The unique needs of law firm accounting require constant interaction between your billing and accounting areas. Case costs, retainers, invoice payments, etc. affect both billing and accounting balances. When you use separate systems for practice management and accounting, you invariably end up with multiple challenges. A single, integrated practice management and accounting system improves profitability, strengthens compliance, and gives you peace of mind.
CosmoLex is able to connect with 1000s of financial institutions and automatically retrieve daily activities. Once the initial connection with your financial institution has been established, no further manual steps are necessary. As new transactions are made, CosmoLex will periodically fetch, automatically match it with book transactions, and request users to review them.
Transactions which were “matched” or “added” using automatic bank data feeds are automatically marked as bank cleared, automating the bank reconciliations. One bank account feed is included free of charge. Additional bank account feeds will incur a nominal fee.
In a multi-attorney firm, it’s critical to track revenue & business expenses by partners or locations or even by practice area. You may even wish to create separate profit centers for different practice groups or equity partners. CosmoLex provides advanced accounting features for allocating your collections to each attorney based on originating attorney, working attorney etc. General business expenses can be allocated to different profit centers (set as “classes”). Class-based income statements can provide deep financial insight into your profit centers (Reports are under development).
Alternatively, if your needs are basic and, for example, you just wish to know which practice areas are most profitable, you can create multiple “income sub-accounts” in your chart of accounts and select these as part of the matter setup. That’s it. After that, as matter invoices are paid, fee income is credited to its specific income account. Your income statement will contain these income sub-accounts.
The lack of a legal-specific chart of accounts on your general ledger leads to financial reporting and compliance issues for lawyers using generic accounting software. CosmoLex is designed expressly for law firms, which means you’ll find a complete, customizable legal chart of accounts ready for you, out-of-the-box. It’s just one more way in which CosmoLex does a better job handling your law firm’s accounting than any generic accounting software.
In addition, CosmoLex includes tools like these to make CosmoLex Business Accounting software a complete solution for all of your bookkeeping and accounting needs.
Every law firm needs a trusted advisor to help ensure that their financials are 100% compliant. And our CosmoLex Accounting Partner (CAP) program makes it easy for them to work on your firm’s financials. A unique Client Access Login will allow them to work in your CosmoLex account (with your explicit permission) and fine tune your books remotely. There is no cost for you or them. Contact our team for details.
