Digitisation: The Key to Financial Compliance in Law Firms

April 21, 2023

In today's digital age, law firms must keep pace with technological advancements to remain competitive and meet growing industry demands. Digitisation and automation of financial processes, including accounts payable, have become crucial aspects of workplace operations and procedures. These software's are streamlining tasks, increasing productivity, and ensuring compliance with financial regulations.  

Law firms of all sizes deal with a vast amount of financial information, client records and data. This extensive database leads to an enormous obligation to maintain accurate data and audit trails. Due to the time-consuming nature of legacy systems and manual payment processes, implementing a digital solution is recommended to significantly improve your firm's procedures, security and compliance.  

 

Why automate?

Payment processing can be an extraordinarily time-consuming task. With the management of paper trails, the potential for human error, auditing and time and cost per invoice, there must be a better solution. With automation, these processes can be made easy, managing and paying invoices from your suppliers and vendors can become streamlined with various aspects of digitisation. This includes, purchase orders, receiving reports and supplier invoices, as well as automatic data and audit trails.  

Law firms should manage their financial processes efficiently to maintain a steady cash flow, accurate and accessible financial statements, maintain good supplier and client relationships, and, most importantly, comply with Australian finance and tax regulations.  

 

Security

Security benefits that are featured within digital tools are unmatched when compared to manual security procedures. With some payment processing automation platforms offering proprietary fraud detection engines, with these engines, firms can protect their financial and client data.  

The fraud detection engine offers a solution to cyber fraud by storing all data locally and on the cloud. This feature also provides single-sign-on, multifactor authentication and consistent patches and improvements to the platform. This system can prevent unauthorised access to financial records, reducing the risk of data breaches and online fraud and ensuring law firms are always protected.  

 

Save Time

As the legal industry is fast-paced and unexpected, time is of the essence when it comes to the management of financial processes. Automating the payment process provides firms with a time-saving solution that automates many existing manual tasks associated with accounts payable. Not only does this save a significant amount of staff time, but it also ensures that this extra time can be spent on pressing and critical financial issues.  

An integrated automation solution can solve the issues of billing, archives, compliance and record keeping. Ensuring law firms can manage financial data in a consistent and reliable manner.  

 

Productivity

Law firms that invest in automation software to streamline financial procedures will benefit significantly from increased productivity, saved time and ensured compliance. Firms can rest assured that there is a prominent aspect of dependability in payment automation software, and the investments will continue to benefit the company in the future. Cloud-based automation software can be integrated faster than on-site manual solutions. With integrations in cloud platforms being explicitly built for existing practice management systems and business management systems, firms can ensure smooth and simplified integrations with current platforms used, as well as simple staff training.  

With automation and digitisation, law firms can manage their efficiency with financial operations, such as tracking expenses, seeing a detailed list of all outstanding, paid and upcoming payments, managing vendor accounts, seeing vendor details, and processing payments. The time-saving that comes from investing in accounts payable automation can significantly reduce staff workloads and improve productivity within the firm. With this increase in productivity due to implementing automation software, the risk of incorrect data entry and breaches within current regulations is minimised, leaving staff feeling confident that their invoicing is done correctly and ensuring the firm will not have to resolve any compliance concerns.  

 

Financial compliance

One of the best benefits of automating payment processes is improving and guaranteeing financial compliance with existing regulations. Law firms in Australia are legally obligated to maintain accurate financial data to show to auditors throughout and at the end of a financial year, especially considering the sensitive data stored in invoices. It would be a risk to continue using manual and paper-based processes that are prone to error and can result in hefty penalties.  

Digital software mitigates these risks and fully automates the accounts payable process from end to end, providing integrity checks of supplier details and purchase order matching to ensure no duplicates. Digital automation solutions also provide an aspect of transparency and visibility to allow your firm to track expenses, identify discrepancies and maintain compliance. These regulations include GST/HST payments that can be automated.  

 

Alii is a robust accounts payable automation solution that enables law firms to automate their accounts payable processes. Alii improves efficiency and reduces potential errors. Alii can help your firm to eliminate paper-based transaction processes and seamlessly automate invoice processing, payments and record keeping.  

Automating accounts payable tasks provides several benefits for your firm and finance staff, including reduced time and effort required in manual data entry, minimising the risk of potential errors and improving financial visibility and accountability.

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