Raising the Bar: Payment Practices that Boost Productivity for Law Firms

Running a law firm is hectic and stressful, and filled with paperwork. Law practitioners juggle their time managing multiple clients, contract revisions and court-enforced mandates and deadlines. Office staff must ensure that the legal team has the information and tools necessary to quickly address client needs. Furthermore, when it comes to the financial side of the business, partners require access to reports and analytics to measure performance that helps drive decisions.  

Let’s take a look at best practices your law firm can implement to help you gain efficiencies, streamline operations, and improve back-office tasks by using a secure, cloud-connected solution like PayJunction.

Go Digital

Paper processes are time consuming, inefficient and wasteful. Many firms still rely on old payment systems that support paper receipts and batch reports.

Instead of filing away every paper receipt, you can streamline and improve your recordkeeping by going paperless. Everything in the PayJunction solution is digital. Invoices are linked with client payment details and securely stored in the cloud, eliminating the need to manually print, store and retrieve paper records. This means that instead of digging through a filing cabinet for a past transaction, you can search for a receipt with a few clicks, using a client’s name, transaction date and even a custom field related to a specific case.

Streamline End-of-Day and Bank Reconciliation

The time spent consolidating sales receipts, printing batch reports, preparing deposits, and reconciling ACH and credit card activity with bank deposits, and processing statements adds up. Plus, law firms must ensure that processing solutions can deposit to both your IOLTA trust account for client funds, and your operating account for fees earned. Fees can only be debited from your operating account in accordance with IOLTA rules.

With a Virtual Terminal, you can set up separate accounts for different areas of your firm — family law, bankruptcy, criminal defense, estate planning — as well as direct us how to split deposits for Trust vs. Operating bank accounts. Even better, since all payments captured in-person, over the phone or online are consolidated in one management console, your firm can simplify end-of-day procedures, reconciliation and reporting across departments and locations.

And when it comes to bank account reconciliation, you’ll know immediately if your deposit reports match bank records.  You don’t have to wait until the end of the month to receive processing and bank statements in the mail to line up the batch and deposit totals. PayJunction enables you to accomplish your accounting goals with real-time visibility.

Gain Business Insights

Getting insight into your firm’s performance over time can require hours of preparation. Even understanding it on a day-to-day basis requires manual work, which eats up precious time for office management.

Proactively analyzing financial data to gain insights into client trends and legal team performance metrics helps you and your partners make better-informed decisions. PayJunction's built-in reporting software tallies your billing data for you, providing you with meaningful financial reports that empower your business and help you plan for the future. 

Manage From Anywhere

A cloud-connected solution like PayJunction allows you to log in and manage payments from any browser-connected device. The value of this became more evident during the COVID-19 crisis as law firms adjusted to working remotely. PayJunction reached out to law firms that process with us, and learned that 43% stated that “Allowing staff to access from anywhere” helped them better manage the business remotely. 

You can track the status of all outstanding invoices, email electronic receipts, and set up new client billing information. The ability to manage a multi-location firm through one single platform simplifies bookkeeping.

Additionally, not everyone in the practice should have access to the same technology. Under the lens of audit and compliance, it’s increasingly important to grant system access, and define user rights and roles to lower the chances of risk or fraud.

It’s Time to Raise the Bar

You need a smart, reliable payment solution that delivers a better client experience, improves operations and scales to meet your needs. Talk to PayJunction. We promise to raise the bar at your practice.

Which boost in payment productivity does your firm need the most? Tell us in the comments section below!