In March 2023, the LEDES Board ratified updates to the Ebilling XML formats, creating new versions 2.0.4, 2.1.4 and 2.2.1.
In late May of 2023, a call with a developer implementing the new formats led to the realization that certain fields, all of which were math calculations, we not only difficult to understand, it was difficult to articulate our intention on how the math should work. The impacted fields are in the @MATTER segment, matter_disc_credit_fees, matter_disc_credit_exp, matter_net_fees, and matter_net_exp, and the changes are limited to the Description column with instructions on how the math should be calculated. In addition to align how math for discounts and credits work at the Matter level to correspond to how it does at the @FEE and @EXPENSE levels, we changed the @MATTER_DISC_CRED.disc_cred_amount field to Required.
We have issued Updated format documentation for the 3 formats without changing the version numbers, instead referring to the new documentation as XML Ebilling 2.0.4 Updated, XML Ebilling 2.1.4 Updated and XML Ebilling 2.2.1 Updated.
The new documentation is available on each format page on LEDES.org.