It wasn’t too long ago, that a foreclosure law practice expressed frustration to us regarding the manual bottlenecks and lack of transparency when it came time to issue a check to the clerk of court. We listened to the end-to-end process and realized the frustration was preventable and only increasing with time. Once my client took a breath, I simply said, “We have a solution for you. We can make your systems talk to one another.” I had his attention and we worked together to get a viable solution quickly in place. The benefits have made a significant impact to their timelines.

The existing process was entirely manual; it required a paralegal to print out the case details from Perfect Practice (their case management system) and submit to Accounts Payable for a check to be written to the clerk of court. There was no transparency in the process so if a stack of case details sat on a desk in Accounts Payable, it sat there until it didn’t. With rigorous timelines to be met and the firm being paid by the loan vs. by the hour, this bottleneck created a ripple effect of costly delays throughout the entire process.

The main need for system integration in this particular firm was creating an integration utility so Perfect Practice and QuickBooks could seamlessly communicate. With this system integration solution, paralegals marked specific cases that were ready for court in Perfect Practice and information was automatically pulled into a data entry file that triggered an action for Accounts Payable. From there, Accounts Payable could easily print the check for the corresponding file.

Paralegals now had visibility into how many payments were pending vs. paid. Accounts Payable now had a faster method of getting checks printed. This freed up time for each party, allowing a better value to be delivered to their clients. It also allowed the accounting department to shift resources based on demand to decrease latency and become more efficient, overall. The firm was able to get loans through the process faster and take on more clients, making it a win/win for everyone involved.

How are your systems talking to one another? What areas of your business could you benefit from system integration?