thing that is on you is getting the recipient addresses right in that dialog. That is your first invoice, sent.

Where to Go Next

You have run the full loop. From here, the natural next steps are getting comfortable with the Financials area where invoices and payments live, and, if you hold client funds, setting up your trust accounting. But the core of Outlaw is the loop you just completed, and you can repeat it for every client and every case from here on.