How To Block Bill For Your Time

Time by Ping offers several features to help you block bill your time more efficiently and easily – here’s how to use them best.

We know that certain lawyers need to block bill for their work Activities or are restricted by guidelines to releasing just one Entry for each Client / Matter daily, even if they have multiple captured Activities attached to them. 

Time by Ping (TBP) makes clever use of features like Smart Select to create workflows that expedite block billing to just a few clicks.

How do I block bill for my time?

Before you start billing for your time, it’s important to make sure every Activity in your Timeline has a Client / Matter assigned to it. 

TBP will assign Clients / Matters to much of your Activity automatically as it captures your working time, but you may also need to manually assign some yourself. We recommend having your whole day accounted for before you block bill with a single Entry for each client each day. To learn more, read our How To Assign & Re-assign Your Time article.

Once you’ve gone through and are happy with your Timeline, TBP makes it easy to group your time spent on different Activities into a single Entry for quicker and more efficient block billing.

Group with Smart Select

Using our Smart Select feature you can select all Activities in your Timeline or Entries in your Timesheet relating to the same Client / Matter in just a few clicks:

1. Click on any Assigned Activity or Entry for the Client / Matter you want to group and you’ll see the Client / Matter box display on the right-hand side of your TBP window
2. Check the ‘Select all activities' or ‘Select all entries’ checkbox and Smart Select selects all the Activities or Entries associated with that Client / Matter for that day
3. Click ‘Group and Edit’ and the Client / Matter box expands
4. Make any edits you want to the group Narrative, for example to summarize the individual Narratives into something easier to reference. You’ll still be able to see individual Narratives alongside each Activity
5. Once you’re happy, click ‘Close’

To learn more about how Narratives work with block billing, read our How to Edit Narratives article. 

Group by Client / Matter

You can group and edit all Entries relating to a Client / Matter in seconds from your Timesheet view:

1. Click on any Client / Matter header to select all Entries and the Client / Matter box displays on the right-hand side of your TBP window
2. Click ‘Group and Edit’ and the Client / Matter box expands
3. Make any edits you want to the group Narrative, for example, to summarize the individual Narratives into something easier to reference. You’ll still be able to see individual Narratives alongside each Activity
4. You can then either choose to ‘Close’ to close the Client / Matter box or ‘Release’ to release the grouped time straight away to the Practice Management System (PMS)

How do I view just the Activities that make up a Group?

Easily. On your Timesheet view you can simply drop down the entry and see the activities that form the entry. 

On your Timeline view, you can expose an entire group on its own by:

1. In your Timeline, click on any Activity within the group and you’ll see the Client / Matter box display on the right-hand side of your TBP window
2. Click ‘Edit Details’
3. Check the ‘Show entire group in Timeline’ box
4. Your Timeline will show all the Activities in that group ordered chronologically
5. Make any edits you want to the group Narrative, for example to summarize the individual Narratives into something easier to reference. You’ll still be able to see individual Narratives alongside each Activity
6. Once you’re happy, click ‘Close’