No matter what your business is, you need a professional bookkeeper to help you keep your financial figures straight and ensure that your books are accurate. This issue becomes even more critical for a practice such as a law firm, where having a bookkeeper who can accurately track dollars as they flow in and out of various accounts is critical to your long-term success.
Why is a law firm bookkeeper so important?
Bookkeeping services for any business are critical. Indeed, in no industry is it possible to be successful in the long run without full bookkeeping services that can track your expenses and revenue.
However, for law firms, this is particularly important. This is the case for multiple reasons, the most paramount being:
- Your time is money. As such, partners in any law firm need to concentrate on their cases and legal workload as much as possible, thus ensuring that they are spending as much time creating billable hours as humanly possible. This will keep new clients coming in, keep work flowing, and ensure that the firm can bill for as much as possible.
- Law firms will often deal with escrow cases where they hold money in an escrow account or a retainer. It is vitally important that this money always be accounted for and never improperly spent. Doing so can result in serious sanctions against the firm in question and potentially even result in revoking a law license. This is not something that any attorney can afford. As such, attorneys must be conscientious when it comes to the management of their money.
- Credibility is vital within the legal industry. For all of the grief that is often heaped upon the legal profession, the simple truth is that the vast majority of lawyers always act with credibility and ethics at the forefront of their minds. Doing something inappropriate with their financial books or with a client’s money will automatically lead to a severe hit to their credibility and damage their ability to conduct business going forward. As such, these additional pressures make it vitally important that law firms appropriately manage their money.
For law firms, It is imperative to have an industry-specific bookkeeper who knows the ins and outs of the law industry’s tax rules and regulations. A bookkeeper can also help you save time by taking over your financial administration responsibilities and help you make more money by finding ways to improve your financial situation.
What are some common law firm bookkeeping solutions?
There are a variety of options that can work better for some firms than others. These include:
- Hiring an in-house bookkeeper who can manage your money full-time. This may be appropriate for larger firms, but others may find that this adds an expense far too burdensome.
- Giving someone the part-time responsibility of managing their financial operations. While this may work for smaller firms, it may mean that someone has too many responsibilities to properly concentrate on financial management. The person in question may also lack the necessary expertise, leading to mistakes or omissions like not making the most of tax deductions.
- Hiring an outside firm experienced in outsourced law firm bookkeeping to manage financial matters such as their accounting cleanup, accounting software integration, tax planning, and more.
Regardless of what types of bookkeeping solutions you are looking for, at Fusion CPA, we can help you with your bookkeeping and so much more. Our services can scale to help you not only stabilize your finances but also save money and plan for a bright future.
If you are interested in learning more, contact us today to schedule a discovery call with our team.
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This blog article is not intended to be the rendering of legal, accounting, tax advice or other professional services. Articles are based on current or proposed tax rules at the time they are written and older posts are not updated for tax rule changes. We expressly disclaim all liability in regard to actions taken or not taken based on the contents of this blog as well as the use or interpretation of this information. Information provided on this website is not all-inclusive and such information should not be relied upon as being all-inclusive.
