Tikit recently announced a record year of sales and a huge uptake of its practice and case management solution P4W by a plethora of law firms in the UK. This flexible and functionally rich system is used by law firms to manage accounting, billing, compliance and time recording, all from one system.
Tikit clients often state how impressed they are with the broad functionality that the P4W system offers, both from within the system itself and with the addition of other tightly integrated best-of-breed products, a couple of which are the TaskCentre Credit Control Kit and the Partner TaskCentre Starter Kit from Codeless Platforms.
These useful kits provide a set of common tasks and alerts that law firms want to automate in order to improve business processes and enhance the service they provide to their clients, such as billing, credit control, financial postings and time recording.
For many law firms, the management of numerous small administrative and compliance tasks, associated with cases, is detrimental to the running of a practice, taking up time and resources that could be better allocated elsewhere. This was a situation that Tikit customer, Forshaws Davies Ridgway LLP (FDR Law), found itself in, as David Wood, Chief Technical Officer, explained.
“We realised that we needed help managing the many compliance and admin tasks in our credit control process in order to reduce our aged debts. Now, Codeless Platforms’ solution runs so efficiently in the background that our employees forget it is there. They just know that there are lots of jobs that no longer need to be done.”
A closer look at the Tikit P4W kits
The TaskCentre Credit Control Kit contains a set of tasks and alerts designed to automate 99% of a law firm’s credit control processes. The procedure can be configured to meet the needs of the law firm and will automatically produce internal notifications, statements and letters chasing for payment at appropriate intervals following the production of an invoice in P4W’s billing wizard. Credit Control documents are automatically saved to the P4W Case Management system and then printed or attached to emails which are sent automatically with little to no user interaction.
Alternatively, the Partner TaskCentre Starter Kit provides a wider range of automated solutions for many small, manual administrative tasks. Data is obviously of paramount importance and so the kit includes a number of automated data checking solutions.
The Data Validation solution can be run on a predetermined day and time to identify invalid emails, postcodes and telephone numbers. The Archiving solution will highlight dormant matters, such as live matters that have not had any bills, financial or time postings raised to a ledger within six months. It can also email an archivist when a matter is marked as complete or needs destroying.
A wide range of financial tasks can also be automated to help improve cash flow and reduced aged debt. Credit control is one such area, ranging from emailing fee earners with a list of ‘covered’ bills, to informing the right person with lists detailing unpaid bills and the top 20 outstanding client debts.
The Matters Fee Earner can be emailed whenever a CCR (Client Credit) or CDR (Client Debit) posting is processed by the accounts team. Likewise, the accounts team can be automatically emailed daily regarding matters with an overdrawn client account, bills outstanding at 14 days old where the matter has a client balance and/or any NYP/Anticipated disbursements which remain unpaid following the receipt of payment of the client bill of which those NYP/Anticipated disbursements are associated.
Billing tasks include alerting originators of a bill that it is ready for printing once posted to the ledger and listing the fee earners profitability for private bills produced over the past week. This is calculated by taking Costs Allocated and subtracting the Time Billed.
Time recording or WIP tasks can also be automated including alerts regarding WIP limits approaching or exceeding, and when a time transaction has been amended for a previous period. The weekly time sheet procedure can produce a weekly time sheet every Monday morning which is split and sent to each fee earner showing what time they have recorded on the last week.
Additional tasks that can also be automated include anti-money laundering tasks, risk register updates, complaints update reports, BACS purchase ledger payments and a number of file management tasks.
To find out more about the TaskCentre Credit Control Kit and the Partner TaskCentre Starter Kit from Codeless Platforms, or Tikit and P4W, visit the site here, or call +44 (0)1489 609010.
Additionally, to find out more about what Codeless Platforms can offer professional services organisations, please call us on +44 (0)330 99 88 700.
