eBilling Accuracy Goes from 25% to 99.3%
Midwestern firm uses BillBlast to bring order to the chaos of eBilling
Challenges
The billing manager at a 55 fee earner, Midwestern law firm has been involved with eBilling since it first emerged in 1999. As adoption of the practice slowly began amongst the firm’s primarily IP-focused client base, it became easier to track the status of outstanding eBills. However, when the percentage of clients using eBilling dramatically increased from 5% to more than 60%, the firm needed to find technology with a proven ability to seamlessly integrate with the firm’s existing financial system. Thus, their search for the best eBilling solution began.
The first challenge the firm faced was their legacy solution’s inability to integrate with the growing number of spend management platforms used by their clients. The billing team would dedicate inordinate amounts of time to checking each individual client platform to see the status of every eBill. They wanted a centralized aggregation dashboard to provide an accurate snapshot of accounts receivable, instead of having to manually create one with Excel®. During the time that it took to create the accounts receivable document, the status of many outstanding eBills had changed, rendering the entire process moot.
Another challenge that the billing team discovered was the status of eBills not refreshing automatically, causing many to fall into limbo until the inaccurate status became apparent. This led to an additional loss of time devoted to correcting those inaccuracies. There were countless instances where the client did not have the invoice, but the firm’s legacy solution showed it as already submitted. With all the inaccuracies needing constant attention, the software was creating more problems than it was solving.
Solution
The firm’s billing manager and senior billing analyst were determined to find a better solution. After weighing the available offerings, they ultimately decided to implement Aderant’s BillBlast side-by-side with their existing solution in order to provide them with an apples-to-apples comparison. While waiting out their existing contract with the legacy solution, the firm strategically paid for both solutions, decreased their usage of the old software, and increased their usage of BillBlast. “Well, we say it was a comparison, but in truth, there was no comparison,” said the billing manager. “BillBlast is infinitely better and does what technology is supposed to do – make our jobs easier and more efficient.”
The firm also found the tracking and auditing facilitated by BillBlast to be more efficient because they could drill down into the data, find errors, and correct the status. “The rejections report generated by BillBlast is so important because it allows us to address the rejections immediately,” reported the senior billing analyst. “Before BillBlast we didn’t know which invoices were rejected because the status we were seeing was wrong.” In fact, by using the two solutions side-by-side, BillBlast showed that their legacy solution was only 25% accurate. The firm expeditiously moved all eBilling to BillBlast with satisfaction.
Business Impact
The billing team no longer spends hours logging into various spend management platforms in search of the status of individual eBills. They now have an aggregated dashboard that provides an accurate, real-time status. They can immediately see when an eBill has been rejected, take corrective action, and then re-submit for payment before it becomes past due, written down, or written off.
The team receives regular reports, which are automatically generated by BillBlast, that provide valuable intelligence into which clients, which platforms, and which reasons are responsible for the rejection of their eBill submissions. This allows them to address the issues uncovered by the data and improve their efficiency moving forward.
While their legacy solution had made the billing team skeptical, the benefit of information and reports generated by BillBlast restored their trust in a SaaS solution. A recent analysis revealed that the accuracy of the firm’s eBilling status is 99.3%.
