Overview
A "soft cost" expense refers to an expense that is not directly related to the production or delivery of goods or services. It is a cost that is difficult to quantify or measure precisely, and typically includes intangible items such as time, effort, and opportunity costs.
There may be certain matters where your firm would like to apply an internal cost which is a percentage of the billed fees. ZenCase recommends creating a soft cost percentage for the invoice fees to account for these type of internal costs.
Setup Percentage Of Invoice Fees Soft Cost
Firm administrators will be able to create the soft cost for percentage of invoice fees which can then be applied to a matter.
Click on your name in the upper right corner of the screen.
Click on "Firm Settings".
Click on "Settings".
Click on "Soft Costs".
On the soft costs table, you will see a list of all the available soft costs for the firm.
Click "Add Soft Cost".
Enter a name for your soft cost.
Select "Percentage of Invoice Fees" from the Bill Type dropdown.
Enter the percentage under the "Bill Rate/Percentage" field.
Click the "Default for New Matters" if you would like the percentage soft cost to automatically be applied to matters when creating new matters.
Click "Save".
You can now set the soft cost firm member which will display on invoices for the soft cost expense that gets created on a pre-bill.
Setup Soft Cost Member To Display On Invoices
Firm administrators will be able to set a soft cost member which will display under the "Member" column on invoices.
Click on your name in the upper right corner of the screen.
Click on "Firm Settings".
Click on "Configurations".
Click on "Billing & Payments" tab.
On the Billing & Payments configuration page, you will see a "Firm Member" select dropdown.
Select your firm member who will be associated with the soft cost (aka internal cost).
We recommend creating a new member called "Internal Costs" and making the member "Active". You can use the "Internal Costs" member as the member that will display on invoices for the soft cost expenses that gets created on pre-bills.
You can now set this new percentage of invoice fees soft cost to a matter.
Related Articles
Let us know if you have any questions!