Finance

What Finance shows you

Five tabs, one date window. Whatever period you pick at the top applies to all of them, so the number on the Overview and the number on the Bills tab are always describing the same months.

• Overview

  The headline picture — unbilled work in progress, what’s outstanding, what’s past due, what you collected — plus a revenue trend, hours by activity, costs by category, and your largest clients.

• Bills

  Every invoice with its status, and a receipt-style view of any bill: each line grouped by matter, with the fees and the costs itemized exactly as the client sees them.

• Time

  The firm-wide hours ledger — the same entries you log inside a matter, rolled up across all of them, plus anything Theo has spotted that you haven’t logged yet.

• Expenses

  Costs advanced on a client’s behalf: filing fees, experts, transcripts, records, travel. Drop in a receipt and Theo reads it for you.

Unbilled work is not revenue

The first tile on the Overview is unbilled work in progress: the value of everything logged that hasn’t been placed on a bill yet — time plus chargeable costs. It is the firm’s most useful number and the easiest one to misread, so Finance is deliberate about it:

• Unbilled is work you have done. It becomes money when you bill it and are paid.
• Outstanding is billed and still owed. Past due is the part of that whose due date has passed.
• Collected is cash actually received in the window.
• Realization is collected divided by issued. Before you have issued anything it reads as “—”, never 0% — a firm that hasn’t billed yet and a firm that never gets paid are opposite situations.

What Theo captures for you

Finance watches the work you have already recorded in Theo Law and proposes entries you may not have logged:

• Recordings. A finished Theo Reporter session — a deposition, a client call, a hearing — shows up on the Time tab as a suggested entry with its real duration. One click logs it against the matter; it can never be proposed twice.
• Receipts. Drop a photo or a PDF onto the Expenses tab and Theo reads the vendor, the date, and the amount. It fills in a draft; it does not save anything.
• Work already logged. Time entries you record inside a matter roll straight up into Finance. There is one hours ledger, not two.

To be clear about the boundary: Finance does not read your mailbox or your calendar. It captures from recordings you made in Theo Law, receipts you give it, and work you logged. Anything else is entered by hand.

Nothing Theo reads goes on a bill unreviewed

Every automatic capture lands as a draft you can edit and has to be explicitly saved. That is a deliberate extra step. The amount on a receipt is one of the few numbers a model genuinely reads off a source document rather than inventing — but it still ends up on a client’s invoice, so a person confirms it first. The amount field is a real editable input for exactly that reason.

Building a bill

On the Bills tab, choose a client and a period and Theo assembles a draft: every unbilled time entry and every unbilled chargeable cost for that client in that window, grouped by matter, priced at the rate that was in force when the work was done.

• Review it as a draft. Nothing is marked billed and the client sees nothing until you issue it.
• Issuing freezes the bill. The line items and the total are captured as a snapshot at that moment. Change a rate six months later and the bill your client already has stays exactly as it was.
• Record payments as they arrive; a partly-paid bill shows its remaining balance. Voiding a bill reverses it and keeps the row for the audit trail — an issued bill is never deleted.
• If some work was skipped (already billed, or outside the period), the draft says how much and why rather than quietly leaving it out.

Ask Theo about the money

The Ask Theo button opens a panel scoped to your firm’s finances — the same assistant as Theo ESQ, pointed at your ledgers instead of at case law. Ask it things like:

• “Who owes us the most, and how late are they?”
• “How much unbilled work is sitting on the Acme matters?”
• “What did we write off last quarter?”
• “Which matters are taking the most hours for the least revenue?”

Theo reads figures; it never produces them. Every number in that panel was computed from your own time entries, cost records, and bills before the conversation started. If you ask for something that isn’t in front of it, it will say what it would need and offer to build you a report — it will not calculate a total and present it as fact.

Custom reports

Describe the report you want in plain English on the Reports tab — “revenue by practice area this year”, “hours by activity for the Doe matter”, “aging on everything outstanding” — and Theo builds it: charts, tables, and headline figures, laid out for what you asked for.

• Theo decides what to show and how to draw it. The figures themselves are computed from your ledgers by the same arithmetic the dashboard uses, so a report and the Overview can never disagree.
• Saved reports keep the numbers as they were when you ran them. A report is a statement about a moment; re-running it later against fresh rows would quietly change a document you may have relied on. Run it again to get today’s picture.
• If a request can’t be built from what’s recorded, Theo says so rather than showing you an empty chart.

When the numbers are a floor

Finance loads a bounded slice of history at a time. If your firm has more than one load covers, the page says so out loud and the totals are labelled as a floor rather than an exact figure — narrow the date range for an exact number. A quietly-partial financial total is worse than an annotated one.

Access & requirements

• Your firm only

  Every figure is scoped to your own matters, clients, and ledgers. Finance reads nothing outside your Law workspace.

• Part of Theo Law

  Finance ships with the Theo Law plan. See Theo Law for the plan and how to get it.

• Audited

  Creating a cost, issuing a bill, recording a payment, and voiding a bill all land in the matter’s audit trail.

• US dollars, v1

  Amounts are in US dollars. Trust / IOLTA accounting, card payments, LEDES export, and multiple timekeeper rates are not in this version.