Legal Accounting Software Should Be Customisable

When it comes to billing, all law firms bill differently, and some legal accounting software will allow you to customise your billing procedures in accordance with the way that you prefer to work. While some firms leave it to the accounts department to carry out the billing, others prefer fee earners to bill their own work. If you are considering legal accounting software, you need to ensure that you choose one that will provide you with the flexibility that you need.

Some legal accounting software can be configured so that you can trigger billing manually or can be set to bill at predetermined limits. So, for example, you could set it to trigger billing when work in progress reaches a specific limit. Equally, bills could be triggered according to disbursement levels or lockup/unpaid invoice totals. It also goes without saying that any software should also be able to provide comprehensive legal aid billing for family and crime matters. All legal aid claims which have disbursements and fees agreed should be billed instantly through the system.

Cash flow is, of course, vital for any business, and some legal accounts software can provide a configurable cash flow report and also help with debt collection tools. Flexible aged debtor reports and a debt reminders module will help, as will automatic client statements and follow up letters at predetermined intervals, together with telephone-based debt collection procedures that you can incorporate.

Where a fee earner claims an expense, such as mileage or parking for instance, it should be immediately available for billing as a disbursement or in the case of a legal aid claim for submitting to the LAA. The fee earner enters the claim, and acceptance or rejection of the claim should be available on screen. The fee earner should tick a box to indicate that he has a receipt for the claim. Where different rates are involved the software should be able to deal with this, so if the fee earner gets paid 25p per mile and the client should be billed at 45p per mile this should happen automatically.

Of course, those are just some of the functions of legal accounts software. There are many more, such as client deposit accounts and interest calculations, AML compliance, KPI monitoring, and so on.  

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