Cash flow is the lifeblood of professional services organizations. While cash may be king, the billing and collections process is often treated like a pauper from a technology standpoint. Within many firms, spreadsheets and manual systems are commonly used to bill clients and to track payments. Without integration to a central system, monitoring what’s been billed, what’s been paid, and what’s still outstanding can involve accessing multiple spreadsheets—or even worse, stacks of paper. This leads to wasted time and effort, frustrated personnel, and delayed payments. Beyond immediate cash flow concerns, this lack of visibility also hinders relationship building and obscures opportunities for growth.

Many firms have begun to embrace the concept of “no more manual processes,” but merely automating a small portion of the billing and collections process doesn’t do it justice. In order to reach peak cash-flow efficiency and gain the real-time insights required to build your practice, the billing and collections process needs to be enabled by an all-in-one system.

PracticePro 365 is a unitized cloud practice management software with nine core features that run your firm. Billing and collections functionality is one of those core features. It connects seamlessly with accounts receivables functionality and a host of other capabilities, including automation and analytics. With PracticePro 365, you can streamline the entire billing and collections process while gaining visibility into the highest producing areas of your business so you can spot opportunities for growth. We know how PracticePro 365 can accelerate the cash-flow cycle because we use it ourselves. Here are a few of the billing and collections capabilities and the benefits they can bring to your practice:

• Quick bill at the click of a mouse—Practice Pro 365 streamlines the billing process by keeping information together. With seamless access to up-to-date time entries and client contact information, it cuts down on unnecessary steps to create invoices. In fact, the system automates nearly every part of the process. By clicking on the quick-bill feature, PracticePro 365 will create and automatically populate an invoice with all of the relevant, up-to-date information related to the engagement, including time, expenses, and rate structure. The billing administrator just has to check the final amount; the system does the rest.
• Generate progress bills without manual entry—One of our favorite features is the ability to send incremental bills based on work done to date or other criteria. Once the engagement terms have been entered, the system will automatically populate each bill accordingly. It also gives you the ability to transfer notes from previous bills to the current one.
• Strengthen your most important client relationships—PracticePro 365 gives you the ability to view your Top 10 clients to ensure you are servicing and building those relationships.
• Stay on top of past-due accounts—Want to see how many invoices are 30, 60, or 90 days past due? The reporting capabilities within PracticePro 365 make it easy to monitor and follow-up with slower paying clients.
• Spot opportunities for growth—With a unitized system like PracticePro 365, you can compare billings by service lines such as Assurance, Tax, Family Office and General Consulting—to assess their relative contributions to the firm’s overall billings. You can also track and analyze year-over-year growth to gauge the effectiveness of your business strategies.
• Track progress against budget and revenue targets—PracticePro 365 enables you to compare year-over-year billings, as well as billings against your current year budget. You can also get alerts when a bill goes out below expected realization, so you can see where the firm may be underperforming and investigate why.

PracticePro 365 differentiates itself in the marketplace by enabling you to do everything in one system based on real-time information. Bills can be sent out in minutes using daily time entries, instead of waiting until month end or period end. Plus, everything is tracked and accessible. Information, such as the engagement start date, estimated cost, the billing manager, engagement manager, invoice due date, and client contact information, all rolls from process to process throughout the cash-flow cycle. With little lag, fewer human errors, and real-time insights, PracticePro 365  gives you everything you need to get paid faster.