Integrated Legal Business Accounting
Legal business accounting of CosmoLex is designed to handle all of the unique and intricate legal-specific bookkeeping requirements with which every lawyer must comply. The business accounting component is able to take care of your law firm’s bookkeeping and accounting accurately and automatically — in the background — while you perform your day-to-day practice management and billing activities. Plus, there is never any need to struggle with duplicate data entry or tedious export/imports that come with using a separate generic accounting package.
TechnoLawyer® author Warren Christopher Freiberg summarized it well, stating, “CosmoLex Frees Law Firms From the Tyranny of QuickBooks and Complexity”.
Data Entry & Reconciliation Using Automatic
Bank Data Feed
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.
Free Login for External Bookkeeper
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 us for details.
Customizable Chart of Accounts
The lack of a legal-specific chart of accounts on your general ledger leads to fiscal 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.
Prevent Common Accounting Mistakes
CosmoLex business accounting software includes everything you need to stay in compliance with regulations that specifically pertain to legal work. One of the biggest benefits of CosmoLex is its ability to prevent common accounting mistakes. In fact, at every level, CosmoLex is designed to safeguard lawyers and their practice from the severe consequences that come with unintended errors. Staying compliant with generic business accounting software often involves complex maneuvers or workarounds. CosmoLex legal accounting software avoids generic integrations and gives you a higher level of sophistication.
Income Statement By Attorney, Dept, Practice
Area
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.
Accurate Accounting for Hard & Soft Costs
Matter Cost Accounting – Three simple words that make every lawyer wince, for good reason. Inadequate internal accounting procedures fail to capture matter related costs, resulting in lost revenue and, in some cases, tax and ethics compliance consequences. CosmoLex legal accounting software provides a number of tools to ensure compliance– and profitability — at the same time:
- Matter Cost Transactions (e.g. payment by check or credit card) can be posted at the time of entry to a corresponding legal matter for future billing — ensuring no profit leakage.
- Hard Costs can only be posted to your choice of account (advanced client costs or reimbursable client costs).
- Soft Costs (e.g. billing for copies, mileage) which are already expensed as office expenses) can be billed to legal matters — and its reimbursement tracked separately.
Other Business Accounting Functions
In addition, CosmoLex includes tools like these to make CosmoLex Business Accounting software a complete solution for all of your bookkeeping and accounting needs.
- Memorized Payee Accounts
- Journal Entries
- Bank Statement Imports
- Bank Reconciliations
- Print Checks
- E-File 1099-Misc Forms
- Collected Fee Distributions
- Over 50 accounting & billing reports (in PDF or Excel formats)
