Following the adage “you can’t improve what you don’t measure,” many firms are using budgets to establish financial targets for revenue growth, cost control, and—most importantly—profitability. Successful law firms now view budgeting as a living process, rather than a once-a-year event, updating their budgets continually based on actuals and revising their forecasts so they can always project their “Latest Expected Outcome.”

In this way leading law firms have made budgeting the cornerstone of their Business Intelligence strategies.


Improving the Bottom Line “Down Under”
A good example of a law firm that has transformed its budgeting process is Clayton Utz, Australia’s third largest law firm.

Like other firms, Clayton Utz historically developed its budget using spreadsheets. Their finance department juggled dozens of spreadsheets to gather budget information from their various office, departments, and practice group leaders. Additionally, large amounts of data were entered manually, often resulting in duplicate information or errors. This process made it exceptionally difficult for Clayton Utz to develop accurate budgets and reports in a timely manner, track changes between budget version, and audit individual inputs.

In addition to these limitations, Clayton Utz’s budgeting process was time consuming, typically taking eight to nine weeks to complete.

“It was a challenge for us to effectively coordinate our budgeting efforts, especially with six offices and up to 60 people—including partners, department heads, finance team members—involved in the process,” said Paul Vogelzang, Director of Practice Management at Clayton Utz. “Budgeting can be done with spreadsheets, but given the complexity of our business requirements and need for strong budget revision management, we came to the conclusion that there had to be a better way.”


Meeting Tough Business Requirements
When Clayton Utz searched for a new solution to improve their budgeting process, their objectives were simple: minimize the impact the process had on its partners and finance team and reduce the overall—and non-billable—time it took them to develop their budget.

After examining several solutions, Clayton Utz selected a business planning and forecasting solution from ADERANT. “We had very specific functional requirements we wanted and they satisfied most of these needs” explained Vogelzang. ADERANT Expert Executive Office Budgeting helps law firms to automate their budgeting and forecasting processes. The module enables firms to quickly develop accurate budgets for their people, revenue, expenses, and capital requirements in a collaborative, real-time environment.


Delivering Bottom Line Results
Clayton Utz successfully implemented their new budgeting solution in time for the start of the firm’s annual budgeting cycle, which began in March. The solution had an immediate impact, reducing the firm’s budget cycle time by nearly 40 percent.

“Everything went very smoothly, especially considering it was the first time we had used the new system,” Vogelzang said. “Its ability to develop budgets in a collaborative environment, instantly consolidate revisions, and easily compare different versions helped us to reduce our budget development cycle from more than eight weeks to just five weeks. This was a huge gain in productivity for us as our financial analysts could actually spend time analyzing the budget rather than consolidating spreadsheets.”


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