Claire Green explains why it’s time to embrace the e-bill
- New electronic bill of costs: moving with the times.
- Data management: mastering the spreadsheet, while improving transparency.
- New assessment procedure: more positives than negatives, but work still to be done.
Anything electronic has always been controversial and can leave people feeling excluded. Certainly it seems that this is how the vast majority of practitioners feel when looking in on the new electronic bill of costs.
Having spent a significant period of time with the e-bill, however, it is time to open the door and welcome them in—electronic billing is the future. And, unlike vinyl records, there is unlikely to be any nostalgic return to paper in a few years’ time.
It has not been plain sailing to reach this point. Only last weekend, I spent ages inputting data into an e-bill only to have the ‘wheel of doom’ appear and spin relentlessly—two hours’ work gone. It is a cautionary tale about using the autosave function.
Time to excel
From a drafting perspective, a rudimentary knowledge of Excel/spreadsheets
