Legal Accounting Software - Typical Features

What can you expect from legal accounting software products? Time and Billing, Payroll, Accounts Payable, General Ledger and different kinds of practice management reports, at the minimum.

First of all, you should expect it to be tailored to the special needs of lawyers and law firms, incorporating facilities such as Time & Billing and Trust Accounting, and using terms familiar to you. The software will of course provide general accounting modules such as General Ledger and Payroll.

Below, we look at some typical features of legal accounting software in some more detail.

TIME & BILLING: With a time and billing feature tailored to legal practice, and integrated with other modules like General Ledger, Trust Accounting and Accounts Payable, you can not only prepare and send out your bills in a minimum of time but also link the bills to other relevant functions. The software might also enable you to accept credit card payments against the bills.

TRUST ACCOUNTING: Helps you manage trust accounts for your clients in a convenient manner, and also protects you against inadvertently contravening provisions of law.

PAYROLL: The payroll module might allow you not only to prepare payrolls for your employees but also generate different kinds of reports under tax and employment laws, such as tax withholdings. It might also have facilities for tracking employee leave.

ACCOUNTS PAYABLE: You can manage payables, adapting to differing requirements including accounting for client advanced costs and maintaining aged payables files.

PAST DUE NOTICES: Where clients are late in paying their dues, alerts can be generated and late fees can be computed automatically.

UNBILLED TIME & EXPENSES: Time and expenses incurred on a case, but not billed till a later date, can be tracked and managed with this facility.

BANK ACCOUNT SYNCHRONIZATION: You can import your online back accounts and reconcile entries with those in your general ledger bank accounts, electronically.

GENERAL LEDGER: Creating a chart of accounts customized to your practice and adopting “cash” or “accrual” systems of accounting are major features that you can expect from the General Ledger accounting module.

REPORTS: Legal accounting software products typically come with pre-defined reports that are tailored to the needs of the legal community. You can also customize the reports to provide just the information you want.

AUTOMATED ACTIONS: Report generation, past due alerts, recurring transactions and such standard actions can be automated so that these are performed without fail and in a timely manner.

FREQUENT ROUTINES: Frequently occurring activities such as check writing, printing deposit slips, etc can be facilitated in a manner to require a minimum of manual involvement. Similarly, data entry can be speeded up with frequent entry memories and using one entry to feed multiple functionalities.

INTEGRATION OF DIFFERENT MODULES: Time & Billing can be integrated with Trust Accounting, Accounts Payable and other relevant modules. Real Estate Closing can be integrated with Trust Accounting. Payroll can be integrated with General Ledger. Credit Card Processing can be integrated with client invoicing.

Legal accounting software with facilities such as those outlined above can indeed be a great productivity-aiding tool for law firms. Time and money spent on routine activities can be saved, and utilized for more productive activities.