How Does Invoice Review and Approval Work Before a Bill Goes Out?

Running billing produces a draft, not a final invoice. That draft, the pre-bill, goes to the timekeeper or supervising attorney to review and correct before anyone sends it to a client. How long that review takes, more than the billing rate itself, is one of the biggest levers on realization.

What a pre-bill actually is

A pre-bill reflects the time and costs entered against a matter before anyone has decided what actually gets billed. Nothing about it is final. It exists specifically to be marked up, corrected, and approved, the same function a printed draft served when a partner used to scrawl adjustments in the margin and hand it back to be retyped, except the correction happens inside the same billing cycle instead of a separate round trip.

Why the review step exists

Time entries get written in the moment, often by someone other than the person who owns the client relationship. A pre-bill gives the timekeeper, or the attorney responsible for the matter, one more look before the number becomes permanent: catching a vague description, a duplicate entry, an entry that rounded up more than the work actually took, a rate that doesn’t match the engagement letter, or work that belongs in a write-down rather than on the invoice. Once a bill goes out, those same corrections turn into credits, apologies, and a client who reads every invoice that follows more skeptically.

None of this is about slowing billing down. It’s about deciding, once, what a client is being asked to pay, rather than deciding it twice: once by whoever logged the time and again, after the fact, when the client questions a line item.

The corrections a good pre-bill review catches go beyond arithmetic. A description that reads clearly to the timekeeper who wrote it, “call re: settlement,” say, can read as vague or padded to a client who wasn’t on the call and doesn’t recognize the shorthand. Rewriting that description before the invoice goes out changes nothing about what’s owed, and everything about whether the client understands what they paid for well enough not to call and ask.

The cost of a partner who sits on pre-bills

Realization rate is the ratio of what a firm actually bills against the value of the time it recorded. The single biggest lever on that number is usually how long work sits as a pending pre-bill before someone decides what to do with it, well ahead of the billing rate or write-off policy.

A pre-bill that waits through several billing cycles for a partner’s attention is worse than late: it carries stale memory of the work, so descriptions get shortened or generalized rather than corrected properly. It delays cash by roughly the same margin it delays the invoice itself. And it tends to get approved on momentum rather than reviewed on judgment, because by the time someone opens it, the detail that would have justified a smaller write-down is already gone. The productivity and write-down reporting a firm relies on to catch that pattern only works if the pre-bill reached review in time to matter.

A hypothetical week of sitting on pre-bills

Take a hypothetical firm that generates pre-bills every two weeks. If a supervising partner routinely takes eleven of those fourteen days to get to review, the invoice goes out with three days of runway before the next cycle’s drafts are already stacking up behind it. Multiply that lag across every matter the partner touches, and one late invoice turns into a standing backlog that never fully clears, where every review happens under time pressure instead of on the merits. This is a hypothetical arithmetic example, not a claim about how long review takes at any particular firm.

The delay compounds past realization, too. An invoice that sits three days from a bloated review queue instead of going out the same day billing runs pushes back every later step: when the client sees it, when they pay it, and how many days of cash velocity the firm loses before the money actually lands. A slow pre-bill queue is a realization problem and a collection-timing problem wearing the same cause.

What this depends on

• How many people touch a matter’s time before it’s ready to bill, since a single-timekeeper matter reviews faster than one with several contributors.
• Whether the reviewer is the timekeeper, a supervising attorney, or both in sequence.
• Firm size and how billing cycles are staggered across practice groups.
• How much of the review is substantive judgment about the client relationship versus mechanical checking for errors.

Realization rate on its own only tells you the outcome. The number worth actually finding is how many days of work sat in review before anyone decided what to do with it, because that’s the number a rate change can’t touch, and it’s usually the one nobody has ever measured directly.

Related questions

It generates pre-bills? Yes. Running billing produces a draft, not a final invoice. That draft is the pre-bill, meant to be reviewed and edited before it becomes a client-facing bill.

So wait, this is an invoice? Not yet. A pre-bill becomes an invoice only after someone reviews and approves it; until then, it’s a working draft that can still change.

What does the pre-bill look like? It looks like a draft invoice: matter-by-matter time and expenses with running totals, all still editable. What changes between the draft and the final invoice is entirely up to whoever reviews it.