When I first started working with my first bankruptcy client, he was tracking the success of his bankruptcy firm using an Excel spreadsheet and a Word document. He was entering all the transactions by hand and busily setting up formulas to add, subtract, divide and so forth.
While he ended up with a usable statement for his firm, the time it took him to manage the spreadsheet and input all the data was absolutely ridiculous. I wanted to tell him to add a line to calculate how much money he was losing by spending his OWN TIME putting this thing together.
And you can imagine what happened when a week or two went by and he hadn’t had the time to get all the data into the spreadsheet! He was left with piles of transactions to enter which led to longer nights at the office and a greater level of anxiety because he had to start choosing between serving a client and getting his books up to date. Or he had to choose between going home to be with his family or getting his records up to date.
Not only that, until he got the records up to date he was operating his business blindly because he really couldn’t tell what his current state of affairs really was!
If you are tracking your accounts in a spreadsheet or by hand, if you are tracking your accounts yourself rather than hiring a bookkeeper to do it for you, I can tell you right now that you are losing money.
For every hour you’re spending handling your own accounts, you are losing the equivalent of your hourly rate. What may seem like a money-saver is really a money-drainer. It's time to find someone to take care of these $20-per-hour jobs so you can get to the business of producing $300-an-hour work as the leader of your practice.
To learn more about how I feel about these kinds of practices, request a copy of my book Discover The Acres of Diamonds in Your Law Firm.
Helping firms shore up their business, one list of things NOT to do at a time…
