Should You Consider Outsourcing Your Billing Work?
Savvy firms have learned to outsource their office needs, like virtual receptionists or contract paralegals. Is it time to consider outsourcing your billing too?
See if this little double-edged sword scenario sounds familiar. Your firm is doing so well, with so many clients that you spend too much time on billing work each month. Perhaps a full day or two is dedicated to drafting invoices, reviewing and sending to your clients. That’s one or two days of non-billable, non-revenue time.
But…your firm is not so busy that you can hire a billing manager on even a part-time basis, let alone have enough work for 40 hours a week.
You may feel stuck in the middle. Doing so well, you’re sucking valuable billable time away to take care of administrative tasks related to a growing business. But you’re not doing well enough to hire an extra body just yet. And hiring a CPA to do your billing seems like overkill, not to mention, expensive.
Plus, let’s talk about the third rail here. You hate billing day. I mean really despise the first of the month. You didn’t spend those long hours cooped up in a law library because you love accounting. No, your passion is practicing law.
There is a solution to solve there myriad of issues. It’s called Outsourced Legal Billing. Let experts in legal billing practice THEIR passion so you can get back to your first love.
If you haven’t heard this term before, it’s because this a relatively new phenomenon in the legal industry. The idea of outsourcing other office needs like virtual receptionists or other office functions, is commonplace. So why not your billing work?
The Solution: Step-by-Step
TimeSolv, a web-based time and billing software, has been pioneering this practice for close to a decade. It’s breathtakingly easy. Here’s how it works for you as a law firm.
- You input your time and expenses as usual (in this case, using TimeSolv’s various time and expense entry methods) for your various clients and their matters.
- At the end of the billing cycle, TimeSolv’s billing experts create draft bills for each of your clients.
- Each managing attorney then gets those pre-bills emailed to them for review.
- Revisions are made, sent back to your billing experts who send final, updated bills for approval
- After final approval, invoices are sent through whatever mechanism you’ve set up for each client like email, first class mail or LEDES submittal
- When you receive payment, just enter those payments into TimeSolv and your billing person will allocate the payments to the correct invoice.
- TimeSolv also provides whatever custom reports are needed by you
When you look at the steps involved, you can see where the time savings is for you and your firm. You no longer have to deal with the work of aggregating the invoices into drafts, you simply review and send. Can you see the billable hours flowing back into your day?
Those increased billable hours will more than make up for the cost of this billing service, by the way. The math is pretty easy to figure out. Even gaining one more hour of billable time each month would cover the use of the software and the service.
A lot of attorneys are reluctant to give up the billing duties to outside sources. After all, billing is truly the lifeblood of the firm. No invoices = no revenue. You can see the shift in thinking should be no billable time = no revenue. Let’s fun back into your billing day…because you’re not doing the billing! Let’s give you more time to work with your clients and grow your business.
Made for Firms That Do E-Billing
Firms that are required to submit LEDES invoices to clearinghouses are liable to gain the most from outsourcing their billing. Most services, including TimeSolv, will not only to the submissions for you, but they’ll handle any appeals assistance that is needed if invoices or time entries are rejected. Once again, you don’t need to spiral down the time suck that is LEDES appeals when you have your billing experts on board.
Time is money for law firms. There’s no way around that. If your firm is not making every effort to offload non-billable time duties from your timekeepers, you’re missing huge opportunities for real revenue and firm growth!
Scott Clasen is the director of marketing at TimeSolv Corporation, a Minnesota-based company providing leading class billing, timekeeping and project management tools for law firms since 1999. TimeSolv’s web-based platform is compatible for both PCs and Macs, and offers an iOS and Android app.
