The Disbursement screen is where all costs paid out by the firm on behalf of the client will be tracked in order to ensure reimbursement at the conclusion of the case. Please note that this screen may be called something else, such as Case Costs or Expenses as configured by your administrator.
The top half of the screen will keep a running total of all of the costs added to the case under various categories, such as recoverable or waived, grouped by each individual plaintiff. The bottom half of this screen contains all entries for costs made on the case.
The Structure of This Page
Disbursement Limit Section: Lists the expense budget for the case and allows editing. See Disbursement Limit.
Financing: Indicates whether the disbursement have been financed by your firm and, if so, the date from which they were financed. If the case disbursements are marked as financed, the interest will be calculated automatically on the negotiation/settlement screen.
Summary table: Displays expenses totals (total, recoverable, non-recoverable, and waived) spent on behalf of each plaintiff. See Summary Table.
Add disbursement button: Used to add a new disbursement to the case file. See Adding a Disbursement.
Disbursement table: Contains the disbursement details and allows various actions to be performed on them. See Disbursement Table
Disbursement Limit:
The disbursement limit is intended to provide a guide as to the budget for expenses on the case. The limit is not a hard cap; a case can continue to accumulate disbursements even after passing the limit, but cases with a total disbursement amount greater than the current limit appear in the Cases With Disbursement Exceeding Limit Report to aid in identifying and tracking them. The Disbursement Limit section contains four elements: the limit amount, any comment on the limit amount, Edit hypertext for editing the limit, and Show History hypertext for viewing past changes to the limit. If the disbursement limit on a case has not been manually set, it is automatically set by the SmartAdvocate system. If the case has an estimated case value range assigned to it via the Edit Case button on the Case Summary page, the disbursement limit will automatically be set to the limit associated with that case value range in the Case Values picklist. If an estimated case value has not been set, the disbursement limit will automatically be set to the value in the Disbursement parameter in the System Parameters administrative page. To manually set the disbursement limit, click the Edit hypertext. This will open a panel with two Text input fields: one for the Disbursement Amount Limit, and one for the Comment. Both must be non-blank. When you have made your desired edits, click Save to save the changes, or Cancel to discard the changes and close the panel. To return to having the disbursement limit set automatically instead of manually, click the Edit hypertext, then fill in 0 as the disbursement amount limit and save the changes. (The comment must still not be blank, though it will also be automatically reset on saving.) To view changes in the disbursement limit over the history of the case, click the Show History hypertext. This will bring up a panel listing the limit amount, the date it was set, the date it was replaced, the associated comment, and the staff member who set it.
Summary Table:
The Summary table totals the disbursement amounts in the Disbursement table. It is updated automatically when changes are made to the Disbursement table; no changes may be made to the Summary table directly. Each row of the table represents an individual plaintiff. See Tables for general information about table structure and usage, including all buttons and other tools in this table that are not mentioned below