Legal Accounting Features
Electronic Postings
The cash room will make light work of entering day to day transactions with LawPro’s easy to use posting routine that cuts down on data entry time and helps eliminate errors. One entry of an amount updates all elements of the transaction, standard narratives pick up details from the matter record and the forecast balance shows straight away what the effect of the posting will be on the current balance.
Nominal Ledger
LawPro allows you to build your chart of accounts to suit your circumstances. It is a period based accounting system meaning that you can continue to finalise month or yearend accounts while progressing with daily postings. Handling recurring transactions such as rent and rates, VAT returns, cheque printing and keeping on top of credit control are all functions provided by LawPro to make life easier for an accounts department and firm wide management.
Bank Reconciliation
Reconciliation of bank accounts including designated deposit accounts is normally a time consuming and tedious process, but not with LawPro – auto matching of transactions, importing, sorting and searching of electronic statements all cut the time and effort required for completion.
Billing
Many law firms continue to rely on traditional manual approaches to capturing billing information and creating the bill to a client. Coloured debit and credit slips are handwritten and shuffled around the office to be deciphered and keyed into the accounts system by the cash room staff, who then print out the resulting detail for someone else to type into a bill and do the arithmetic before printing the bill and giving it back to the accounts department to post to the accounts system. LawPro is designed to remove all the pain from this billing process just with a few simple adjustments to the way you work.
The render bill screen offers a suggested name and address for the bill and shows the value of billable time recorded plus any disbursements billable to the client. These entries can be overridden and adjusted to suit. LawPro can also keep track of billable activities so that circumstances such as block court fees or fixed priced conveyancing work can have values set up and brought forward for inclusion on the bill.
Interim Billing
LawPro also provides an auto billing function that allows you to generate bills automatically based on criteria and triggers that you define, for example when work in progress exceeds a particular value.