Auto-bill
The hardest part of billing is remembering. Auto-bill watches the work you are already doing inside Theo Law and writes the time entries for you — then shows you exactly what it saw and why it billed what it billed. It lives on the Auto-bill tab of Finance.
What it does
Every hour or so, Theo looks at what happened on your matters since it last looked, groups that work into blocks, and writes a time entry for each one against the right matter, the right service, and the right rate. The entry lands on your ledger flagged as Theo’s, ready for you to keep, edit, or strike.
Every minute is measured, never estimated. Auto-bill does not guess how long something probably took. A duration on an auto-billed entry came from a clock — a recording’s own length, an appointment’s booked length, measured time on the matter. If nothing measured it, nothing is billed for it.
What Theo watches
Six sources, each switched on or off separately, because they carry genuinely different confidence and a firm will reasonably trust some and not others. The Auto-bill tab shows each one and whether it is currently reporting.
Recordings
Depositions, client calls, and hearings you recorded in Theo Reporter, timed by the recording’s own length. The strongest signal there is.
Appointments
Calendar appointments on a matter whose time has passed, timed by the length you booked. A person chose that length, so it is separable from the rest.
Time on a matter
Time you actually spend working a matter inside Theo Law. It measures only while the tab is in front of you, and records nothing about what you were doing — just how long, and which matter.
Interpreted conversations
Conversations you ran through Theo Translate on a matter, timed by the session’s own length.
Questions you asked Theo
What you asked Theo ESQ about the matter. Used to write the narrative on the entry — never used to invent a duration.
Documents and drafts
Drafts you wrote, documents you filed and classified, agreements you sent for signature. Narrative only, for the same reason.
The last two are narrative sources. They tell Theo what the work was so the line on the bill reads like something a person wrote. They never add a minute on their own; a question you asked Theo contributes time only through the work session that was open while you asked it.
How an entry gets written
- Nothing counts until it has settled. Work only becomes eligible after a grace period (10 minutes by default). A session still open and a recording still finalizing both have a duration that is about to change, and billing a number mid-change is billing the wrong number.
- Evidence is grouped into blocks. Pieces of work on the same matter close together in time become one entry. A gap longer than your block gap (20 minutes by default) starts a new one, so this morning and this afternoon don’t merge into a single seven-hour line.
- The block is classified. Theo picks the service from your own catalog — the activity that produced the evidence, the service you usually bill on that matter, and the catalog’s own hints all vote. It is priced at the rate in force for that client and matter.
- The narrative is written. If you asked Theo to write descriptions, one bounded pass per run writes each line from what actually happened. If that fails, it falls back to your catalog template rather than leaving the line blank.
- The entry is written, then the evidence is marked used. In that order, always — so a crash between the two costs you a duplicate you can see and strike, never a silently-lost hour.
The limits that protect the bill
A daily cap per matter
Theo will not write more than your daily cap of minutes for one matter on one day. It counts everything already on the ledger for that day, not just its own entries, so it can never push a day past the ceiling you set.
A floor and a ceiling per entry
Blocks shorter than your minimum are dropped — forty two-minute lines is what makes an attorney stop trusting a ledger. Blocks longer than your maximum are clamped, never split: the time really happened, and inventing a second line to hold the remainder would be inventing an entry.
Clients you exclude
Any client on your exclusion list is never touched, on any source.
Nothing is ever billed twice
Every piece of evidence is marked the moment it is used, and each run only looks at what has happened since the last one finished. The same recording cannot become two entries.
You review it — and you can see why
An auto-billed entry is marked as Theo’s on your Time ledger and stays that way until you open it. On the Awaiting your review section of the Auto-bill tab you can expand any entry and see the evidence it was built from — which recording, which appointment, which session, and how many minutes each contributed — then keep it or strike it.
- Editing an entry makes it yours: the description, the minutes, and the service are all editable, and once you have touched it, it is no longer flagged as unreviewed.
- Striking one removes it. The work it came from is not re-proposed later.
- If you turn on hold unreviewed entries, a Theo-written entry cannot land on a bill at all until a person has opened it. The bill draft says how many were held back and why, rather than quietly leaving them out.
Why some work wasn’t billed
This is the part most capture tools leave out. Every run records what it declined to bill and why, and the Auto-bill tab shows it in plain English: under the minimum, over the daily cap, the client is excluded, the matter is closed, no rate is recorded, still inside the settle window. If Theo saw your work and did not bill it, you can find out why in one place instead of wondering.
Passes, and running one now
Theo runs automatically, roughly hourly. The Passes section shows the recent ones — the window each covered, how many entries it wrote, how many minutes, and whether anything failed. A source that could not be read is reported as failed, never silently as nothing found: those are different facts, and only one of them means you have no unbilled work.
Run now triggers a pass immediately for work that has already settled. It is safe to press twice — a second pass finds nothing new, because the first one moved the cursor.
Seeing what it would do first
Preview the next pass answers the obvious question before you commit to it: what is this actually going to write? It runs the whole pass — the same window, the same sources, the same rules, the same pricing — and then shows you the entries instead of saving them. Each one lists the matter, the client, the service, the rate, the description that would appear on the bill, and which recording or appointment or session it came from.
A preview changes nothing at all. No entry is created, no evidence is marked used, and the cursor does not move — so the next real pass still sees everything the preview showed you. You can run one as many times as you like.
You can preview before turning auto-bill on, which is the point of it: the empty state offers See what it would do, and Theo shows you the entries it would have written for the last few days using your own rules — your excluded clients, your switched-off sources, your rounding. Nothing is switched on and nothing is recorded.
One thing worth knowing: if you have asked Theo to write your descriptions, a preview writes them too, and that costs the same as a real pass would. It has to — showing you a template line when the bill would say something else would defeat the purpose. If your descriptions come from your catalog templates, a preview is free.
Turning it on
- Open Finance and go to the Auto-bill tab.
- Open the settings panel and switch auto-bill on. It ships off: whether Theo writes your timesheet is your decision, not a default.
- Choose which sources it may look at. Recordings, appointments, and interpreted conversations need nothing else. Time on a matter starts measuring only once you allow it.
- Set the shape of an entry — block gap, minimum, maximum, daily cap, settle grace — and whether Theo or your catalog templates write the description.
- Make sure your service catalog and your rates are set. Theo classifies into services you defined and prices at rates you recorded; without them there is nothing to bill against.
What it will not do
It never reads your mail
Auto-bill sees work you did inside Theo Law and nothing else. Not your mailbox, not your phone, not your other applications.
It records how long, not what
Time on a matter measures duration and which matter. It does not record what you typed, read, or looked at.
It never invents a minute
A duration always came from something that measured it. Narrative sources describe the work; they never create time.
It never issues a bill
Auto-bill writes time entries. Building a bill, reviewing it, and issuing it stay explicit acts you perform — see Finance.
Access & requirements
Auto-bill is part of Theo Law and sits inside Finance. Every figure it writes is scoped to your own matters, clients, and ledgers. Creating and editing entries lands in the matter’s audit trail like any other change, so a bill assembled from Theo’s entries is as defensible as one assembled by hand.