Who can use this feature?

👤 Only Organization Administrators can set the Accruals settings

🔑 Needs the Spend Management module

In this article:

Accruals are your unbilled estimated spend. They are an essential part of legal budget management, that can help your finance team forecast expenses and manage budgets accurately.

Tracking accruals provides legal teams with valuable insights into billing patterns, enabling them to maintain financial control and set clear expectations with other teams and Legal Service Providers (LSPs).

By monitoring accruals, legal departments can ensure that actual billed amounts align with their estimates, resulting in smoother and more transparent budget management.

LawVu's accruals process integrates seamlessly with your existing workflows, allowing you to set it and forget it.

If you are an Org Administrator:

2. Toggle the 'Request monthly accruals information from your LSPs' button available from the Accruals tab.

3. Choose whether to request accruals from all your LSPs or just those with active or on-hold matters.

4. You'll also set an acceptance window and add a custom message.

Usually the accruals window is set for the end of the month, for example between 20th and the 25th of each month, even though you are free to specify another window as well.

A notification will be sent to your Legal Service Providers both on the day the window opens and on the last day of the acceptance window.

Note that for the notification to be sent out, a key contact information and email must be provided. Check this article to see how: Manage the profile information of your legal service providers

This is an example of the notification the Legal Service provider will receive by email / app or both depending on his notification preferences:

You can share this article with your Legal Service Providers to guide them through the accrual submission process: Law Firms, Article 8: Submitting accruals

From the Hub's page, click on the Organize button in the top right and ensure the Accruals widget is added.

The widget displays all Legal Service Providers who have submitted their accruals and those who haven't. It also shows the total estimated unbilled spend and the submission window's closing date.

Click the View all button in the Accruals widget to access the Accruals grid. Here, you can review a detailed breakdown of accruals, including comments from LSPs, pending invoices, cost centers, and purchase orders.

Use the Column selector to add more attributes, such as Budget and Fees to date.

Select the accruals you want to send to the finance team and click Send to export a copy as an Excel file.

-- No, that is not possible.

-- Yes, you can adjust them whenever you want from the Spend / Accruals grid.

-- Any Legal Service Provider user with the 'manage invoices' permission and any Client user [In-house/Org admin] with the 'manage invoices' permissions can post accruals.

-- Only matters with a value entered—either in the accrual amount or within a comment—will appear in the Accruals grid. If no values are provided for a matter, including a $0 accrual or an empty comment, it will not be displayed in the client Accruals grid.

-- You can change the accruals window at any time. However, once notifications have been sent, they cannot be recalled. For instance, if the original window is set from the 20th to the 25th of the month and an Admin changes it to the 27th on the 22nd, the final notification will be sent on the new end date, the 27th.

-- Yes, all LSPs with no access will receive the notification as long as the key contact has a valid email address and the user selects to send accruals notification to ALL LSPs.

-- Yes, the LSP can still submit an accrual as long as the window is open. However, only the client can submit and edit the accrual if the window is closed.

-- No, the notifications are based on the client’s time zone. The first and last notification is scheduled to be sent at 00:30 am client time zone. For example:
The client org uses 'Pacific SA Standard Time', which sent out notification of the last day of the accrual window at 00:30 am. LSPs based in New Zealand will receive this notification the following day at 3:15 pm.