Far too many solo and small legal practices utilise outdated and ineffective software for their law accounting needs. If you are one of them, you could be putting your firm at a significant disadvantage. Inadequate legal accounting software can lead to excessive amounts of time spent on accounting tasks, as well as the potential for increased billing errors. Whether you are stuck in the stone-age of paper systems or using accounting software that is not tailored to the practice of law, it is time you make the change to effective legal accounting methods and here are six reasons why:

1. Expense tracking

You cannot have a successful law practice without detailed knowledge of where money is being spent. From your firm’s overhead costs to expenses incurred on behalf of a client, you need to constantly maintain an accurate record of these costs. When there is no adequate legal accounting software in place, your solicitors and staff may attempt to track expenses by saving receipts or writing payments in a ledger.

This type of practice is potentially problematic for a number of reasons:

• Receipts and pieces of paper can go missing, leaving you with unaccounted for expenses.
• The memory is unreliable. You or your staff may forget to enter an expense into the ledger or enter it incorrectly.
• This type of data can disappear. A ledger or envelope of receipts can be lost or even destroyed.

2. Accurate trust accounting

Trust accounting is a major responsibility for solicitors, as clients rely on their lawyers to hold and keep their funds in trust. But trust accounting comes along with a lot of rules and responsibilities, so it is vitally important to keep accurate records and follow your industry guidelines. Failing to comply with trust account regulations can lead to serious problems with your clients and the approved regulators.

The right legal accounting software takes these specific rules into consideration, allowing you to collect, track, and reconcile all money going into and out of your client trust accounts. It may provide safeguards to ensure that funds are earned before they are withdrawn and help you in the prevention of overdrawn accounts.

3. Legal specifics

QuickBooks is one of the most widely used accounting software packages among businesses across the board, and that includes the legal profession. Many lawyers choose to use this software to handle their firm accounting needs. While QuickBooks offers many benefits, it is not customised for law firm usage and the specific needs of a legal practice. For example:

• To segregate client trust accounts from firm operating accounts in QuickBooks, you need to establish a separate company profile within the program. Moving funds from a client’s trust account for invoice payment also requires extra steps, which can be particularly cumbersome for firms making 10 or 20 of these transactions each month.
• QuickBooks also requires you to manually review trust account balances and send out replenishment requests to clients.
• QuickBooks does not offer the mobile time tracking services that busy, modern law offices need.

Find out why many practices have chosen to move away from QuickBooks to Sage Intacct by reading this Case Study from Legal Monkeys. By switching software Legal Monkey freed up 6 days/month from tedious accounting and reporting tasks and shortened monthly financial close by 5 days.

4. Invoicing

Law firm invoicing can be extremely time-consuming and tedious without the right legal accounting software. Your solicitors may have to look back and review client matter tasks in order to submit their times to support staff. Your support staff may have to go around the office trying to round up time tracking records from the attorneys. Then, once all of that is completed, your staff has to sit down with an outdated, inefficient accounting system to create invoices and manually send them out to clients. The entire process can be unreasonably time-consuming and filled with opportunities for inaccuracies.

When it comes to subscriptions, specialised contracts, and recurring billing services–and the added complexities of revenue recognition compliance–Sage Intacct is the cloud financials solution finance trusts. We provide the automated workflows, smart revenue recognition, and seamless data flows that streamline the revenue cycle across your organisation.

5. Reporting options

A large part of accounting is the ability to review your firm’s financial position on a regular basis, identifying areas for potential improvements. Solicitors need accounting software that allows them to run numerous reports about the firm’s billing practices, realisation, accounts receivable, and expenses.

With Sage Intacct, financial reporting and analysis options are almost limitless. Compare operational statistics with financial metrics. Check summary roll-up figures for multiple entities—even if it’s only mid-month. Drill down to source transactions for granular transparency instantly. Flag trends and spot exceptions with powerful report visualisations.

With Sage Intacct dashboards and reporting, you can compare performance across any business driver that matters to you. You get 150 built-in financial reports as well as the ability to easily create custom reports. Forget Excel reporting, waiting for customised projects, or relying on external tools.

6. Time tracking

Accurate and timely time tracking is crucial to the success of your legal practice, so it is also a top reason why you need the right legal accounting software. Gone are the days of jotting down times and tasks on the corners of legal pads or sticky notes. This type of time tracking is unreliable and often inaccurate, leading to the overbilling or underbilling of clients. You are either going to damage your clients and reputation by overcharging clients or damage your firm’s bottom line by undercharging for your valuable services.

Sage Intacct makes it painless to manage time and expenses. Your employees can enter time and expense data anytime, anywhere. Managers get instant alerts to review and approve reports. Employees receive prompt reimbursement in the right currency.

Your legal practice has specific accounting needs, and you need a legal accounting software that adequately meets those needs. X3 Consulting takes pride in providing solicitors and law firms with comprehensive and useful accounting tools. Click here to register to watch a 20 minute demo of Sage Intacct to find out more.

Customers and leading research organisations agree that Intacct’s position as market leader is well deserved. The system consistently adds significant value by automating complex business processes, reducing manual effort and empowering decision making.

By providing rich financial and operational insights, Sage Intacct can help drive your business growth. A typical example of the impact of this leading accounting and financial management system is that many organisations have been able to reduce their period end close time by 79%, helping them focus on what’s really important.

Built for finance, by finance; Sage Intacct has 4 main features providing the best software solution for accounting…

1. Core Financials – Powerful automation of complex processes and multi-dimensional data analysis.

Accounts Payable – Streamline your workflows across the AP cycle and gain real-time visibility with 24/7 access from any device with an internet connection. Save thousands in pounds and hours by automating manual accounts payable processes and eradicating inefficient workflows.

Accounts Receivable – Automate your processes, email your invoices and offer a variety of payment options. Gain the ability to generate recurring invoices for easy subscription management, attach customer documents to transactions for better record keeping, and so much more.

Cash Management – Improve your cashflow by accessing a complete picture of your cash footprint and working capital. Always be in control of cash, and for easier management, import statements from your financial institutions and automatically reconcile your current, savings and credit card accounts in minutes.

General Ledger – Benefit from multi-entry, multi-dimensional financial visibility, scalability and flexibility to thrive without limits. View reports and dashboards across any combination of drivers and metrics. With dimension values you can capture the unique business context of transactions, operational measures and budgets, and see the most relevant views of business performance.

Order Management – Save time, improve accuracy and increase profitability. This software removes manual work from multi-channel order management and can adapt to your unique workflow and pricing requirements. Data automatically flows to order fulfilment, billing, revenue accounting and more.

Purchasing – Radically reduce invoice-to-payment time by 50% and eliminate hours of monotonous transactional data entry. Create structured, predefined transaction and purchase approval workflows that increase purchasing speed, accuracy and efficiency. With a comprehensive suite of dashboards and reporting tools you can monitor budget versus actuals, analyse costs and gain visibility into your entire procure-to-pay cycle.

2. Advanced functionality – Everything you need to increase productivity, make timely decisions and drive your business forward.

With additional modules, you’re always ready for what’s next.

Fixed Assets – Fixed assets and core accounting create an automated asset management system.

Inventory Management – Track, value and manage stock while maintaining accuracy at every step.

Multi-Entity and Global Consolidations – Easily manage complex financials for multiple locations and entities.

Project Accounting – Manage costs and revenue, keep projects on time and maintain profitability.

Revenue Recognition – Account for multiple revenue types such as subscriptions, licenses and services.

V.A.T. – Automatically calculate VAT (UK) or Sales Tax (US) with a built-in Avatax integration.

Spend Management – Govern company purchasing versus budget and never exceed spending caps.

Time and Expense Management – Keep your team focused on client goals, rather than tedious administrative tasks.

Vendor Payment Services – Power payments on American Express Global Commercial Services’ platform.

3. Dashboards and Reporting – Financial dashboards and reporting software that turns data into insight

Sage Intacct’s innovative general ledger includes 8 dimensions to capture the business context of your transactions, operational measures, and budgets. That means you can quickly access or create reports that analyse real-time business performance by business drivers – without managing a complex chart of accounts.

Our 8 predefined dimensions are ready to go out of the box, including department, item, and employee. And it’s easy to add more dimensions to reflect unique business drivers and take your financial reports to the next level.

Best-in-class financial reporting platform – With Sage Intacct’s financial reports, you get the agility and flexibility to quickly slice-and-dice the details that matter to all key stakeholders: investors, executives, sales, finance, and other departments. And when you have new questions, dive deeper with custom reports, dashboards, or visualisations. Reach peak performance with fast answers for confident decision-making.

Improve business agility – Most financial management systems can only handle financial data, but Sage Intacct tracks and reports both financial and operational data—like square footage, available hospital beds, SaaS metrics, or other granular measures that matter to your business. With all your financial and operational data in one place, Sage Intacct’s best-in-class multi-dimensional visibility enables you to slash time spent checking the accuracy of your financial data so you can start making strategic decisions that will impact your business.

Financial Reporting – With Sage Intacct, financial reporting and analysis options are almost limitless. Compare operational statistics with financial metrics. Check summary roll-up figures for multiple entities — veven if it’s only mid-month. Drill down to source transactions for granular transparency instantly. Flag trends and spot exceptions with powerful report visualisations. With Sage Intacct dashboards and reporting, you can compare performance across any business driver that matters to you. You get 150 built-in financial reports as well as the ability to easily create custom reports. Forget Excel reporting, waiting for customised projects, or relying on external tools.

Deeper insights – Sage Intacct’s interactive custom report writer lets you easily create real-time reports that tackle your toughest reporting needs. Get the insights you need in seconds to address complex issues and respond to market changes. Start with hierarchical field selection, drag-and-drop design, and automatic conditional formatting, grouping, and subtotals. Then go to the next level with calculated columns with calendar and math functions, conditional logic, rolling sums and aggregations, and pivot tables. And when you need specifics, just drill down to transaction details.

4. Billing – Untangle billing and revenue complexities

When it comes to subscriptions, specialised contracts, and recurring billing services–and the added complexities of revenue recognition compliance–Sage Intacct is the cloud financials solution finance trusts. We provide the automated workflows, smart revenue recognition, and seamless data flows that streamline the revenue cycle across your organisation.

Contract and subscription billing – Streamline workflows across the AP cycle with exceptional speed and efficiency.

Project costing and billing – Bid smarter and bill faster with less revenue leakage.

Revenue recognition – Automate complex revenue accounting, configure expense amortisation and more.

Why choose Sage Intacct Software for Accounting?

Leading cloud accounting and financial management solution, Sage Intacct, helps Finance Managers and CFOs access integrated management and financial reporting across their business entities allowing you to focus on growth and drive. This unique software for accounting solution provides the automation and controls around billing, accounting and reporting, whilst eliminating errors, allowing you to stay audit-ready and focus on what’s important to your business.

At the heart of Sage Intacct is customer success. On the leading business software review platform, G2, (formerly G2 Crowd), Sage Intacct has the highest customer satisfaction score for both accounting software and ERP Suites.

Are you interested in Sage Intacct and want to learn more? Why not take a coffee break demo today or contact us by email at info@x3consulting.com to speak to one of our consultants.

REGISTER FOR THE DEMO

If you’d like to find out more about choosing the right software for your accounting business, why not download our 2020 Buyers Guide, the ultimate guide to accounting and financial management software. Fill in the form below and we will email you a copy of the white paper.

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TAKE CONTROL OF YOUR BOTTOM LINE

When it comes to financial management, not all Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions are created equal. Sage X3 software for finance and accounting has been built from the ground up with multi-company and inter-company accounting in mind. Rest assured you’ll have complete oversight of your different business streams, accounts and reporting requirements from a sophisticated finance ERP.

Key Benefits

Sage X3 for complex finance does everything that an ambitious Finance Manager would expect, and much more.

International Tax Compliance

Automate tax calculations and manage reporting and declarations as per the relevant legislation. Manage VAT, BAS, GST and other global tax requirements.

General Ledger

Define for each ledger multiple analytical dimensions that can be shared or specific to several entities, to manage regional, departmental, cost centre, financial metric reporting.

Manage Assets

Manage company assets (owned, leased, rented) including depreciation context and plans. Conform with IFRS16

Journals

Create an unlimited number of journals, choose from pre- defined types or create user-defined templates to automate recurring or reversing journal entries. Attach supplementary notes and explanatory files (spreadsheets etc) to the journal for future auditor analysis.

Reporting

Profit and loss, cash flow, balance sheet, ageing, trial balance and more, with options for creating and designing financial reports.

Dashboards

See at a glance important metrics, analytics information and KPI reporting with lists, charts all customisable and delivered real time.

Expense Management

Define and control expenses linked to purchase requests and employee reimbursements, with electronic approval processes.

Banking Management

Manage bank or cash entries, automate payment processing, inter-site transactions and bank statement reconciliations.

WHY OPT FOR SAGE X3?

• Sage X3 is made for medium to large businesses, built for genuine integration of information across your organisation to reduce silos, duplication and inefficiency.
• Comes with built-in financial management KPIs, dashboards and role-based reporting tools for CFOs and Finance Managers as standard.
• Your choice to deploy in the cloud or on-premise with a fast implantation turnaround and web- based interfaces that are mobile-responsive.
• Sage and X3 Consulting have a long track record of success, with demonstrated capability in financial management solutions — your project will be managed with competence and care.

DOWNLOAD our Finance guide to find out more about how to gain control over your finance function or contact a member of our team using the contact form.

Or you can take a product tour direct from Sage.