Heading into the new year everybody begins to assess the current year and how they can improve. It happens in our personal lives- maybe it’s losing a couple of pounds, spending more time with your family, or reading more.
In business, we all make resolutions too. For many law firms a great resolution, whether they know it or not, is to tighten up their legal accounting.
Reconcile Your Firm’s Accounts With More Frequency
This may sound like a vague New Year’s Resolution, and in all honesty, it is. There are many ways your firm could tighten up it’s legal accounting, but one major thing your firm can do is increase the frequency in which you reconcile your accounts.
Depending on your jurisdiction you may be required to perform a 3-way reconciliation on a monthly or bi-monthly schedule. While it is required that this process is carried out every 30 or 60 days, it should be done much more frequently. A case can be made that your firm should reconcile all accounts on a daily basis. The problem is that this can be a long and arduous process, and unless you have the right legal accounting solution in place that houses all of your legal accounting data, you would be spending far too much time trying to complete this process on a daily basis.
Migrating Your Legal Accounting Data
A key step in increasing the frequency with which you reconcile your accounts is automating the 3-way reconciliation process. In order to be able to do this, your firm would need to migrate all of it’s legal accounting data into a practice management system like CosmoLex.
In the past migrating legal accounting data was done using two different methods.The first method was the full reset.
Using this method the firm closes out all of their accounts and open new ones. They lose all historical transaction data, cost themselves time and money in opening and closing accounts, and even after all of this is done- there is a good chance that the data is inaccurate.
The second method that many firms have tried to use is an automated data migration process. The problem here is that there is a large number of legal accounting solutions out there, but they do not share a common data format. Going this route will require your firm to convert files and format types, making for a very messy process.
Migrate Your Legal Accounting Data To CosmoLex & Reconcile Your Accounts With Ease
CosmoLex is the only legal accounting solution that has made data migration easy for law firms. Firms looking to increase the frequency in which they reconcile their accounts should first migrate all of their legal accounting data into CosmoLex. CosmoLex has taken what used to be a painful process of migrating your firm’s legal accounting data and simplified it. All your firm needs to do is import their electronic bank statements. From their, CosmoLex can then automate the Three-Way Reconciliation Process, making it easy for your firm to spot errors and accounting inconsistencies as they occur, not at the end of the month.
