Questions that come up in law firms every day:
- How are we doing compared to budget? The responsible attorney needs to dive into the $12,500 in WIP to prepare for a client update call.
- The client is on the phone, and wants to talk through their $42,000 in A/R. The billing attorney needs the big picture on who worked on the matter, and drill down into the specifics as needed.
- The originating attorney would like to know how a significant payment that just came in the door was allocated.
Today, all these questions, and hundreds more, result in the same thing: a request to the accounting department for a report. If you’re right in the middle of your billing cycle, the choice is to either delay billing or potentially have an unhappy partner waiting for that report and the resulting clients with unanswered questions.
Attorneys and even staff often don’t want to try and find the information themselves because it’s too complicated a process. Many firms don’t allow attorney access because of the confusion it has caused – better to let accounting help interpret the results.
According to Gina Martin, the Executive Director at Nelson Hardiman, “Most will give up before they can find how much the client owes us.”
There is, however, a much better solution. A user experience designed for attorneys and staff to instantly find the answers to their questions.
Type in whatever you know, like the name, ID or description, and BillingQ will find all the relevant clients or matters for you. If you’re looking at information at the matter level, with one click you can roll-up all the matters for that billing contact (handy if you have them on the phone!).
Saved searches are created for attorneys ahead of time so that they can just click on “Over 90” and see all their past due accounts. Pre-built searches can ask questions, e.g. I want to see matters with A/R over $10,000 along with WIP over $1,000.
BillingQ client/matter dashboards are a 360° view of financial information, including A/R aging, WIP aging, payments, write-offs, write-ups/downs and trust with drill down to the narrative level. Security determines who can see what.
We then build on those capabilities with DataQ, which provides law firms with deep insights into revenue and profitability by firm, practice group, team, and individual attorneys.
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