Speaker 1: Hey there, in this video I'm gonna show you how you can automate your accounts receivable collection for your law firm in Clio Manage. You may already know that it is possible to automate email reminders with the tool. This can be done under settings in the billing section. However, what about creating those manual tasks for your team such as phone follow-ups or escalating to legal letter for a significantly overdue bill. This is also possible with an automation platform called make.com and in this video I'll show you how you can set it up for your firm in just a few easy steps. By the end of the video you'll be able to create these automatic tasks which will have all the necessary information for your billing team to be able to follow up with the client such as the name of the bill, the task to be performed, any information about the client and about the bill and for these tasks to be automatically created every day. This will ensure that you don't have to run reports all the time and that all the bills will be followed up in the same manner every time. Let's get going. If you stick to the end of the video I'll also let you know how you can get the templates to these automations so you can easily import them into your make account, make a few changes to customize it to your specific process and hit the ground running. I have a few bills over here in my demo Clio account. Some of them as you can see are not due, some are overdue. We have two overdue invoices from yesterday. One is actually a trust request and another one is a normal revenue bill and then we have another one revenue bill for 22 days overdue for another client. By the end of the video we'll be able to create tasks just like this in an automatic manner. They will also be assigned automatically as task type of AR collection or whatever you really want to call it. It's actually very easy to filter them out for your bill and team. You just need to go to filters, scroll down over here and then select task type AR collection to only see tasks related specifically to account receivable collection and not get distracted with anything else. In terms of who we assign these tasks to, we can either do it to one specific user if you just have one person responsible for that or we can actually define a Clio group and randomly assign these tasks in between those team members to distribute the workload if you have a bigger billing department and also accommodate scenarios where one person can be on leave and to make sure that no tasks are created for them while they are away. Let's get going. The first scenario that we're going to cover is a more simple one where we just want to assign these tasks to one particular user in our organization. Let's for now just look at these two main modules searching for the bills and then creating the tasks and then I'll explain how this routing works over here and what these other modules are. First of all, this scenario is meant to be run daily. As you can see over here in schedule settings I have changed it to run every day at 8 a.m. You can change when you run this but the idea here is that this scenario will run every day and will check for a particular criteria in terms of bills. For example, bills that are one day overdue, that are 21 days overdue, that are 30 days overdue and then create the appropriate tasks for them. It will also run on the weekends to make sure that we don't miss any bills but then obviously the staff can action those items whenever they return back to work on Monday. Again, let's look at these two main modules over here searching for the bills and then creating the task. In terms of searching the bills, this is a default module available with the Clio Manage Connector. The setup here is quite simple, you just connect it to your Clio Manage account and then really the only filter that I'm using here is this due at filter. What we are doing here is we are adding negative days, i.e. subtracting X number of days from today's date which is determined by this now variable. In this case, for example, we are subtracting one day from today, i.e. any bills that are due at yesterday. As you can see over here, we have two of them over here. One is a trust request and another one is normal revenue bill. The second filter that we have set up over here, if we scroll down, is the state of awaiting payment to make sure that we obviously only get the bills that are still awaiting payment and that are actually overdue. You also have this type field over here that you can filter by as well. You can select if you just want your revenue bills or only your trust request bills or if you leave it empty it will actually return both, depending on your preference. Lastly, there is this limit field over here which essentially defines how many records will be returned per run of this automation. I usually try to set it as high as possible to make sure that all of the bills are properly processed if we are operating at higher volumes. Let's press OK. What this will return is multiple bundles. In this case, for example, we had two bills overdue for yesterday, so it returns two bundles. Each bundle contains all the information about the invoice, such as the total, the bill ID, the number of the bill, the kind as well. For example, this is set as trust kind. All the information as well about the client and all the information about the shaded matter. Then similar for bundle two. In this case, for example, the kind is actually revenue kind and again all that same information is displayed as well. Any of the actions or modules after this one, considering the multiple bundles, will run once for each bundle. You don't have to set any kind of loop here. As you can see over here, this module ran twice because again there are two bundles in common. The second module that we have over here is creating a task. In here we are assigning it to a user. We are selecting a specific user from our organization, in this case myself. We are naming the task to a standard naming convention. You can customize all of this. Bill number and then the number of the bill and then, for example, phone follow-up number one. We then have in the description the information about the client name and their primary phone number. These values can be extracted just by clicking in here, scrolling down. You have this client object and you can get the first name, last name, email, phone number, etc. After that we are putting some more information about the actual bill. The bill type, we are checking if the kind of the bill is of revenue kind. Then it will be revenue, otherwise it will say trust. For the due date, we are formatting the due at field from the bill with this particular format. Again, you can change this format as you want, but essentially it will be the day, shorthand of the month, and then the year. And finally, the balance as well with the balance field. The due at of the task will be now to make sure that it's executed, it's done today. You can set it, for example, to tomorrow if you prefer. In this case, just follow a similar process to the one that we defined in search bills, add days, and then in that case plus one. We are also attaching it to a matter. For this, usually you'll be able to either select select any matter if you want it to be defined statically, but in this case we are actually mapping it. We went to this matters field over here and then I selected matter ID. We can also notify the assignee if you want by email, also notify once it's completed, set the permission to public or private, set the priority if you want. And for the status, we are putting it in pending to make sure that it appears in the user's task list. For the task type ID, I have defined a special task type. You can define those here if you go into tasks in Clio Manage, task types, and you can click add and define whatever task type you want. In this case, I defined one for AR collection and so I have selected simply it here. Again, what this will allow us to do is if we have other tasks, as you can see over here, schedule client meet and whatnot, click on filters, select the task type of AR collection, and it will only show those related to account receivable. And then for the time, estimated time, we can also set that. This value should be in seconds, so in this case, for example, I set it 15 minutes multiplied by 60 seconds. The task will then appear, as you can see over here, a quarter of an hour. Now, obviously, if we just use these two modules, we'll only be able to do it just, for example, for bills that are one day overdue and then we will need to replicate the scenario, you know, duplicate it and change up the settings, right, and run multiple scenarios at once. If you don't want to do that, if you want to combine all of these in one scenario, you can use a structure like this. So you add this router before searching for the bills and then you simply add multiple routes, right? Again, this will run, in this case, they don't have any filter, so it'll just run all the times. And essentially, it will first look up any bills that are one day overdue and then we'll look up, in this case, for example, all the bills that were 22 days overdue, right? So simply here, we have defined a very similar structure at days now minus 22, and in the creating of the task, we have changed up its copy, right? So in this case, for example, we escalate into a legal letter and then the description, for example, is the same. We are also setting up this one, for example, with high priority. If you want to add more of them, simply click plus, you can then hold shift and then select these two modules over here, ctrl C, or also you can click copy modules and then paste them here or ctrl V, right? You then connect it to this one, you delete this module, you can click this button auto align for it to be properly aligned, and then you can change this up. So for example, you know, this should be 30 days overdue, you change up the search bills to minus 30, and then you also change the task to whatever you want, right? Escalate to legal letter number 2, etc, etc. So just like this, you can add more routes, and as well, as I mentioned, you can also filter them out by revenue or trust, so you can, even if the same day, for example, right, one branch can be for revenue type and another one can be for the trust request type. Now don't worry about setting this all up on your account, I will actually provide a template, and at the end of the video I'll let you know how you can get those, so that you can simply import it into your make account and get started already with the structure. Alright, so let's look at now the second scenario, which is a bit more complex, but actually just consumes one more operation, and that is when you want for the task to be distributed among multiple team members and to dynamically be able to change who they will be assigned to, right, which group of users they'll be assigned to. And so for that, we can use this groups feature in Clio Manage. If you go to settings, and then groups, you'll be able to define a group, right, I called it AR collection, and then if you click on it, click edit, you'll be able to define the team members, right, so here, for example, you can put all the people responsible for billing, and then whenever somebody goes on leave, you can actually remove them from this group to ensure that no task is assigned to them while they're away, and when they come back, you'll simply add them again and save the group. So let's look now at the automation. Again, I'll provide a template for this one as well. The first step would be actually using the custom API call, because the Clio Manage Connector doesn't provide, let's say, a native module of looking up the group, so you don't, again, you don't have to worry about setting this all up, this is already predefined, the only thing that you need to change, actually, is this group ID, right, so once you have defined the group in Clio Manage, if you then click edit, in the URL, you'll be able to see that says groups slash an ID and then slash edit, so what you'll need to do is you'll need to copy this ID over here and then replace it in after group slash in here in the URL, right, leave that dot JSON as is, and then the rest, again, you can leave as is the configuration. So what this will essentially output is will provide the name of the group and then all the users, and for the users, we'll get, again, their name and we'll get their ID, which we'll need for the following steps. So the first step, it just runs once, it gets all the members of that group, and after that, we have a very similar structure as before, the only difference here is that once we find the bills, in the creation of the task, we actually assign in the user ID instead of you having a static assignment as before, we go here, as you can see, a static assignment of a user, we are assigning it dynamically. So essentially what this function does, it first of all gets a random number, it then looks at the lengths of this users array coming from this first module, and here in users, it looks at the length of it, and essentially picks up a random position in it, right, and then simply gets information about the user, the user object, and then the user ID. So essentially it turns a random ID out of that array. Then the name and the description and everything else really stays the same as in the previous, you know, in the previous example, and we obviously have the same here as well. This ensures that when we run it, these tasks over here will actually be assigned dynamically. So for example, in this case, I've got assigned, you know, this bill number three, but then Michael got assigned the task for bills number two and bill number five. Let's actually delete these and run that automation and see and see how they are assigned now. All right, as you can see, now I actually got two tasks and Michael just got one. Again, this will be random over obviously a longer period of time, the distribution will be fairly equal. Now, if you are doing this, that doesn't mean that one of the tasks, for example, you know, escalate into legal letter, instead of defining it dynamically, we can actually escalate it to just one particular user. So in this case, we could just select, for example, myself and that means that any of these tasks will always be assigned to myself and the rest of the tasks will be defined dynamically. Also, that means if you have multiple groups and you have like a more complex structure, you can also do that and, you know, look up information about multiple groups, etc. So, you know, you can really make sure that this works for your process. And then the last piece of the puzzle will really just be accounting for scenario when this search bills doesn't return any information. In this case, the only thing that we need to do is add a filter on the next step, which will simply check if this bill ID exists or not from the previous step, bill ID exists, as this will just ensure if there's no information returned from this previous step that the next steps will not be executed, right? So, for example, I have changes to now to 30 days overdue. If we click now to run this, as you can see, we still had two execution, two tasks created here, but then for the 30 days overdue, it didn't return anything, so it didn't pass the filter. And if we go now to Clio, as you will see, only two tasks have been created. Okay, now to the big question, how you can get the templates to this? For this, you simply need to message me on LinkedIn, say that you want these templates for this automation, and I'll provide you with those files. The only thing that you'll then need to do is go into your Make account, create a new scenario, and then here in the More section below, click Import Blueprint. Then choose the file that will be provided, Blueprint.json, click Save, and this will create the same structure on your new Make scenario. The only thing that you'll need to do is, for example, for this one, obviously, change the connections to your particular Clio Manage account, and then in the URL as well here, change the group ID, and then adjust the structure to whatever you want in terms of days overdue, in terms of filtering for revenue or trust requests, and obviously, the name and the assignment as well of the tasks. I hope that you have enjoyed this video and that implementing the system in your firm will actually improve your collection rate. If you have any issues or questions about this automation, feel free to drop me a message on LinkedIn, and if you want somebody to build this out for you and guide your firm through this automation process, I'm the founder of Automation Followers. We are an automation consulting firm helping boutique law firms streamline their practices in systems like this, in billing, intake, case management, and marketing. So if you want to learn more, again, feel free to message me on LinkedIn or go to our website automationfollowers.com and book your free initial consultation today, so we can see the possibilities at your firm. Thank you for watching, and in the next few weeks, I'll actually also release another video on a similar topic, talking about how we can automate the creation of legal letters and other follow-up documents, so you can actually send them out by post, again, without lifting a finger and without any human input. Have an awesome day.