Every year, medium-to-large-sized corporate legal departments may process thousands of invoices from law firms. When businesses manage this process without a specialized invoicing system, their team is likely to become overwhelmed, and overpayments are unavoidable. Not to mention that employees are expected to process invoices and act as the first line of defense. Even for a small legal department, the investment of man-hours to thoroughly review invoices and find errors is challenging.
You can reduce your legal spending and save up to 26% on accrual estimates by implementing a better legal expense management system in your organization. An integrated database, automated billing, a dedicated budget, and clear KPIs to measure vendor performance will help you in meeting this outcome.
Discover three key functions of expense management software that will save your team time and money in the long run.
Automatically Enforce Billing Policies
One of the quickest ways to drain money from your company is vendor noncompliance with billing guidelines or outside counsel guidelines. When legal operations teams must manually review hundreds of billing line items across spreadsheets and invoice stacks, costly errors like double billing and overbilling quickly occur.
A legal spend management system helps to simplify the identification of costly non-compliance issues and the avoidance of unnecessary legal spending.
Streamline Accrual Management
Legal expenses tracking software automates the time-consuming and error-prone process of managing accruals. It collects all law firm accruals in one place and will email firms that have not sent their unbilled estimates throughout the accrual window.
So that you can quickly review accruals, you can reach out to vendors ahead of time to discuss and adjust legal costs before the final invoice arrives. Spend management solutions can also help you optimize spending by providing reporting options that show vendor accruals vs. actuals.
Improve Spending Insights
With centralized, end-to-end visibility into your legal costs, legal expense management solutions make it easier to analyze spend data thoughtfully. This means you can include more strategic information in your spending reporting about financial trends, risks, and cost-cutting opportunities.
You can quickly obtain a clear dashboard overview of legal spending and drill down into various critical aspects such as spending by practice area, timekeeper, and UTBMS codes. Expense tracking software also integrates with other tools used by legal operations, resulting in real-time spend data updates.
While some businesses are worried about implementing legal technology due to the upfront costs, doing so will hurt your bottom line much more in the long run. Leading technology law firms and business service firms are far more likely to report higher profits than transitioning or trailing firms. Visit Zaggle EMS, an all-in-one spend management software to discover how it can help your company manage business expenses more effectively, saving time and money. Contact us today to schedule a demo!
