There are two types of Disbursements available within Wise Owl Legal.
Please note that if the disbursement you are entering is dated in the past, there is a chance that this will break bank reconciliations for the account you enter it to if they have already been reconciled. If unsure, please enter past disbursements as recoveries.
Pay Now - Paying through Cheque or EFT right now.
These will appear on your bank account as the whole amount that you are entering them for.
They can then be matched correctly against your bank statement when it is reconciled.
Pay Later AKA Accounts Payable
Pay Later disbursements will invoke the Accounts Payable module in your accounting system. There is specific legislation that prevents law firms from receipting money into General if there is unpaid invoices charged to the client (ie Accounts Payable).
If you have a bookkeeper regularly processing payments, this is a really good way to manage invoices the firm has outstanding for payment. However if your bookkeeper only comes in monthly, this might not be for you as, in line with the legislation, you will be prevented from receipting client money in Wise Owl Legal if there is unpaid Accounts Payable invoices included on the client’s bill.
Please only use the Pay Later Disbursements when it is actually an Accounts Payable that will not be paid for a while. Remember you will be prevented from receipting client money in Wise Owl Legal if there are unpaid Accounts payable invoices included on the client’s bill.
How to enter a Disbursement
To access the Disbursement Register select the Accounting & Finance tab, orange $ sign, from the top menu bar.
Note: Anticipated disbursements are not required in Wise Owl Legal because we have a full functioning accounts payable module
Before a disbursement can be billed or sent to your accounting system it must be confirmed.
It is important to double check before confirming disbursements that all the information is correct. No changes can be made once confirmed, as this can cause conflicts with your accounting system. Also, disbursements cannot be partly confirmed. This means that one line from a multi-line disbursement cannot solely be confirmed. If one line is selected and confirmed, the whole disbursement will be confirmed.
Bulk Confirmation of Disbursements
Before a disbursement can be billed or sent to your accounting system it must be confirmed.
It is important to double check before confirming disbursements that all the information is correct. No changes can be made once confirmed, as this can cause conflicts with your accounting system. Also, disbursements cannot be partly confirmed. This means that one line from a multi-line disbursement cannot solely be confirmed. If one line is selected and confirmed, the whole disbursement will be confirmed.
To simplify this process the Wise Owl allows bulk confirmation of disbursements.To do so access the disbursement register and search for the disbursements to be confirmed. A simple way to do so is to search by 'Draft' as the purchase status, and set the dates as necessary.
From here, select the disbursements to be confirmed by ticking the boxes on the left hand side of each line.
Select bulk actions from the bottom of the page and then confirm disbursements.
A confirmation message will appear. Please ensure the correct disbursements are selected before confirming.
Auto-populating the description field when creating a disbursement
Wise Owl Legal offers the function to manually edit the description field on a disbursement to auto- populate when the item field is entered. Not all users can edit purchase items, if you cannot do this, ask the power user to perform the action for you.
Under the Accounting and Finance banner, select the items tab from the Lists subsection.
Select Disbursement / Recovery Items; this will open a full list of Purchase Items from which you can manually click on each item code individually to edit.
In the default notes field, type what you would like to auto-populate into the description field of a Disbursement Payment. This can be manually edited when making a payment - hence you can use this feature to guide users as to what you want entered into this field.
Once complete save changes.
Some of your disbursements may have a ‘closed’ status on them. This means that the disbursement is one that has been posted to your external accounting system & Paid and that happened over 90 days ago.
Wise Owl has also stopped monitoring if it has been changed / cancelled or deleted from your external accounting system.
Note that you can still bill this disbursements at any point.