Financial management is critical to the success of any firm. FilePro’s accounting and management reporting functionality helps you gain visibility and control over your financial operations.
Cash flow is one of the key issues facing businesses today. In addition to understanding the concept of cash flow and how it impacts your business – you must be able to plan and manage for it.
Cash flow refers to the movement of money through your firm. Management of your cash flow is paramount to ensure that you have enough money coming in to pay bills. Cash flow should not be confused with profit – profit refers to the difference between revenue and cost over a period of time.
Management Reporting
FilePro provides instant and timely access to Financial Management reports that you can use to effectively manage your cash flow.
Within FilePro there is an abundance of Management Reports available including Practice Summary, Fee Earner Analysis and Productivity reports. These reports allow you to easily track the performance of your fee earners, giving you up to date figures as to the time that has been recorded, billed and received within your firm. Standard financial reports are also available, including Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet and Trial Balance. Click here for a fee earner productivity report example.
Debtor Management is an integral part of any law firm and having good procedures in place will assist with this and have a positive effect on your cashflow. There have been recent enhancements to various reports within FilePro that can help with Debtor management. Reminder Notices and the Calculate interest function (found under the Debtors menu) are also tools to assist with the process. Click here for a debtor aged trial balance and unbilled costs report example.
FilePro also provides the ability to save a “set” of commonly used reports. Instead of selecting each required report, you can save multiple report selections which can be produced at the click of a button.
Budgets
Developing and managing internal budgets is a fundamental element of an organisation’s financial management framework. Effective internal budgeting will significantly contribute to the achievement of an organisation’s goals and objectives.
Budgets for Fee Earners
With the start of the 2015/16 financial year fast approaching, it is time to consider adding or updating your staff budgets in FilePro.
The setting of budgets for Fee Earners sets a performance expectation which can be easily tracked and monitored by both the Fee Earner and Management.
Budgets for General Ledger Accounts
FilePro allows for budgets to be set for each of the Income and Expense General Ledger codes. There is also the ability to compare the current budget amounts to the budgets set in the previous year.
If utilising budgets for income and expense accounts you are able to generate a Profit and Loss report to include “With Budget Month To Date (MTD)” or “With Budget Year To Date (YTD). This will then show your budget figures, allowing a comparison of the firm’s actuals to budget.
Please feel free to contact the National Resource Centre if you would like more information on any of these topics or refer to our online Help Manual.
