05 Apr The top 3 reasons you should hire a bookkeeper for your law office

Hiring a bookkeeper for your law practice is one of the best things you can do to increase your bottom line. You are busy. So busy in fact with high level items that often things go by the wayside. Even if you have the latest practice management software, you can’t rely on that alone as you might not be inputting your bookkeeping and accounting information correctly. That’s where having a bookkeeper is especially important.

In no particular order, here are the top three reasons why you should hire a bookkeeper for your law practice.

1) More time spent on cases means more profit

If you or one of your clerks are spending valuable time on bookkeeping you’re not spending time on billables. Ideally, very few tasks you do on a day to day basis should be non-billable. Those items should be outsourced. If you are a smaller practice you might not need a full-time bookkeeper on staff and that’s where we come in. Outsourcing your bookkeeping to us makes financial sense. We can come to your office weekly, bi-weekly or monthly depending on your specific needs.

2) Billing your client’s, the right way – taking a detailed approach

Often at Rochon & Associates we see that lawyers are lumping all their different services into one sales line. The problem with this is that at the end of the year, it is really hard to know where you are making money.  And, if you don’t know where you are making money it is hard to know where to focus your energies the following year. Do you need to do more marketing for one service type? Eliminate a service you offer as the income from it does not compensate you enough for the time and energy you put into it? Let us help you divide your sales lines into each service type.

3) Reports make your life instantly easier

One of the things that bookkeepers can do is provide you with monthly reports that give you updates on how your practice is doing, where things are being billed, what expenses you had that month etc. but where the big value comes in is that they can also then look at those reports and advise you of steps to take to improve.  We will review year over year performance and make sure the practice is growing, rather than not performing. The last thing we want is to find out at the end of the year at tax time that your practice didn’t perform how you thought it was financially.

Added bonuses – other reasons to hire a bookkeeper

• If you only want to hire someone to do a review of your practice’s finances, Rochon & Associates offers Practice Management Reviews as well as an Operational Efficiency Reviews, which is a great way to get an overview of your practice and find out what’s working and what’s not working.
• We can also assist you with any HR needs you may have, job descriptions, job postings and applicant screenings, employee management, health and safety, labour board compliance and more!

You are a lawyer, not a bookkeeper and with tight timelines and a focus on billable hours, hiring a bookkeeper to keep your books organized, efficient and that also knows how to run your practice management software is key to your success. At Rochon & Associates, your success is our success and that is why we take a pro-active approach to our bookkeeping, stopping problems in your practice before they start.