Accounts Receivable Automation for Law Firms: A Q&A with Invoiced | LawPay

We recently caught up with Jared King, CEO of Invoiced, to discuss the growing popularity of accounts receivable automation in law firms. Invoiced has specialized tools for efficient, effective accounts receivable management and integrates with LawPay for faster, easier payments.

Jared shared his take on the challenges of legal billing and the considerable difference automation can make on a law firm’s cash flow and efficiency. Read on to learn more about Invoiced and the benefits of streamlining your invoicing, billing, and payments with smart, user-friendly technology.

What is Invoiced's origin story?

I founded Invoiced in 2013 after identifying a major gap in billing software and solutions. Early on in my career I was actually a freelance technology consultant and one thing I was consistently asked to develop for clients were billing solutions that would meet their needs but didn’t break the bank.

At the time there were either basic billing solutions that would be ideal and affordable to very small businesses, or there were more complex solutions that were not in an approachable price point for mid-sized businesses. That’s when I set out to create a cloud-based invoicing application that could meet the needs of larger businesses but wouldn’t break the bank

Invoiced was a fairly basic billing platform in the beginning, but after collecting customer feedback we added more bells and whistles over time. This helped us become the full coverage, highly flexible accounts receivable (A/R) software that we are today that is utilized by SMBs and enterprise businesses alike.

How does accounts receivable automation software help legal professionals specifically?

It’s no secret legal billing can be difficult and time-consuming. Many law firms track and bill very specific increments of time but also have to accurately track trust versus operation accounts and bill for a wide variety of filing and miscellaneous fees.

Additionally, law firms need to offer multiple payment options so clients can afford their legal fees, which means there is a need for flexible invoicing options and to provide clients with an accurate view of payment history in a professional manner.

Legal accounting teams attempting to record such tasks through outdated methods can lead to multiple errors and excessive hours spent on bookkeeping work. Utilizing an automated A/R platform like Invoiced helps streamline tedious workflows, reduce billing errors, and improve your firm’s cash flow.

Why should businesses consider switching to Invoiced for A/R? Does it require a workflow overhaul?

We help legal professionals get paid faster, waste less time on collections, and provide a better experience to their clients, point blank. Our platform also offers a unique combination of user-friendliness while also being extremely powerful, meaning it can be used for a solo practice or scaled up for a global, multi-practice firm.

Because Invoiced can meet the needs of both small and large practices, implementation timelines will vary, but it is possible for some customers to start using our software same day while others may require several weeks to set up. That said, adding a platform like Invoiced to your tech stack and accounting process isn’t necessarily about workflow overhaul as much as it is about reducing and replacing workflows altogether.

With thousands of customers and more than $40 billion in receivables processed in different industries, Invoiced is pioneering the field of accounts receivable automation.

Which common tasks and functions can Invoiced help a law firm automate?

Invoiced allows legal professionals to automate a variety of billing tasks. Based on a firm's specific needs, legal teams can pick and choose which A/R tasks they want to automate, like creating per-attorney invoices, building a catalog of fees, producing account statements, and more.

Some popular areas of accounts receivable automation for law firms include:

Collections We offer a powerful collections software that takes most, if not all, of the collections work off of internal teams. This software not only automates the collections process, but it also offers features like multi-channel reminders to speed up the collections process, threaded conversations to help accounting teams keep track of client communication and invoice status, integrated task management to keep track of invoices that need additional escalation or follow-ups, and more.

Payment Plans Invoiced makes offering clients custom payment plans easier than ever. Our platform can automatically process and track payments as they are due, making collections easy on the firm and providing clients with a simple, user-friendly payment experience.

Reporting Legal professionals can stay informed about their overall financial health with Invoiced’s periodic reports that detail billable time, balances that are due, cash flow forecasts, and more.

Do you have any recent examples or case studies about how Invoiced has helped a law firm get paid faster?

While our legal clients span many different types of law including family, corporate, real estate, and more, one of our favorite success stories is about Immigrant Law Group, a group of human rights lawyers based out of Portland, Oregon. Before Invoiced, Immigrant Law Group’s account administrator was conducting work by hand and often stressed about keeping up with the piles of paperwork required to keep track of the firm’s billings.

One of the account administrator’s biggest pain points before implementing Invoiced was spotty synchronization between the firms’ accounting software and their billing systems that was used for payment plans. This caused errors on accounting statements, delays in processing payments, and the need for additional communication with clients regarding billing mistakes.

After deploying our accounts receivable automation software, time spent on managing payment plans was reduced by 70 percent. More details about Immigrant Law Group’s experience working with Invoiced can be found here.

How does your typical customer in legal decide they need an advanced A/R solution?

Our typical legal client will touch base when they reach a point in billing volume or complexity where the process is unsustainable, a drain on resources, prone to human error, or they need to focus their time on other priorities.

Another common factor that brings firms to us is high delinquency rates. That is typically a pretty big signal you should be looking for a better billing solution.

How important is a streamlined payments experience for improving legal billing and collections?

A streamlined payments experience is essential for improving billing and collections because every law firm ultimately needs to be able to track available assets and determine the financial standing of their practice.

Without strong A/R management software, law firms risk a dangerous domino effect where payments are delayed or slow to process. This in turn prevents legal professionals from understanding what is still owed or what assets are available to determine the next steps or future outlook of the firm.

How does Invoiced handle trust vs. operating accounts from invoicing to payments to reporting?

We offer third-party integrations with a variety of partners to help businesses meet industry-specific needs.

In the case of law firms, Invoiced accepts client payments through our integration partner, LawPay, to help separate trust and operating funds while automating invoice reconciliation. With this feature, legal professionals can stay organized on which money belongs to them and what amount should go towards court fees and other expenses for clients.

Why did Invoiced choose to partner with LawPay? From your perspective, how does our partnership help our mutual users?

LawPay specializes in payment processing for attorneys and law firms and we specialize in the rest of the accounts receivable process. It was a natural fit when we decided to make our platform even better suited for the legal industry. We also partner more broadly with LawPay’s parent company, AffiniPay, so extending our relationship to your team was a no-brainer.

*Jared King is Co-Founder & CEO of Invoiced, the category defining company in the field of A/R automation. Jared built Invoiced from a small bootstrapped startup to a thriving global platform that now serves the billing and collections needs of more than 20,000 businesses in 92 countries and processes more than $2 billion in client receivables every month. Because of Invoiced’s scale and success, Jared has a uniquely valuable vantage point for how cash management, business process improvement and technology come together to help companies get paid faster, waste less time on collections and provide better payment experiences for their customers. *