Mistakes That Legal Billing Software Can Help You Avoid
With a legal billing software, lawyers and firms can accurately collect the payments for their time and effort. It takes care of the nuanced work. This software is optimized for the legal profession and has features like time-tracking, invoicing and accounting capabilities. Lawyers will be able to capture billable and non-billable hours. This software can make timekeeping and billing a breeze.
With this tool, lawyers and law firms can avoid the silly mistakes. When you fail to bill or invoice properly, it can cause a significant damage to your relationship with your client. Here are a few mistakes a billing software can help you avoid.
1. Mismanaging your Retainers
2. Leaving out Billables
3. Restrictive Rate Invoicing
4. Incompliance with Policies
5. One invoice for each Task
Mismanaging your Retainers
A big part of working in a law firm is billing your retainers accurately. Unfortunately, most invoicing software available are not made to facilitate retainer management. If you have a multi-disciplinary legal practice, it is important that you get hold of a legal billing software to make retainers more credible. Most law firms struggle to keep the retainer brimming and end up incurring losses. A billing software allows legal staff to track and manage retainers in a manner that notifies you instantly when the retainer funds are getting low. It automatically sends a notification to your client to fill up the funds for use.
Also Read: Important Key Aspect of Every Billing Software
Leaving out Billables
Lawyers have to spend a lot money during a case. These expenses ideally should be cared for by the client, but due to improper billing, lawyers usually end up paying them from their pocket, resulting in a loss for a law firm. A legal billing software can manage all your billables at one place. It will ensure you get paid for every penny you are spending on the client’s job. This is facilitated by two features, comprehensive expense tracking and time tracking.
Restrictive Rate Invoicing
Legal firms, unlike other businesses, have various styles of invoicing for different types of clients. Even the rates are different for every other task that they perform. There is no set standard of rates and billing. How does then a regular invoicing software is expected to manage tiered rates, without having any concept of it as such? It leads to only one thing – accounting chaos. Legal billing software are made to handle different rates and tiered rates in depth so every client is billed correctly. Attorneys can charge fees on a case-to-case, task-to-task basis with the help of a legal billing software.
Incompliance with Policies
An acute mismanagement of the policies is probably the biggest folly committed by traditional invoicing software. Legal billing is subject to many different state policies and regulations that are often missing in a regular billing software. With a legal billing software, you make credible and professional invoices that are in compliant with the policies of your state. You can directly send in your invoicing as reports without needing to make any last-minute corrections.
Also Read: Billing And Invoice Software – Link
One invoice for each Task
This is another major error that is often committed when you are using a regular invoicing software. Law firms that use a regular invoicing software end up creating a number of invoices for a particular client due to the lack of features for matter based billing. A law firm charges an array of rates depending on the task. This means you need a legal billing software that allows you to bill separately for each task within an invoice.
