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Profitability

Taking the guesswork out of law firm budgeting and forecasting

· 5 minute read

· 5 minute read

The budgeting and forecasting process can be arduous and challenging. With numerous stakeholders and contributors and various moving parts, even compiling current data is a massive undertaking. And, once current data has been compiled, maintaining it and ensuring its accuracy can become an entirely separate challenge.

Law firm financial teams need a way to simplify the budgeting and forecasting process and the ability to get it done quickly and accurately. For most firms, the current process involves gathering spreadsheets from individual stakeholders and distilling that information down into a single spreadsheet through a series of complex and sometimes glitchy formulas.

This approach relies heavily on stakeholders to submit accurate and complete information the first time for the process to have any chance of working smoothly. If anyone has changes or needs to make a correction to the information they’ve submitted, the changes must be made manually on the other end.

The budget process can be long and span multiple weeks — or even months — and that means updating the budget worksheets for each unit, office, department, etc., with the most current data. With so many different spreadsheets being exchanged, financial teams must perform manual checks every time to ensure that the right people have received the appropriate budget templates.

Get your firm’s financial team on the same page

Think of how much easier this process would be if the entire financial team was able to work on the same document and platform and see and make changes in real-time.

Budgeting & Forecasting from Thomson Reuters is a web- and Microsoft Excel-based solution that provides up-to-the-minute visibility to the financial information firms need to make critical business decisions. Whether you are building a plan from the top down or the bottom up, Budgeting & Forecasting gives you the confidence of knowing that you are working with accurate information in the familiar Excel environment you are accustomed to seeing.

Streamline your budgeting and forecasting process for accuracy and speed

Budgeting & Forecasting works with Thomson Reuters 3E and Enterprise — along with several third-party practice management systems — and can easily integrate with your firm’s human resources and payroll systems.

It helps to streamline even the most sophisticated law firm budgeting and forecasting processes — helping to standardize each aspect in a way that reduces human error, instantly corrects common issues and saves time. Its modular design allows users to start at virtually any point, such as budgeting, forecasting, reporting, long-range planning, analysis, or modeling.

Help your law firm stay on budget

For Pam Vassar, Assistant Controller at the law firm of Parker Poe, and Business Development Manager, Ashley Poindexter, the real-time updates provided by Budgeting & Forecasting have been crucial in helping the firm stay on budget.

When Vassar was manually updating budget reports, she aptly described it as a “very gruesome, time-consuming process” that would customarily require more than 20 hours of her time each month. In addition, Budgeting & Forecasting has helped to overcome the problem of reports becoming obsolete so quickly that overspending had already occurred by the time they were distributed.

Make the case for your law firm’s automated budgeting and forecasting solution

Accurate budgeting and forecasting are essential to the success of every firm, and the value of the investment in a comprehensive solution is undeniable. Take the time to learn more about Budgeting & Forecasting from Thomson Reuters and start building your case to modernize your firm’s process.

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