Firm Central’s New Enhanced Reporting: The Answer To The Small-Firm Profitability Problem

Small law firms and solo practitioners face additional challenges in a market that’s already demanding for lawyers across the profession. On top of the pressures that are inherent to practicing law, small-firm lawyers also have to juggle the demands of running a business.

Thankfully, Thomson Reuters gave us Firm Central, practice management software specifically designed to help small practices perfect the difficult balancing act between lawyer and businessperson. From matter management to keeping track of deadlines to billing your time, Firm Central streamlined the process of running a business while offering top-notch legal services to clients. But even with the administrative side of things under control, many small firms still struggle with profitability, which is the key to keeping any business alive. Practicing law and running a business leaves little time for tracking your performance, analyzing your revenues, and coming up with strategies for building your firm and attracting new clients.

Firm Central has stepped up once again to fill that void. Thanks to new enhanced reporting features, you can now easily access the metrics you need to analyze your firm’s profitability, your key performance indicators, and your potential business development opportunities, all from the same practice management tool where you’re already running your business.

Key Metrics At Your Fingertips
Firm Central’s Enhanced Reporting gives you helpful analysis of your profitability right within your daily practice management platform. Simply click on the new “Reporting” tab to get started.

As user-friendly as it is attractive, the new reporting dashboard gives you a quick and easy-to-understand visualization of many of your most important performance indicators. You can now see the big picture of everything from your overall revenue to your most profitable clients, all in one easy place.

Under a quick year-to-date summary of your financials, there are a series of helpful widgets that break down your most important indicators of profitability. In all, Firm Central provides you with eight different widgets that present a snapshot of your firm’s financial performance. These include:

• Revenue – the total revenue you’ve invoiced and collected so far this year
• Current Work In Progress – the total value of the time that has been recorded for ongoing matters but not yet billed
• Billed –the total amount invoiced year-to-date
• Collected – the amount of your invoiced total that has actually been paid year-to-date
• Revenue Year to Date – the firm’s total revenue for the current year, separated out by month
• Aging Accounts Receivable – the amounts you have outstanding, broken out by how long they’ve been outstanding (not limited to the current year)
• Top Clients By Revenue – presents your firm’s top ten clients based on revenue over the last 365 days (includes both collected and outstanding amounts)
• Revenue By Practice Area – a year-to-date breakdown of your total revenue by individual practice area

With just a glance at your new dashboard, you can see which clients, practice areas, and times of year are most profitable for your firm, as well as things that hinder your profitability, like where your collections tend to lag. The ability to focus on the individual elements that impact your firm’s revenues is the first step to not only understanding your overall profitability, but taking the steps necessary to boost it. While amassing this kind of information used to be a time-consuming and often painstaking process, Firm Central makes it simple. Enhanced Reporting gives you the quick and easy insight you need to stay on top of your firm’s finances while continuing to serve your clients.

It’s All In The Reports
In addition to the visual information you get from the widgets, Firm Central now allows you to run detailed reports on nearly every aspect of your firm’s profitability for a more in-depth analysis. In all, there are currently 10 different time and billing reports that you can run, with more to be added in the future.

From accounts receivable to individual employee billings to write-offs, you have an easy way to tackle the individual factors that impact your firm’s overall finances, allowing you to see where you’re excelling and where you could stand to make a few improvements. Just by clicking “Run,” the reports are pulled up instantaneously on your screen – no need to export to a different program or wait for data to be pulled in from other sources.

Better yet, the reports are entirely customizable to suit your individual needs. From an aesthetic perspective, you can format them in a number of ways so that the final product is presented in the way that’s most useful to you. In terms of the data, you can limit it to the information you most care about or want to focus on at a given moment. And if you do decide to export the reports, you have several file formats to choose from, including PDF, Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and formats that can easily be embedded into websites, all with a simple click.

Between the new dashboard, the customization options, and the automated-reporting functionality, your practice management tool just became the best weapon in your arsenal for understanding and increasing your profitability.

Let Enhanced Reporting Enhance Your Profitability
At the end of the day, law firms are businesses and profitability is crucial to survival. Firm Central’s Enhanced Reporting gives you a simple way to identify business trends, top clients, and top practice areas, allowing you to maximize your marketing dollars and target the work that will help grow your firm. By having a better way to keep an eye on your accounts receivable, you can stay on top of collections issues and make sure you’re taking the best actions to get paid for the work you’ve done. Real-time metrics also allow you to make better decisions on staffing and set business goals that make financial sense.

When understanding your finances is this easy, there’s no excuse not to do it. Start enhancing your firm’s profitability today with Enhanced Reporting by Firm Central. Learn more and start a free trial today!