Accounting and bookkeeping are a foundational part of managing a law firm. They provide a detailed picture of law firm revenue and expenses.
However, far too many law firms rely on makeshift spreadsheets and generic accounting software to manage their books. This leads to frustration for staff, financial opacity, compliance risks and lost time that could be spent serving clients.
Automate Your Billing
Whether you’re an established business or just starting out, automating your billing can eliminate the time-consuming manual tasks that keep you from taking advantage of new opportunities and increasing revenue. The right automated billing software will streamline the entire process and improve the accuracy of your records by preventing manual data entry errors and generating accurate reports.
In addition, the best automated billing systems will offer the capability to integrate with your other business solutions. This enables real-time data synchronization, which saves your staff from manually updating records across different software programs. For example, many of these solutions can be integrated with customer relationship management software, project management software, and accounting software.
Automated billing is especially helpful for businesses that charge recurring fees. For example, fitness and nutrition centers that sell membership fees, personal-training sessions, and nutritional products can use an automated system to manage these charges and provide their customers with accurate monthly statements. Utility companies, like gas and water service providers, also rely on these systems to manage varying consumption rates and bill accordingly. The same goes for financial institutions such as banks and credit unions, which must balance their bookkeeping for varying interest rates, loan principals, and revolving credit terms.
A quality automated billing solution will allow you to create and deploy a customizable online payment portal for your customers. This will give your customers the ability to view and pay their invoices through a variety of methods, from electronic checks to major credit cards. Some of these platforms will even let you automate upcoming and overdue payment reminders to be sent to your customers, helping you to track down late payments.
Automate Your Invoicing
Whether you’re working in-house or outsourcing, consistent bookkeeping is critical for smooth financial processes. Automating key parts of your accounting for law firms can make the whole process run more efficiently and help your firm run like a well-oiled machine.
For example, with legal billing software that streamlines e-billing for lawyers, you can get your bills out to clients more quickly and easily each month. This helps you keep a lid on expenses, stabilize cash flow, and improve client experience.
Another part of your accounting that can be automated is accounts receivable processing. This can eliminate the pain of dealing with past-due clients and free up resources to focus on more profitable cases.
In addition, automated systems allow for more reliable tracking of billable hours and payments. This can enhance productivity, help fine-tune firm billing practices and facilitate better decision-making through data analysis.
Automated invoicing can also reduce the strain on your team. Instead of having to manually follow up on overdue invoices, you can set up automated email notifications that notify clients when an invoice is due, allowing them to pay online through an integrated payment system or by phone, email or text. This eliminates the need for follow up calls or emails and allows you to improve relationships with your clients.
Streamline your invoicing process with the right law firm accounting software and you’ll see significant benefits to your business. Make sure your chosen solution includes best practices for legal accounting like bank account reconciliation, trust reconciliation and client ledgers. It should also include a document storage feature that ensures secure and organized access to important financial documents, with naming conventions and tagging to simplify lookups.
Automate Your Payments
Having the right law firm management tools can save you time and money. They’ll help you streamline your firm, reduce inefficiencies and human error, improve productivity, and enhance client service. But it’s important to know how to draw the line between tasks that can be automated and those that require human interaction.
The most effective way to automate your law firm is by integrating legal workflow automation technologies into key processes like client intake, document automation, billing, and payments. Using these tools will help you save time by eliminating manual documents and payments, and allow you to spend more time on revenue-generating activities.
Billing automation can save you time by reducing the number of errors and missed deadlines caused by manual invoice processing. This also allows you to provide clients with easy payment options, such as online portals, which can decrease outstanding invoices and boost your firm’s bottom line.
Precise time tracking is another essential component of legal bookkeeping, and it’s the foundation for accurate billing. By using legal software that supports timesheets and budgeting, you can better manage your firm’s resource usage while maintaining ethical standards.
In addition, many legal firms handle client funds through trust accounts, and this specialized aspect of bookkeeping requires a more complex and segregated accounting system to ensure that client funds are safeguarded at all times. By implementing a legal accounting platform that integrates with bank feeds and provides built-in account reconciliation to verify that representation of client funds is accurate, you can avoid costly mistakes that could lead to regulatory violations and reputational damage.
Automate Your Time Tracking
One of the most important steps law firms can take to simplify their bookkeeping is automating their time tracking. This enables firms to track every billable minute, which improves both firm revenue and client satisfaction. Manual time entries are prone to errors and inconsistencies, resulting in missed billing opportunities, lost revenue, and compliance violations. Automated legal time tracking eliminates these risks by automatically turning off and on timers for billed activities and converting them into invoices upon completion.
Choose a legal time-tracking platform with integrations to your preferred payment gateways and practice management systems for maximum efficiency. This ensures that your accounting data is always up-to-date and reduces the need for manual input and double-entry of information across different platforms. Moreover, opt for software that offers a mobile app so lawyers can track time while on the go.
Finally, ensure that your legal time-tracking tool can sync with email clients such as Outlook and Gmail. This helps your team track time directly from emails instead of having to manually enter information into the system. It also minimizes the learning curve for new staff members and allows attorneys to easily use the platform without sacrificing productivity.
Similarly, choose legal software that allows for easy expense-tracking. Regularly reconciling your accounts and ensuring that recorded payments align with bank statements helps avoid errors, mismatched records, and costly mistakes down the road. Expenses are the silent undertow in any law firm’s financial waters, but a well-organized system of capturing and reporting expenses can help you manage these costs effectively.
To ensure that every dollar is accounted for, law firms must allocate all client payments to the incurred costs of a matter before recording it as income, much like how thebottom-line.com would do things. This prevents overbilling and ensures that the correct amount of time is billed to each client.
Automate Your Expenses
While every law firm’s needs are unique, many common best practices can help firms streamline their bookkeeping processes. For example, firm managers must make sure that they separate revenue that covers incurred costs from actual income when logging matter-related payments. This is a critical accounting practice that ensures accurate records and avoids compliance issues. In addition, firms must also maintain an effective schedule for executing core bookkeeping tasks like recording billable hours, maintaining cash balances, and managing client accounts.
In addition, it’s important to use an automated expense tracking system that syncs digitized receipts with accounting software for easy record keeping and tax time processing. This will save time, prevent errors, and reduce expenses. Furthermore, a good law firm accounting system should allow managers to create budgets and analyze spending patterns to improve financial performance.
Lastly, it’s crucial to adopt a legal accounting system that allows attorneys to submit timesheets electronically and track their billable hours. By doing so, attorneys can better manage their client relationships and demonstrate to clients the full scope of their services, which ultimately builds trust and fosters stronger attorney-client relationships.
Streamlining accounting is a top priority for law firms that want to drive productivity, security, and strategic business growth. Unfortunately, too many firms continue to rely on scattershot spreadsheets and generic accounting software to manage their books, which leads to frustration for staff, missed opportunities for efficiency, compliance risks, and lost billable time.