Be in complete control of your legal expenses and focus on your core activities.
Application Level Security
Tracking, controlling, and categorizing expenses is essential to operating any successful law firm. Unfortunately, expense management for law firms is something that is often neglected until a file closes. With so many other important issues to deal with, it’s no wonder the tedious and boring task of managing law firm expenses is a low priority. Fortunately, CloudLex’s Expense Manager gives you all the control and insight you need while also taking away the drudgery. Read on to learn how Expense Manager can benefit your firm.
Control which law firm expenses go to Quickbooks and when
Expense Manager seamlessly integrates with QuickBooks. Expense Manager is a uniquely structured app. It allows the entire firm to contribute data without requiring that every staff member have full access to Expense Manager or the firm’s accounting software. Your firm’s super administrator (typically the Managing Partner) can choose who has full access to the Expense Manager, such as a CFO, Office Manager, etc. The entire staff continues to enter legal expenses as they usually would. However, the firm’s CFO or Finance Manager can then review and push expense entries to QuickBooks as and when desired. No more manual data entry, making your legal matter management system a breeze! To summarize, Expense Manager allows you to:
● Sync expenses with QuickBooks
● Manage and track everything in one place – both expenses and matter progress
● Record outstanding liabilities and sync them directly with QuickBooks
● Ensure upcoming expenses get paid on time
Keep law firm operating expenses on track
The Expense Manager enables the law firm to keep track of legal expenses for every matter, which is critical for personal injury firms. Team members record an expense in a specific matter. They then select the expenses they wish to add to the Expense Manager and export/push the selected expenses to the Expense Manager. This can be done every time an expense is entered or on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis – whatever works best for your firm (though we recommend doing this at least once a day, so you always have real-time information at your fingertips).
Firm CFOs then use the expenses that have been pushed into the Expense Manager to manage all their law firm expenses (accounts payable) in one place. Your finance team can track expenditures by matter, see newly added expenses and requests for payment, etc. They can then approve expenses (and record payments made) or request further information and track what’s been paid versus what legal expenses are still outstanding. Our Expense Manager app:
● Makes expense filing super easy for the entire team
● Alleviates the burden on your finance team by minimizing manual data entry
● Allows you to prioritize and streamline spending
● Helps reduce unnecessary spending
● Improves cash flow; by having more insight, you can determine how best to invest in your cases
Increase visibility, efficiency, and growth
Expense Manager enables seamless coordination between your entire staff and your bookkeeper, CFO, Accountant, etc. As already explained, any team member with legal expenses to record enters those expenses in the relevant matter or client intake and then pushes them to the Expense Manager. Your bookkeeper or CFO reviews, approves, pays, etc., and pushes the expenses to QuickBooks. Your CPA/Accountant then accesses the firm’s accounting software to prepare reports, tax filings, and more. The more frequently your team pushes entries to the Expense Manager, the better your CFO/Bookkeeper (and you) can manage expenses. The more frequently your CFO/Bookkeeper pushes to your accounting software, the better informed your Accountant will be (and the easier their job will become). With this nearly automatic ability to move expense records up the chain (with the simple click of a button), the time lag in updating internal books and getting vital information to your Accountant nearly disappears.
Expense Manager also eliminates the need for manual entry of expenses (and the resulting bottleneck that always occurs). Even better, it eliminates the need to maintain two separate systems that don’t really “talk” to each other (and, simultaneously, that second round of manual expense entry that is often a part of expense management for law firms). Finance-related bottlenecks will virtually disappear overnight. Expense processing will become nearly instantaneous. You and your finance team can see exactly what is being spent and where giving better control and insight. Your Accountant will no longer be badgering you and your finance team for missing records (and making their job easier, reducing your cost).
Don’t wait to get all the benefits that come with legal Expense Manager, including:
● Reducing manual data entry
● A user-centric design and experience
● Better coordination between all team members and your Bookkeeper, CFO, and Accountant
● Go paperless with a secure cloud-based expense management system
● Happier staff all around!
“Simple and affordable. CloudLex continues to impress with its intuitive updates.”
Matthew Salimbene
Matthew J. Salimbene, PC | New York
Expense Management for Law Firms FAQs
What is an Expense Manager?
Expense Manager is one of the most important applications that simplifies managing and tracking expenses within CloudLex and easily syncs them with QuickBooks.
Users simply have to select expenses they have tracked in respective matters and push them to the expense manager with a click. This application is controlled by access management, which means the firm’s managing partner can decide which CloudLex users in the firm will have access to the expense manager.
Do I need expense management software to serve my clients better?
One of the critical challenges faced by personal injury law firms is managing their expenses. With the increasing demand for legal services, bigger matters & settlement sizes, plaintiff personal injury law firms are under pressure to do more with less.
Clients are your firm’s most valuable assets and keeping them satisfied should be your top priority. Your firm’s personal injury case management software should help with that objective and allow you to gain insight into your clients’ minds.
Expense Manager allows managing partners and CFOs to manage all their law firm’s expenses in one place (track and process new requests, track what’s been paid vs. what’s outstanding). From the expense manager, users can record the expense, which will then be synced with QuickBooks, where they can make the payments.
Following are some of the value propositions that help personal injury law firms to serve their clients better:
Seamless integration with QuickBooks – The expense manager offers better control over expenses by letting users decide which expenses need to be pushed into QuickBooks for timely payments. That eliminates expense leakage.
Enable Growth – Law firms can prioritize and streamline spending by reducing the expenses leakages, which further improves the cash flow and means they can invest more $$ in the cases.
Increased efficiency – The expense manager is designed to reduce manual data entry with a user-centric experience.
Access Management – Subscribing managing partner of the firm can decide which users have access to the expense manager, like the firm’s Accountant, who then pushes the expenses to QuickBooks.
How does CloudLex’s expense manager work?
Expense Manager, with seamless integration with QuickBooks, helps law firms to keep track of expenses for every matter. Once subscribed from CloudLex’s Marketplace, legal teams can record the expenses by pushing them to the expense manager; they simply have to select expenses from respective matters and add them to the expense manager. FinOps can then push the records to the integrated QuickBooks account, where they can manage the payments.
Expense Manager allows Managing Partners and CFOs to manage all their firm’s expenses in one place to track and process new requests and track what’s been paid vs. what’s outstanding.
The expense manager application is controlled by access management, which means the firm’s managing partner can decide which users will have access to the expense manager.
Does CloudLex integrate with QuickBooks?
Yes, CloudLex’s Expense Manager integrates with QuickBooks. Users can easily push/export expenses tracked in the expense manager to QuickBooks with a click.
