Time tracking and billing: they’re some of the most crucial tasks to collecting revenue and growing your firm. They’re also historically tedious, time-consuming and high up on the list of tasks attorneys dread most.
The method for tracking time, when done manually or with inefficient processes, is much slower and more involved than it might seem at first glance. First, you have to get attorneys to actually keep track of their time and enter it in a timely manner or give it to staff to do the entry. After the time is entered, someone needs to review it for accuracy and adherence to billing guidelines, which is again usually a manual process. What follows is a significant amount of back and forth between attorneys, staff, bookkeepers and other financial folks before the bills can actually get out the door. Waiting for payment is then another story altogether.
When this much time is wasted on the activity that’s directly tied to bringing in revenue, how can you expect your organization to grow?
The answer lies in implementing the right time tracking and billing technology.
Legal practice management for better billing
In today’s digital era, when tools exist to accurately collect timekeeping and billing information and then submit it to everyone who needs to review and approve it, there’s no excuse to keep using manual processes that impede efficient revenue collection. When you don’t use the right tools, the billing loop described above will continue to take far too much time and communication and, even then, won’t produce sufficiently accurate results.
Your firm’s billing function should integrate with its larger financial processes, regardless of how big or small the firm is. That means having seamless workflows that use automation and other technologies to increase accuracy and efficiency across the board. If your back-office billing cycle is anything like the one we’ve described above, that’s a perfect reason to improve your current systems or invest in new, better solutions.
A legal practice management tool is the best solution to solve billing problems and promote overall firm growth. If you don’t currently have a practice management tool or if you’re not using the tool you have in an efficient manner, it’s not too late to make a change.
Practice management innovation doesn’t have to be complicated. All you need is the right system to get timekeeping and billing information from your attorneys and other timekeepers to the back end, so that information can be accepted, reviewed, processed and approved without costing your team hours and hours of valuable time every month.
How CARET Legal can help
Your billing processes shouldn’t take time away from running the firm. When it comes to running your firm and integrating your back-office billing with the rest of your business processes, you have options. There’s a legal practice management solution that’s right for every practice type.
