News story

Civil news: promoting more accurate billing when you work online

Changes to our systems to help providers with their billing submissions.

We are making changes to the response messages you receive from us when making civil online billing submissions.

The changes are in the following categories:

  1. evidence requests
  2. emergency bill submissions
  3. Family Advocacy Scheme work outside scope

1. Evidence requests

We have amended the evidence request you receive in the Client and Cost Management System to be more specific about the information we need.

Our hope is that this will reduce the need to make second and third requests to you for further information.

This change will be applied for provider and advocate bills.

2. Emergency bill submissions

We will now prevent a solicitor bill from being submitted in error against a ‘live emergency certificate’.

A bill should not be submitted before an assessment of the client’s means has been completed.

Payment on account and counsel bills remain unaffected by the change.

This new error message will appear on both individual claims and on submissions made with bulk upload.

3. Family Advocacy Scheme claims outside scope

We sometimes receive individual and bulk upload claims for aspects of Family Advocacy Scheme work which are not included within the scope of a case.

This leads to rejection, assessment or requests for further information.

A bill will no longer be accepted at the submission stage if the advocacy claim does not match the proceedings granted in the case and an error message will be displayed.

Further information

0300 200 2020 – talk to customer services if you have any questions

Updates to this page

Published 26 July 2017