Friday Feature – BillBlast Email Module: View Messages

This week, Candy Sharpe introduces View Messages– a powerful feature for firms using BillBlast Email Module for legal bill delivery.

Have you ever found yourself frantically searching through your firm’s emails for a bill involved in a client dispute? Did that search require you to poll multiple members of your firm’s operational teams (billing, collections, etc.) to determine who sent it, when they sent it, and/or if they sent it? Perhaps your firm has a centralized repository for all emails to be copied to – did that mean you had to search through thousands of emails to find the one (or more) email that pertained to the invoice in question?

The BillBlast Email Module on its own empowers your firm to manage growing email billing requirements. Since the rise of remote work, law firms report that very few bills still leave their physical office by way of “snail mail.” The BillBlast Email Module delivers bills efficiently, accurately, and confidently to clients via email. Firms can enrich their reporting capabilities through insights into email delivery status, sender and recipient information, and identify when they can expect to get paid. BillBlast picks up where the financial system leaves off, delivering functionality firms need to reduce the bill-to-cash cycle.

What is the View Messages feature?

View Messages is built within the BillBlast Email Module and enables users to access copies of sent items from within the BillBlast web app. This allows billers to answer attorney and client inquiries with just a few clicks. Almost more importantly, firms are able to see bills that were not deliverable (emails that resulted in a bounce-back from the targeted recipient(s)). Bounce-backs will show as an “Email Bounced” error on the Errors Tab within the BillBlast web application.

• View Messages allows users to Download/Open a copy of the original sent item without having to search a centralized inbox
• Bounced email messages are presented to users on the Errors tab in an “Email Bounced” status
• A copy of the Bounced Message is available for users to review bounce details, correct the recipient(s), and resend the email

What problem does the View Messages functionality address for Aderant clients?

Law firm billing and collection team members require easy access to view/open copies of emails sent to their clients requesting payment for legal services. Should the law firm find themselves in a position where a client disputes the timely delivery of a bill, the burden of proof is left on the firm to demonstrate that delivery timeline requirements were, in fact, met. Firms need a systematic, reliable method to obtain this record on-demand. Users are no longer faced with endless hours of internal inquiries and searching to obtain the record required to resolve the attorney or client dispute.

The ability to see undeliverable emailed bills is critical for collections teams. The View Messages feature enables operational teams to see when an email did not reach the intended recipient, without the need to reference internal inboxes (individuals or centralized) to identify those bounce-backs. Users have real-time insight into these bounce-backs and can expedite editing and verifying recipient addresses for resending to the client, restarting the payment process.

How will the View Messages feature impact the legal industry as a whole?

BillBlast’s View Messages feature provides firms with a user-friendly tool to manage the growing requirements of email billing efficiently and accurately and gives teams the ability to react and respond quickly. The View Messages function, coupled with “Email Bounced” error handling, enables billing and collections teams to immediately review the error, expedite the resolution and resend bills.

More and more firms are leveraging BillBlast, the industry’s fastest growing legal tech solution, to manage the ins and outs of email billing. The View Messages feature is putting more of the information their teams need to manage billing and collections at their fingertips. For tracking and audit purposes, BillBlast automatically records when an invoice is sent and by whom. But, even more importantly, it ensures no invoice is left behind by validating that all necessary invoices have been sent to expectant parties. Those features, coupled with View Messages, increase the speed with which the billing team responds to internal or client inquiries, getting bills delivered and paid, and ultimately reducing the firm’s bill-to-cash cycle and increasing realization.