Invoices

Raise an invoice on a matter in a few clicks. Start from one of your firm's invoice templates, pull in any unbilled time, add disbursements, and Cadence IP works out the totals and tax for you.

Starting a new invoice

From the matter's + New menu, choose Invoice. (You can also invoice directly from the Time tab — select the entries you want to bill and choose to invoice them.) The invoice builder opens inline on the matter.

The New Invoice builder with template, payer, line items and totals — Building an invoice: pick a template, confirm the payer, add line items, and the totals update automatically.

Choosing a template

Pick an invoice template for the matter type. The template does the heavy lifting: it fills in the reference, sets the payer (the role being billed, such as the applicant or an instructing firm) and pre-populates standard line items with descriptions and amounts drawn from the matter's data. You can adjust any of these afterwards.

Line items

Each line item has a description, quantity and amount. You can:

Add a line item manually for one-off charges.
Add unbilled time entries — pull recorded time straight onto the invoice as line items. Once the invoice is generated, those entries are marked as billed so you never bill them twice. See Time Tracking.
Add a disbursement — upload a supplier's bill (for example a foreign agent's or an official fee) and Cadence IP reads the amount from it for you, converting the currency where needed.

As you edit line items, the subtotal, tax and total recalculate automatically at the bottom.

Adding disbursements

Disbursements are third-party costs you pass on to the client — a foreign associate's bill, an official renewal fee, a search fee. Rather than re-typing them, click Add Disbursement and upload the supplier's bill as a PDF. Cadence IP reads it for you.

The Add Disbursement button and the AI analysing a supplier bill PDF — Click Add Disbursement and upload the supplier's bill — the AI extracts the details from the PDF.

The assistant pulls the payee, invoice number, amount, currency, due date and a description straight from the bill. If the bill is in a foreign currency, it converts the amount to your firm's base currency using the exchange rate on the day plus your configured spread, and writes a client-ready narrative from your disbursement template.

A disbursement line item showing the currency conversion and marked-up narrative — The disbursement becomes a line item — here CAD 60.26 converted to AUD 64.30 at 1.0670 — with an automatically written narrative.

At the same time, Cadence IP records the underlying cost as a supplier bill. This captures everything your accounting package needs — payee, invoice number, amount and converted value, expense account, tax type, business and sales type — and keeps the original PDF attached. You can review and adjust every field before generating.

The supplier bill record with payee, amounts, currency conversion, expense account and tax type — The matching supplier bill — the expense side of the disbursement — ready to post to your accounting package.

So a single upload does two things: it adds the marked-up disbursement to the client's invoice (the income side) and records the supplier bill you owe (the expense side). The account codes, tax types, exchange-rate spread and narrative wording all come from your Accounting settings, so you rarely need to change anything.

Generating the invoice

When the invoice is ready, click Generate. Depending on your firm's setup, Cadence IP either produces a PDF invoice or sends the invoice to your connected accounting package. Any time entries included on the invoice are marked as billed at this point.

Tip

How invoices are numbered, taxed and pushed to accounting is configured in Accounting settings. Invoice templates themselves are set up per matter type — see Templates.