How time capture plugs profit leakages according to Advanced
To be a successful, profitable business, identifying and plugging profit leakages is of great importance. Profit leakages can take many forms, from discrepancies in billable hours to overlooked overheads and administrative costs, causing substantial drain on a firm’s resources. It can lead to significant revenue losses and undermine a law firm’s financial stability.
Time is money
Up to sixty percent of firms identify missing or inconsistent time recording as their biggest form of profit leakage, making it of paramount importance in restoring profitability and billing efficiency. These inefficiencies can range from errors in timesheet entries to missing critical billing information or even discrepancies due to lack of standardisation across different billing processes.
Not only is manually filling timesheets tedious for fee earners, but mistakes will also inevitable creep in. It’s easy to forget to record the start time, the break time taken, or the time spent on multiple cases in a single task. You may also miss important information critical to billing, such as tracking external costs like expert witness fees or disbursements. A slow and inefficient process means time recording practices won’t be kept up to date, and billable time is lost, revenue is reduced, and efficiency dwindles.
Internal standardisation around time capture, particularly in large law firms can also create issues with accuracy. Fee earners may record time in different formats or use different systems, making it challenging to transfer information across billing platforms and causing inconsistencies in billable amounts.
The most significant problem, however, is the room for human error. When you’re working under tight deadlines, it’s easy for timekeeping tasks to slip under the radar. According to one study, law firms can lose up to 30% of revenue every year from not recording billable time, through time lost on other tasks and administrative duties. By not having an automated system in place for time recording, firms are adding further stress and strain on already busy fee earners.
It’s time to plug the leak
The good news is that there is a ready-to-implement plug for this type of profit leakage – our specialist time recording and validation software. The ability to record your time across multiple devices, online and offline, and through various different programs allows your fee-earners to automate the entire time recording process, reducing the lag between time capture and billing, maximising the amount billed, and ensuring fees are accurate.
Time Capture, Advanced’s market-leading time recording solution, offers a number of time saving processes. It’s intelligent, intuitive features such as time gap recovery helps users auto-populate historic timesheets based on their digital footprint – meaning less chance of missed entries.
Time recording software is designed specifically to improve time capture accuracy and make the process easier for fee earners. Features such as SmartTimers make it simple to quickly start, stop, and restart a new timer, allowing fee earners to better track and record time between cases while lowering capture administration. This ensures that missed deadlines, missed calls, or lost paperwork no longer equate to lost revenue. Fee earners just need to review time entries once they are completed, rather than tracking as they go.
Accurate timekeeping is critical for law firms to operate profitably. A lack of standardisation, too many hours spent on administrative tasks, and errors arising from manual time capture have a massive impact on law firms’ bottom line. However, with time capture software, these issues can be resolved, and profitability can be maximised. Implementing the right time capture software can help improve productivity, processes and, ultimately, your firm’s financial health.
