A Practical CCH Axcess WIP Review Workflow Before You Bill

Most billing problems start weeks before anyone opens an invoice. The partner looking at a bill worksheet is already downstream of the damage: a staff member charged time to the wrong engagement, a phase sat uninvoiced for two quarters, or a line reads "additional research, 4.2 hrs" and no one in the office can say what that covered. The review that would have caught any of it either did not happen or happened in one person's head at 9pm.

This review assumes you run CCH Axcess Practice and that a billing admin or partner has roughly fifteen minutes per client group before a bill run. You need no new software, only the same five passes in the same order each cycle.

Start from the WIP report

Open the invoice screen first and you will bill what is convenient. Open the WIP report and you have to look at everything sitting on the client. Pull work-in-progress for the group you are about to bill and sort it oldest first. Aging is the most useful sort order you have.

Read the dates before the dollars. Time entered this month is seldom the problem. The charges that cost you realization are the ones that aged past the point where the preparer remembers the work or the client expects a bill for it. Any line more than 90 days old and still unbilled needs a decision this cycle: bill it now with a short explanation, write it down on purpose, or move it. Carry it forward one more cycle and it becomes a write-off nobody chose.

Pass one: reconcile WIP to what you promised

Before you touch a rate, confirm the WIP maps to the engagement you sold. Two failure modes dominate.

First, misposted time. A staff member picks the near-match from a dropdown and the hours land on the wrong client or the wrong engagement. They show up as charges that do not fit the engagement: audit hours on a tax-only client, or a client name one entry off from the right one. Catch them here. Once they are inside an invoice, you and the client both have to unwind them.

Second, scope drift. The engagement letter said a 1040 and a state return. The WIP shows twelve hours of advisory calls. Those hours may be billable, and the way to bill them is to call the client, not to slip a line into an invoice and hope it clears. Route scope-drift charges to the partner while the bill is still a draft.

Pass two: read the narrative the client will read

Open the time-entry descriptions and read them the way the client will read them. Firms skip this pass more than any other, and it is the pass that produces the fee disputes.

Descriptions like "work on file," "various," and "per partner" fail on sight. A client you are asking for four thousand dollars can reasonably ask what four thousand dollars bought, and vague descriptions are a leading trigger for a fee dispute. Fixed-fee and value-billing firms can summarize instead of exposing raw time, but somebody still has to answer "what did you do?" in a sentence that does not restate the question.

Where a description is thin, go back to the timekeeper while the work is fresh and get one honest clause out of them. That costs a short conversation now. After the invoice leaves, the same fix is a negotiation.

Pass three: apply write-ups and write-downs on purpose

Realization is the share of standard WIP value you collect, and it is the number this workflow protects. It is one of the oldest practice-management metrics in the profession, for a plain reason: a small unexamined markdown costs almost nothing on one bill, and the same markdown across a book of business costs real margin over a year.

Attach a reason to each adjustment. When you write time down, ask why the work cost more than it should have and whether that overage belongs to the client or to the firm. Training hours on a junior preparer belong to the firm, and a write-down is the right home for them. A client who sent you the wrong records three times belongs in a call about a write-up or a scope change. Record the reason somewhere durable. You will bill this client again next year, and the reason code is the only thing that will tell you what happened.

Pass four: check for charges that shouldn't be here yet

Some WIP is not ready to bill. Time parked against an incomplete engagement, retainer draws you have not earned, and expenses waiting on a receipt all belong in the next cycle. Bill them now and the correction arrives after you have taken the client's money, which is the worst version of that conversation. Separate the work that is still in progress from the work that is finished and billable. You are billing finished work cleanly, not sweeping the account to zero.

Pass five: confirm the math before it becomes an invoice

The last pass is arithmetic. Check that the WIP total after your adjustments matches what prints on the invoice. Gross versus net, discounts, and any prior retainer applied are the classic places where the worksheet and the client-facing document disagree. If your firm carries multiple rate structures or per-engagement fee arrangements, confirm the right one is attached before you finalize the bill. The alternative is finding out from a client email asking why the rate changed.

Generate the bill last.

Put the five passes on a checklist

Partners know how to review WIP. The review still gets skipped, because it lives in individual heads and deadlines beat memory. Put the five passes on a one-page checklist, attach it to the bill-run calendar, and give it an owner. A billing admin can run passes one, two, four, and five and route the judgment calls to the partner: scope drift, write-downs, thin narratives. That split is what makes fifteen minutes per group realistic.

Run this every cycle and your write-downs move off the invoice and onto the WIP report, where you can still do something about them.