Why a compliance-first, technology-driven approach is essential
Your law firm has likely already taken steps to accelerate its work-to-cash cycle through automation. But how can you further speed up revenue collection?
With additional automation and efficiency around time capture and client terms compliance, your firm can make significant gains.
Why these areas? They both affect the prebilling and billing process, impacting the revenue cycle. Below, we elaborate on the critical role of accurate time capture and terms compliance in revenue — and the specific software capabilities that help your firm optimize these functions and accelerate revenue collection.
Current challenges in pre-billing and billing processes
Even if your firm is using technology to automate some aspects of its billing cycle, you may not yet be using the right solutions for two processes that play a critical role in accelerating revenue cycles: time capture and compliance.
Time capture challenges
When you rely on manual timekeeping, your firm’s professionals may forget to record all the time spent on certain activities or matters. In addition, for activities involving multiple fee earners, such as meetings, your colleagues may record these events in different ways, leading to inconsistent time entries for the same activity.
Another problem your firm may have is that your timekeeping system and prebilling processes are not integrated. As a result, finance teams cannot see and account for unreleased time that should be billed for during the upcoming cycle. Moreover, when time entries and prebilling processes aren’t integrated, your partners must manually revise the billable hours on the draft bill. This takes additional time and introduces another step in which errors can occur.
Client terms compliance challenges
Another common problem firms have is that the time their fee earners enter doesn’t comply with client billing requirements. Without upfront visibility into the billing requirements agreed upon in each client’s outside counsel guidelines, your fee earners can’t be sure their time entries comply without navigating to and reviewing the guidelines themselves — a step most are unlikely to take.
Downstream in the revenue cycle, this failure to check billing terms up front leads to partners spending extensive time editing prebills at month’s end. This practice isn’t a sustainable or scalable solution, however, because compliance errors inevitably still make their way into invoices, which leads to billing disputes and delayed or reduced revenue collection.
Impact of these challenges on revenue cycle
Billing errors frustrate your clients and erode trust, making your firm seem disorganized. If your firm cannot get the details of bills right, your clients may conclude that your firm will struggle to effectively execute the details of matter work. Clients may also resent having to continually remind your firm of the billing terms you’ve agreed to follow.
Any one of these client frustrations can result in write-offs or client attrition, reducing your revenue.
Your firm likely suffers additional revenue losses as your partners lose time for client work to addressing billing questions. Likewise, when you don’t have the right systems in place, your billing professionals waste time making corrections and participating in multiple revision cycles, slowing down the revenue cycle. That is, revenue is held up in lock-up, if not lost altogether.
Technology solutions for these revenue cycle challenges
Your law firm can avoid the challenges and impacts described above with the right technology for timekeeping, terms management, and prebilling.
Improved timekeeping experience for fee earners
An effective timekeeping application should accommodate and enhance each fee earner’s preferred approach to timekeeping, whether that’s using timers or automatically capturing time spent on matters and activities across applications. Moreover, the timekeeping software should integrate with billing software so that your billing professionals can see unreleased, work-in-progress (WIP) time.
Intapp Time has these capabilities, offering automatic time capture across applications and integration with Intapp’s prebilling software, Intapp Billstream. Intapp Time also enables professionals to share time entries for consistent accounting of meetings.
A source of truth for client terms
In addition to integrating with Intapp Billstream, Intapp Time integrates with Intapp Terms, which is software for client terms management. Intapp Terms provides a centralized repository for client obligations, including client billing rules. This repository enables your professionals to easily search for, identify, and enforce billing requirements across applications.
Thanks to the integration between Intapp Terms and Intapp Time, your firm’s time entries are automatically checked against client billing rules. For example, if your fee earners enter time narratives in a way that is inconsistent with client requirements, Intapp Terms will let them know of the issue so they can correct before submitting their time.
Compliance throughout the revenue cycle
Intapp Terms also integrates with Intapp Billstream. This integration lets your billing professionals view and enforce billing terms when creating and reviewing prebills.
With Intapp Billstream, your firm also gains workflow visibility, meaning your professionals can see the status of prebills as well as any roadblocks to their completion. Our prebilling software also makes it easier for your team to generate reports relating to prebilling. In addition, Intapp Billstream integrates with popular third-party billing systems, such as Aderant and Elite 3E.
Unified implementation: The Intapp advantage
By combining Intapp Time, Intapp Terms, and Intapp Billstream, you gain a unified solution for compliant timekeeping and billing.
First, Intapp Time captures compliant time entries. These time entries then flow into Intapp Billstream, which helps you create the prebills/proformas that lead to your invoices. At each step of this process, Intapp Terms surfaces client terms to ensure compliance.
This coordinated approach generates transformative results:
- Improved cash flow and reduced lock-up
- Dramatically lower rejection rates from e-billing systems
- Many hours saved by fee earners and billers on administrative tasks
For law firms ready to reduce the friction in their monthly and year-end billing processes, Intapp Billstream — along with Intapp Time and Intapp Terms — offers the most intuitive and compliance-forward solution for accelerating prebill reviews and approvals. This integrated approach to compliant time and billing streamlines workflows to enable firms to bill faster, prevent billing disputes, and quickly turn WIP into cash.
Interested in this transformation of your revenue cycle? See how Intapp makes this outcome possible by scheduling a demo.