BillBlast, BillBlast Analytics and Benchmarking for BillBlast are a Winning Combination

Law firm CFOs carry the crucial responsibility of ensuring the financial health of the firm. The role of the CFO extends far beyond budgets and balance sheets, requiring financial leadership to focus on maximizing revenue and minimizing financial risk. The more actionable information CFO’s can leverage to inform their decisions, the better equipped they will be to proactively optimize the firm’s performance, efficiency, and bottom line.

Compliance with client billing requirements has emerged as one of the cornerstones in a firm’s ability to deliver the highest quality of financial service. When law firms are compliant with their clients’ outside counsel guidelines (OCGs), there is often a direct correlation with client satisfaction due to faster payments with fewer write-offs and deductions. Conversely, firms that fall short on OCG compliance are likely to create friction with clients and most likely suffer financially.

Aderant is dedicated to developing industry-leading legal business technology solutions to help law firm CFOs achieve their business and growth objectives.

What originated as a solution for eBilling, Aderant BillBlast has evolved into a robust bill delivery and management suite that now extends to BillBlast Analytics, and Aderant Intelligence: Benchmarking. This suite of solutions enables finance teams to achieve billing compliance, while empowering CFOs with actionable analytics and metrics to maintain their firms’ competitive edge.

The BillBlast Suite

BillBlast for Bill Delivery and Management

Firms look to BillBlast, the industry-leading solution for email and eBill delivery and status tracking, to streamline and automate the billing process. Most often, the Billing Manager is the final “sanity check” to catch and correct non-compliance issues before a bill is sent to the client. Though many billing compliance issues can be remedied at the point of time entry (with the use of a solution like iTimekeep), a core functionality within BillBlast enables validation further along in the billing process, flagging complex eBilling vendor requirements or invoicing and LEDES file formatting rules.

Bill delivery and management presents a wide range of business challenges for law firms, and BillBlast is designed to successfully navigate even the most complex billing arrangements. BillBlast enables cross-functional teams to efficiently manage the top five challenges law firms face including missing matters/matter reconciliation, rate approvals, timekeeper approvals, budgeting, and backup documentation.

BillBlast centralizes an aggregated workspace of all firm invoices ready to be distributed to the client. It highlights invoice errors that require correction prior to submission, invoices with deductions that the client does not intend to pay-in-full, unpaid invoices, and those invoices that have been approved by the client – giving the team a comprehensive and clear picture of their financial standing.

The BillBlast system verifies that bills are compliant with clients’ deadline dates, hours, and personnel limits prior to submission. This can make all the difference in the firm getting paid or not. BillBlast’s rules-based compliance functionality simplifies adherence with OCGs, effectively reducing the number of rejected invoices, write-downs, and write-offs which would have otherwise decreased the firm’s revenue. When used proactively, BillBlast shapes the matter intake process, so client billing is set up properly from the beginning.

BillBlast Analytics

Law firms issue invoices to bill clients for work performed, but in many cases, payments are delayed – why? Firms are turning to BillBlast Analytics for visibility into the cause of payment delays or decreased revenue realization, allowing them to quickly understand and correct revenue leaks – ultimately improving the billing health and long-term success of the firm.

BillBlast Analytics consists of dynamic metrics and reporting options developed to illuminate a firm’s billing issues. The system’s intuitive dashboards capture and display data related to billing efficiency and performance, outstanding accounts receivable, team productivity, and more. The CFO and billing staff can choose from a variety of key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure including deductions, discounts, write-offs and appeals, invoice aging and time limits to acceptance/payment, and more.

BillBlast Analytics displays these KPIs in real-time, enabling collections teams to proactively address accounts receivable (AR), develop processes to remove bottlenecks, optimize staff performance, and improve firm-wide decision-making rather than sifting through all AR only to discover bill delivery has not been executed. For example, if a firm’s bills are continually being rejected or marked down by a client, BillBlast Analytics can pinpoint the root causes and empower the firm to take appropriate action. Or, if the firm is missing deadlines and losing revenue as a result, it can assess where costly slowdowns are occurring and eliminate them. BillBlast Analytics puts the firm’s billing data at the fingertips of cross-functional teams so they can easily identify areas of improvement and take necessary actions to optimize revenue realization, improve compliance, and strengthen client relationships.

Aderant Intelligence: Benchmarking for BillBlast

Law firms are continually compared, or “score-carded”, by corporate clients to evaluate billing health, measure performance, assign rankings, and more. A law firm’s finance team and CFO may not know where to start on process improvement or in even identifying early-stage billing issues that may be causing the firm to underperform compared to competitors. But now, with Benchmarking for BillBlast, firms can track and monitor their performance down to the client level for both internal evaluation and to see where they fall amongst their competitors.

Benchmarking for BillBlast is a data analytics solution providing unprecedented insight into law firm revenue realization and billing efficiency. Whereas BillBlast Analytics examines an individual firm’s data, Benchmarking allows firms to track and analyze key metrics to gauge their billing performance and compare it to other firms, peer groups, the market, and more. Benchmarking data provides tremendous visibility and transparency so the CFO can objectively see how the firm stacks up against other firms.

Benchmarking provides a broad analysis of the firm’s position in the overall market and then narrows it down to a more granular client-by-client level. Benchmarking helps CFOs overcome “analysis paralysis” to determine which issues to tackle right away by identifying a clear path of action. Upon implementation, Benchmarking empowers the firm’s financial leaders to simply “get started” by isolating the primary drivers of underperformance and identify quick wins. This often includes assessing the firm’s top five most common client deductions and addressing those first. Benchmarking produces data insights that are actionable, enabling the firm to take concrete steps towards improvement and solving problems to boost performance.

Law firm billing is more complex than ever. The Aderant BillBlast suite for bill delivery and management helps finance departments ensure compliance with client billing requirements and safeguard the financial well-being of their firm. BillBlast clients have access to state-of-the-art eBilling, Analytics and Benchmarking intelligence solutions to help them not only rise to meet the challenges of bill delivery and management, but also optimize their billing performance, profitability, and efficiency. Aderant measures its own achievements based on the ongoing success of the finance teams and CFOs we support through our products and services.

For more information on Aderant products, visit www.aderant.com or email [email protected].