The effect poor timekeeping has on closing the books

Accurately capturing, recording, and billing for every lawyer’s time is crucial to your bottom line.

However, timekeeping at law firms can present challenges. Well-planned closing schedules may get derailed as law firm members scramble to submit weeks of backdated time entries. These circumstances create unnecessary stress for your team while costing the firm a lot of money.

Below we look at several of the downstream, negative impacts of delayed timekeeping, the likely root cause of timekeeping problems, and the solution that addresses the source of timekeeping delays.

The real impact of month-end madness

Does this sound familiar? It’s the last week of the month, and your professionals submit a flood of time entries from the past several weeks. Suddenly, your finance team is struggling with insufficient narratives and noncompliant time entries while trying to close the books. Here’s what this is really costing your firm:

Your revenue takes a hit

When senior partners miss recording billable time, the losses add up quickly — to the tens and hundreds of thousands, and in many cases to the millions, of dollars. Late or missing entries can also hinder cash flow by delaying billing or leaving billable hours on the table until next month. Neither option is desirable for the finance team or helps your firm’s bottom line.

Your team’s time is wasted

Instead of focusing on strategic work, your finance team is wasting days chasing down time entries and clarifying narratives. Those analyses on practice group profitability or utilization trends? Those will have to wait for later.

Your clients get frustrated

When time entries are created weeks after work was completed, time entry narratives can be inconsistent or not fully capture the details of all the value your professionals delivered. These narrative shortcomings often lead to multiple rounds of questions and billing disputes from clients that result in your finance team playing mediator instead of driving financial strategy.

Year-end: When a monthly headache becomes a migraine

At year-end, timekeeping problems can snowball into serious challenges for your firm.

For the year you’re closing out, your finance team is likely delayed in wrapping up partner compensation numbers because they’re still processing time entries, fielding billing questions or disputes from clients, or even invoicing.

Not to mention, it’s difficult for the finance team to make solid financial forecasts with unpredictable time entry patterns. How can they predict revenue when they can’t know when time will be entered?

Uncovering the root of the problem

Because your professionals are expected to maximize their billable hours, it’s understandable that they might not always prioritize the arduous, non-billable administrative task of time entry. However, given that timekeeping is crucial to the firm’s closing processes and bottom line, it’s essential that your professionals can provide your finance team with their time entries in a consistent, predictable, and client-ready manner.

While revising your time entry protocols might help, it’s most likely that your firm needs to reassess the timekeeping tools your lawyers have been given. Consider the following questions:

• Does your existing timekeeping tool proactively enforce compliance with firm and client billing requirements?
• Is the tool tailored for the needs of lawyers, and does it offer modern, time-saving technology equipped with AI?
• Do your fee earners find the tool user-friendly?
• How many manual steps are involved in completing a time entry?
• Does the timekeeping tool accommodate multiple methods of timekeeping to meet user preferences?
• How does the tool connect to your other firm systems?

Here’s where Intapp Time can help

Your firm needs more than just a new timekeeping tool. You need a time and billing solution that:

• Makes capturing and submitting billable hours less of a burden for your fee earners
• Proactively enforces client requirements throughout the time and billing processes
• Prevents time-entry delays that affect your closing processes, client satisfaction, and cash flow

Intapp Time helps law firm professionals efficiently capture every minute of their work and adhere to client requirements around time entry. With Intapp Time, your professionals can leverage AI to automatically capture the details of their work effort, choose from multiple timekeeping methods on desktop or mobile devices, and even share time entries.

These advantages add up to more hours billed and more invoices paid — all in a more timely and less burdensome manner. Intapp Time doesn’t just increase the quality and quantity of your fee earners’ time entries, though. Intapp Time also reinforces your closing processes in two important ways.

First, when you integrate Intapp Time with Intapp Billstream, the finance team can see within Intapp Billstream work in progress (WIP) and unreleased time. That gives the finance team a chance to reach out to those professionals with unreleased time and ask them to finalize and release it.

Second, when your firm integrates Intapp Terms with Intapp Time, your lawyers can see client billing requirements at the point of time entry and narrative creation, which helps them comply with those client terms. As a result, your firm produces prebills and invoices that the client is less likely to dispute.

What does this mean for your bottom line?

With Intapp Time, you get:

• Predictable month-end closings
• Billable time numbers you can trust for financial forecasting
• Less time fixing problems and more time driving strategy
• Better cash flow
• More productive fee earners
• Happier clients

In short, the right technology is a boon for your firm.

Contact us to learn more about how Intapp Time, along with Intapp Billstream and Intapp Terms, can make your life easier and your firm more profitable.