As the ghosts and goblins come out for Halloween, there’s something even scarier lurking in law firms—Collections Season! Just like haunted houses, year-end collections can send shivers down your spine.
What makes collections less scary? Invoices-to-cash—a streamlined process that automates everything that happens from finalizing invoices to getting paid quickly and efficiently by clients:
- Delivering PDF bills to clients based on attorney, client and matter preferences
- Increasing the level of follow-up with A/R notices that include the full detail of all bills with outstanding A/R (all in one PDF)
- Centrally tracking all billing and collections activity
- Client portal that makes it easy to pay
Exceptions and More Exceptions!
Getting the bills out is like working your way through a complicated corn maze, but instead of corn stalks and hay bales, it’s all the exceptions created by billing attorneys and the needs of clients that you must navigate. Automating this with workflows with appropriate oversight saves 4-6 days per billing cycle.
Another challenge is when billing attorneys send final bills out. Workflows enable attorneys and/or their delegates a final review, allowing for individual email editing. Importantly, it adds oversight so that accounting knows when the bills went out.
How Does This Improve Collections?
A/R notice workflows are the secret weapon in increasing the throughput of your collections team. Based on attorney, client and matter preferences, automated workflows put the follow-up together with consistent, professional messaging with overview by collection professionals and/or the billing attorneys and their delegates.
Next, if you’re not proactively using online payments, well, now is the time. You need to eliminate barriers to paying, and payment links that make it easy to pay—well, we’ve found over and over again that if you make it easier for clients to pay, they’ll pay faster and more often.
Getting Strategic
First, we create significant time savings by implementing invoices-to-cash automated workflows. That provides both the toolset and the bandwidth to tackle the second step: moving up the Collections Maturity Model.
The Collections Maturity Model provides a measuring stick for understanding your firm’s collections process. It is not unusual for firms to be stuck at Level 2 (or even Level 1 – truly scary). If you’ve made it higher—congrats! Without a comprehensive automation approach, it takes significant effort and process to maintain Level 3.
Invoices-to-cash is your escape plan from the haunted house of ad hoc processes to a well-managed, predictable system.
Escape the Fright
Collections Season can be a stressful and scary time for everyone in the firm. But, right now, this issue has the partners’ attention—you can not only have an impact for this year but set the stage for next year and ever after.
Never have to face this scary prospect again! Learn more about BillingQ Invoices-to-Cash and PayQ NextGen Online Payments.
Author
Bill Bice
CEO | Zebraworks
Recognized as a legal tech industry visionary, receiving Thomson’s innovator of the year award. Founder of ProLaw Software (acquired by Thomson Reuters), West km (used by 70% of the top 1000 law firms worldwide) and Exemplify (acquired by Bloomberg Law).
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