If you’re looking to maximize your Business IQ, a robust practice management system can prove to be an invaluable tool in positioning you and the leaders of your firm to make the best decisions for the business’ future.  The intelligence held inside a practice management system offers you greater insight into how your business functions, which service lines are performing at peak or are under-performing, where the bulk of your profitability is coming from, and which clients are essential to your business and which should be culled to keep it operating most efficiently.  Insights in all of these areas can be gleaned from the quality of the data you input into your system.  In fact, a recent Gartner study found that firms which rely on business intelligence are able to make accurate decisions 20% faster than those that don’t.

A Single Source of the Truth

Data is the lifeblood of any organization but is often housed in multiple places and in different formats.  While most data is likely warehoused inside of one or more technology solutions your employees are trained in, other data may be kept on paper or in filing cabinets, and yet other anecdotal but no less critical data may simply reside in the minds of “firm historians” who haven’t input their knowledge into a platform that can be accessed by all.  A robust practice management system can help you consolidate the data you currently have available to your firm’s service line leaders and key decision makers through various platforms, into one central place.  It gives you a great reason to sit with your firm historians to in order to capture key information that should be tracked inside that central repository.  In addition to giving the data a single place to reside, a practice management system can aid you in pulling all of the data you have together into a single, compatible format which can then be easily transformed into insightful reports and visuals.

Real Time Revelations

Whether you’re interested in analyzing how specific service lines are faring in comparison to one another, how their productivity contributes to the overall goals of the business, how particular offices perform when pitted against one another, or even how individual employees are executing their duties, practice management systems offer up real time revelations on all of these measures.  Empowered by these revelations, leaders can make better, more highly qualified decisions about when the optimal time to increase or decrease staff might be, which levels of staffing would help fill in the holes that exist in your business, which service lines are profitable and which need more managerial attention, and where locations may need to be added or closed.  Since precise, real-time realization numbers available by staff member and service line are easy to access with a click or two of your mouse, you can get an excellent snapshot of what is and isn’t working well at your firm and act accordingly.

Smart Growth

A good practice management system can also help you remove the guess work from your business development activities by demonstrating to you where the best opportunities lie and in which industry sectors time, effort, and budget is being ineffectively utilized.  Pulling reports based on your business development goals for the coming year can ensure that you have a solid strategy to move ahead with for the year ahead – one in which industry niches that have yielded no new clients, year-over-year, can be eliminated from your business development plans and those you may not have previously considered can be woven in to bring in more of the right type of clients.

Capturing the Right Clients

While it may seem counter-intuitive to cut ties with long-standing clients or even those you’ve had a short while during a time when competition is steep, it’s always a good practice to undergo an annual or bi-annual review of your clients to see which are still viable and which have run their course.  A client who may have been a staple for your business years ago may now be costing your firm money and negatively impacting the productivity of your staff.  Failing to conduct these periodic reviews can be draining important resources that could have additional consequences (i.e. impacts on staff retention), and, ultimately, diminish your bottom line.  Utilizing your practice management system’s built-in reporting feature can help you see which clients to keep and which to cull.

If you’d like to learn more about how you can increase your B-IQ with the features tucked inside a practice management system, please contact us for a PracticePro 365 demo.