5 Reasons you need Viewpoint with Actionstep

Our new normal keeps shifting. Your clients needs and your staffs needs are very different to what they were two years ago. To support that change you need immediate and clear access to your financial data. Real time insight into how your firm is performing, and the trends that indicate future performance, need to be at your fingertips.

Traditional reporting does not deliver this level of clear and immediate access. Nor does it easily predict future trends. For that, you need Business Intelligence.

Actionstep is an excellent practice management system. After carefully assessing the market, we found Actionstep to be the best true cloud PMS out there. And most of us have worked in law firms. It offers an easy to use and access solution with superior workflow, document automation and customisation options. (If that all sounds good to you and you’d love a demo – let us know). Actionstep has a vast reporting suite, but it does not presently have a business intelligence component.

Viewpoint by Verlata fills that gap. It supports and expands on the reporting available in Actionstep.

Viewpoint is a dynamic and interactive set of dashboards and reports that give you a holistic, birds eye view of your firm with the ability to easily deep dive into data points. It includes the foundational reporting required by most firms, covering WIP, Debtors, Productivity and File Opening.

Five Reasons you need Viewpoint with Actionstep

1.         Reporting and Business intelligence are two very different things.

Traditional reports show related data in a clear tabular format. That kind of reporting is detail rich, but it is difficult to see specific trends. The information is at a very micro level. It also tends to center around one type of information – for example a separate debtors report to a WIP report etc.

Business Intelligence aims to visually represent your data at a higher level so that trends are obvious and can be further explored. You start at a birds eye view and dive down into the detail. Viewpoint makes use of interactive visual representations of data which are much easier to interpret. It can also show you a variety on information on one screen so that you can see all your metrics at a glance.

2.       Viewpoint is written for decision makers – not the accounts team

The owners of a firm need to see their data in a concise and easy to read way. It needs to make sense at a glance – which is exactly what Viewpoint provides. You don’t need any specialised accounting skills to understand the Viewpoint suite. As it’s based on familiar Microsoft technology, most people pick it up without any training.

3.       There is no need to combine reports in excel to create an overall view of what is occurring

Accounts teams are often called upon to create complex excel reports based on the reports they export out of their practice management system. They manipulate the data and create the graphs and summaries necessary to meet the needs of decision makers. This is a repetitive and time-consuming process. Viewpoint takes away this work. Rather than collating the data, your financial leaders can spend their time analyzing the data and giving you thoughtful insights into your financial strategy.

4.       WIP Write Off visibility
There is some information in Actionstep that can be easily access at a matter by matter level but is not necessarily summarised. Write offs (the difference between the value of the time entered and the fees invoiced to the client) are one of those pieces of information. With Viewpoint you can see that information clearly, choosing how you want to treat different time card behaviours.

5.       Transparency and customisation on how measures are calculated.

Viewpoint offers full transparency into how measures are calculated. If the calculation doesn’t quite align with how you calculate a metric, then we can talk about customisation. We work with you so that you understand exactly how pieces of data are calculated.

Actionstep offers comprehensive tabular reporting at a detailed level. But when you need to access easy to understand, visual data which gives you a holistic view, clearly indicating trends and issues - you need Viewpoint.

If you’d like to see Viewpoint in action, join us for our webinar, or contact us for a one on one demo.