Tag Archives: service items

Lesson #22

Production – Production Sheets function

Production Sheets show on a job-by-job basis, who’s ordering what and how many units need to be produced. This static report includes any production and billing notes associated with jobs in the report, so your production staff doesn’t forget any particulars about a client’s order.

You decide which service items are included on production sheets (in Service Item Master), because not all service items need production, such as reporters’ appearance fees. After all jobs are turned in for the day, production sheets listing required service items for those jobs can be printed or exported as PDF, Excel worksheet, or another file format.

You generate productions sheets for either a single job or turned in date. You can customize them to specific rush types (like next day) and one or more of your business units. You can also include already produced items in the report.

Any styling that you applied to Production/Billing Notes in a job, firm, or contact entry, such as bolding or colors, will appear on the report. This can be helpful in making important information stand out on the page.

You can search for a word or phrase in the onscreen report. RB will highlight all instances of your searched word/phrase in the report and list them in a scroll box along with the page number where they occur.

TL;DR: Production Sheets show who’s ordering what and how many units need to be produced for a specific job or from jobs that were turned on a particular day.

RB concepts in this lesson

Business Unit (BU): One of your company’s revenue centers or any entity in your business that you want to track separately, such as branch offices, other companies you own, affiliates, and profit-sharing operations.

Service items: Regular charges that you bill to your clients are called service items in RB. Service items are listed on your invoices to provide itemized details for your clients and third-party payers. In-house, they provide information to help you analyze your revenue streams.

Lesson #21

Production – Tracking function

Track items as they move through your production workflow and into storage, including the location of physical media, such as DVDs. You can also use the Tracking function to track products you are entrusted with, such as videos and exhibits.

If you have different people handling a service item from start to finish and/or many service items to produce, use Tracking to ensure nothing slips through the cracks and you always know where something is and its current status.

Tracking is optional and independent from other modules in RB9; i.e., item tracking is not initiated from jobs or Turn In. You set up Tracking to match your production workflow so you can track items as they move through the process.

Track what you want how you want

First define item types to be tracked, You can track electronic and physical files, such as finished transcripts, exhibits, video, and archived files, and processes, such as editing, scanning, and synching.

After setting up item types to be tracked, create steps that each kind of item goes through in your production workflow. If an item passes through different departments or staffers as it is produced and completed, you can add alerts to specific steps to automatically notify people when the item is their responsibility. And when you move an item to the last step in the workflow, RB9 will automatically change its status from “In Progress” to “Completed.”

After defining item types and creating tracking steps, specify codes for different areas in tracking:

• Archival Status: Current stored status of original media, such as video tapes. Some typical designations are Archived Here, Originals Destroyed, and Originals Sent To.
• Media Classification: Specifies who has rights to view/handle the media. Designations might include Attorney’s Eyes Only, Confidential, and Under Protective Order.
• Media Format: Types of media you produce, such as Audio Tape, CD, DV-CAM, and DVD-R.
• Priority: Specifies order of importance or urgency such as High, Normal, and Urgent.

As with all lists in RB, these come with a set of defaults so you don’t have to start from scratch. You can customize RB lists by editing the defaults, deleting defaults, and adding your own list options.

Tracking can be initiated as soon as a job is created (scheduled). Or use the Production Sheet as a guide for which service items to track through production. Then keep the status of items being tracked current by updating tracking information as the items move through production and into storage.

Customize how you view tracking lists

The grid in which you view tracked items is customizable to your individual preference:

• Re-arrange the columns so the most important information is most prominent
• Stick up to 10 columns to the left side of the grid so they do not scroll when you have a results grid wider than your screen.
• Stretch/shrink columns to fit the results.
• Hide columns you don’t need to see.
• Choose which column(s) to sort results by.
• If you select more than one column, choose in what column order to sort the list.
• Choose whether to sort info by ascending or descending order in each selected column.
• Save your custom grid as your default.

You can save your custom grid as your default. Your customizations do not affect other users, and you can restore the original RB grid layout anytime.

From the Tracking results grid, you can view and update any listed task’s details, start new trackings, and export the grid as an Excel spreadsheet or a CSV(comma-separated values) file to save, print, share, or use in other applications.

NOTE: This is an RB9-only function. It is not included in RB Lite.

TL;DR: Keep track of where items are in your production cycle and physically in your office.

Related RB concepts

Job: Usually the reporting of a deposition, but can also be any kind of service you provide with your reporters or other resources. More >

Resource: Person or thing that provides your business with a service, such as reporters, videographers, interpreters, scopists, account executives, other agencies that cover jobs for you, or a conference room.

Concept #5

Prefill

When you prefill a job, case, or invoice, RB automatically adds related parties and/or service items — saving time and reducing the chance of incomplete invoices.

Without prefill, you have to enter parties and services one at a time every time. With prefill, you check first for previously entered choices — such as parties to a case or a client’s standing orders — and add some or all of them at once. Prefilling saves time and reduces the chance of overlooking something by automatically including related parties and/or services.

Standing orders

If your clients have certain services they always want — for example the original ASCII file and a condensed transcript — you can enter these standing orders in their profile. Both firms and contacts can have standing orders — which can be different if contacts at a firm have their own service requirements in addition to or in place of the firm’s requirements. You can add these standing orders when prefilling parties.

Prefill parties

Parties and their requested services can be entered at any time:

• In a case starting in the pre-trial discovery phase where you can prefill services from firms’ and contacts’ standing orders.
• To a job where you can prefill from a case.
• In Turn In when creating invoices where you can prefill from the job, case, and recent related turn-ins.
• If you have RB Connect, resources enter parties and services when turning in jobs online. You can give them the option to prefill parties from the job, case, or previous turn-ins.

The Recent Turn-ins option when creating invoices is useful because when parties are added to a case during pre-trial discovery, it’s usually so they can access the case calendar and repository files through RB Connect. They might not have any preferred services. However it’s highly likely that parties to a case that have ordered services on previous jobs in the case will order the same services for similar jobs on the same case, which would be included in Recent Turn-ins so you can easily add them to an invoice.

Prefill services

When you prefill parties in Turn In who have standing orders or previously ordered services, RB creates invoices that automatically include those service items. You can save time entering other service items in batches using Prefill Services.

Use Prefill Orders & Services to include service requests from:

• Billing Sets: Like a fast food combo meal, you can select a preset list of services commonly ordered together.
• Firm’s and/or contact’s preferred services: If you didn’t include them when prefilling parties, you can add them when prefilling services.
• Case’s preferred services: If the party to the case requested services for all jobs on a case.
• Job’s preferred services: If the party to the job requested services when scheduling the job.

These readymade lists might include services that were not ordered for the job being billed. That’s okay: After prefilling you can remove any services not ordered for this invoice.

TL;DR: Instead of entering parties and services one at a time every time, use Prefill to automatically add parties and/or services to a job, case, or invoice.

Related RB concepts

Billing Sets: Like a fast food combo meal, RB Billing Sets are preset groups of service items. Selecting billable services by set, instead of individually, speeds up the billing process.

Contact: Person who works for a firm you do business with, such as attorneys, paralegals, secretaries, legal assistants, claim adjusters, and court clerks.

Firm: Business you provide services to, usually law firms, but can also be other court reporting firms, vendors, insurance companies, corporate clients, and courts.

Job: Usually the reporting of a deposition, but can also be any kind of service you provide with your reporters or other resources, such as realtime, videoconferencing, or read & sign. More >

RB Connect: Online repository, calendar, and access to your office for clients and resources, including interactive transcripts, downloadable invoices and e-commerce for clients, and online turn-in, one-touch job acknowledgements, and downloadable pay statements for resources.