Pre-bill review board for unbilled legal time in Clio

Build me a pre-bill review board that our billing manager and partners work out of before invoices go out each month, instead of exporting a work in progress report from Clio into a spreadsheet. The point is a surface where unbilled time entries actually get corrected and approved, not another summary of what is unbilled.

The main screen lists every matter that has unbilled work. Pull the matters from Clio List Billable Matters and the time entries from Clio List Activities filtered to unbilled entries, then group the matters by responsible attorney. Each matter row shows the matter display number, the client, the work in progress value, the count of unbilled entries, and the age in days of the oldest unbilled entry. Each attorney group header shows a subtotal, and the top of the page shows the firm total plus how much of it has been reviewed so far. Use Clio List Matters where you need matter detail such as responsible attorney or practice area that the billable matters list does not carry.

Clicking a matter opens its unbilled time entries in a table: date, timekeeper, hours, rate, line value, and the full narrative. Reviewers work the entries inline. They can rewrite a narrative, correct the hours, or flag an entry as non-billable, and each save writes back to Clio through Update Activity. Keep the edited row in place with its updated value so the reviewer sees the matter total move as they work, and show a clear inline error on the row if Clio rejects the change rather than failing the whole screen.

Add an approved state per entry and a rolled up state per matter. Clio has no approval field, so store approvals in the app's own storage keyed by the Clio activity id, recording who approved it and when. The matter list shows how many of a matter's entries are still unreviewed, and a matter drops out of the queue once every entry on it has been approved or flagged non-billable. Reviewers should be able to approve a whole matter at once when nothing needs fixing.

Highlight entries whose narrative is missing, unusually short, or matches boilerplate such as "attention to file", "work on case", "review file", or "telephone call". Those are the lines clients write down, so surface them at the top of the matter view and count them on the matter row. Put the minimum narrative length and the boilerplate phrase list in a small settings view so a firm can tune both.

Every timekeeper with flagged entries gets a chase timekeeper button. It opens a Slack direct message with Slack Open a Conversation and posts it with Slack Send a Message, listing that person's vague or missing narratives grouped by matter with the date and hours on each line, and a short ask to fix the wording before billing closes. Match Clio timekeepers to Slack accounts by email using Clio List Users and Slack List Users, and let the reviewer read and edit the message before it sends.

Filters run across the top of both views: practice area from Clio List Practice Areas, timekeeper from Clio List Users, a date range on the entry date, and a minimum matter value. Filter selections persist per user between sessions, so a partner who only reviews their own files lands on that slice every time.

Bake in Clio's data shapes. Time entry quantity is returned in seconds on API version 4.0.4 and above, so convert to hours for display and convert back to seconds when saving an hours edit, and never show a raw seconds figure to a reviewer. Money amounts are decimals in the account currency, so format them in the firm's currency. Index endpoints are cursor paginated through page_token with a limit of up to 200, so page through the full set before totalling anything; a partial first page shown as the firm's work in progress would be worse than no number at all.

The billing manager sees the whole firm, and a partner can switch the board to their own matters. This app only reads and updates existing Clio time entries. It does not create time entries, delete anything, or generate bills.