When you set out to start your own law firm you probably considered many things. Where you could find clients, attorneys to work alongside, office space, how to manage your financials, and much more. All too often firms fail to consider how their firm will handle their data entry process when it comes to legal billing and legal accounting.
How Data Entry Process Can Take Your Firm Down
Overlooking your firm’s data entry process concerning its legal accounting and billing data can spell real trouble for your firm. Inaccuracies between these two systems can make it extremely difficult for your firm to secure cash flow from clients while creating billing complications.
In addition to creating problems with your firm’s financials, a less than perfect data entry process for your firm can create compliance issues and ethics violations. When running your own law firm compliance is king. It’s not a three strike system. The first time your firm runs up against compliance issues could very well be the last because compliance issues can lead to disbarment for your firm.
Where Data Entry Errors Occur Concerning Your Legal Accounting & Billing Data
Law firms need to ensure that both their legal accounting and billing systems use identical sets of data. Firms often experience issues aligning these two systems because of the simple fact that they are, in fact, two different systems! This means that on a regular basis the same data has to be entered no less than two times. Depending on who manages which systems inside of your firm this could mean that any number of people are involved the process, and they have to enter the data across these systems to match up identically without any exceptions. Failure to do this results in the issues mentioned above, including; ethics violations, compliance issues, billing complications, and difficulty securing cash flow from your clients.
How To Avoid Data Entry Errors Surrounding Your Legal Billing & Accounting Data
Once you understand the severity of the penalties and complications associated with entering your legal billing and accounting data the logical question becomes, “How can my firm avoid data entry errors?”
There are a couple of ways. Of course, you could always create a manual system in which you align your firm’s billing and accounting systems. The problem is you are still depending on a human not to make mistakes, and we all know that no matter how good your firm’s staff is, nobody is perfect. The problem is that anything less than perfection when it comes to aligning your legal accounting and billing data just isn’t good enough. So any manual method carries great risk for your firm.
The suggested method for firms truly looking to simplify and perfect their data entry process is to implement a practice management system that integrates these two systems and only requires your staff to enter the data once! While there is still some dependency on a manual process of entering the data, the data is only entered once and both your legal billing and legal accounting systems use the same data. In the event that there is an error your firm would only have to correct it once and the changes would be applied across the board.
The CosmoLex practice management system allows you to manage your entire firm in one web-based system. In addition to legal billing and accounting, CosmoLex also incorporates calendar and task management, business accounting, email management and document management in their practice management solution.
If your firm is looking to simplify your legal billing and accounting data entry process while reducing costly errors, give CosmoLex a shot with a free trial today.
