7 Billing Practices to Get Paid Faster, Plus the Financial Infrastructure That Makes Them Work

Why great billing advice fails without the right systems behind it

The American Bar Association recently published excellent guidance on billing practices that help law firms collect payments faster. Their advice covers the fundamentals: communicate fees clearly, offer multiple payment options, use retainers effectively, track time religiously, keep clients updated, and make paying easy.

It's solid guidance. But here's what the article doesn't tell you: implementing these practices without proper financial infrastructure is like buying a race car without knowing how to drive stick.

At Accounting Girl, we've watched firms adopt every billing best practice in the book—and still struggle with collections. The missing piece is almost always the same: the financial systems that turn good billing habits into actual cash in your account.

Let's walk through how to make these billing practices actually work.

Clear Fee Communication Needs System Alignment

The ABA recommends explaining your fee structure during the initial consultation and documenting everything in a clear engagement letter. That's foundational advice.

But here's what we see constantly: beautifully drafted fee agreements that don't match how the firm actually invoices.

The engagement letter says one thing. The invoice reflects something different. The client is confused. The bill gets disputed. Collections drag on.

This disconnect happens when your intake process, engagement letters, and billing systems operate independently instead of as an integrated workflow.

Before you focus on clearer communication, ask yourself: do your last ten engagement letters align with your last ten invoices? If not, you have a systems breakdown, not a communication breakdown.

Multiple Payment Options Require Proper Accounting

Offering credit cards, eChecks, and online payments removes friction for clients. The easier you make it to pay, the faster you get paid. No argument there.

But different payment methods create different accounting challenges. Credit card payments come with processing fees. ACH transfers have different settlement timing. Online payments need proper routing—especially when client funds are involved. Payment methods like Zelle and Venmo don’t always show details so it’s easy to forget where they came from.

The biggest risk we see? Electronic retainer replenishments that bypass proper trust accounting workflows.

When a client clicks a link to replenish their retainer via credit card, that money needs to land in your IOLTA account—not your operating account. Your payment processor, practice management software, and accounting system all need to be configured correctly to make this happen automatically.

We've cleaned up trust account messes caused by "convenient" payment options that seemed like a good idea but created compliance nightmares. The convenience isn't worth it if your three-way reconciliation falls apart.

Retainers Only Work With Bulletproof Trust Management

The ABA suggests using retainers to secure payment before work begins, splitting large retainers into milestone-based payments, and sending clients alerts when balances run low.

This is excellent advice—and also where we see the most compliance risk.

Evergreen retainers are powerful cash flow tools. But they only work if you have real-time trust account tracking, consistent three-way reconciliation, and systems that alert you before a retainer runs low (not after you've already done the work).

Here's a quick test: Can you produce an accurate client trust ledger in under five minutes right now?

If the answer is no, your retainer strategy is built on shaky ground. The lockup metric we track for clients includes both billing delay and collection delay—but trust account confusion adds a third delay that doesn't show up in standard metrics. You've technically been paid, but you can't access the funds because you're not sure what's been earned versus what's still held in trust.

Time Tracking Is Both a Revenue Problem and an Accounting Problem

Poor time tracking is usually discussed as a revenue problem: you lose billable hours when you don't capture time accurately.

But it's also an accounting problem. When realization rates are low because of sloppy time capture, your profit margin analysis becomes meaningless. You can't identify which practice areas or clients are actually profitable if your time data is garbage.

The ABA recommends tracking time in real-time rather than reconstructing hours at month-end. We'd add: track where unbilled time disappears in your workflow.

Is it during intake calls that should be billable but aren't captured? Administrative tasks that bleed into client work? Court preparation that gets rounded down?

These leakage points cost you twice—once in lost revenue, and again in distorted financial data that leads to bad decisions.

Client Updates Support Collections and Financial Clarity

Keeping clients informed about case progress helps them understand the value they're receiving. When a bill arrives and matches what they've been seeing in progress reports, collections become almost automatic.

The infrastructure angle here is integration. Your case management system and billing system should talk to each other.

When you log a significant case milestone, that information should flow into your billing workflow. When you send a progress update, it should reference the work that will appear on the next invoice.

Firms that treat case updates and billing as separate processes create a disconnect in the client's mind. The surprise invoice—even when it's completely legitimate—triggers payment delays.

The Bottom Line: Billing and Financial Infrastructure Must Work Together

Great billing practices without great financial infrastructure is like building a house on sand.

You can follow every ABA recommendation perfectly, but if your books are a mess, you won't know which clients are actually profitable, what your true collection rate is, whether your retainer policies are working, or how much unbilled time you're leaking.

When billing systems and financial infrastructure work together, you don't just get paid faster—you get visibility into what's working and what isn't. You can make data-driven decisions about pricing, staffing, and growth because your numbers actually mean something.

The billing practices are the strategy. The financial infrastructure is what makes the strategy executable.

If your billing practices are solid but your financial infrastructure needs work, we should talk. At Accounting Girl, we specialize in building the accounting systems that make great billing practices actually deliver results—specifically for law firms, with all the trust accounting complexity that entails.

Your firm deserves both: great billing habits and the financial clarity to know they're working.