ShareDo contains extensive finance functionality to enable the Case Management System (CMS) to be the single application that case handlers need to access. If configured correctly, there should be no need for your case handlers to access external finance systems to manage payments, fees, or other financial items.

At the core of ShareDo’s finance framework is the case accounting structure.

Think of this as a configurable Chart of Accounts that is maintained for each case or matter. This structure acts as both a ledger into which transactions are posted and the basis for maintaining budgets.

Posting into this ledger are a number of finance transaction types, including:

• Payments: Payments made to third parties.
• Invoices and Invoice Payments: Bills for your services together with receipt of cash.
• Account Adjustments: Import of values from third-party systems or managing client/office transfers.
• Offers: For managing negotiation cycles against costs, damages or other items.
• Time & Fees.

These transaction types are then supported with functionality for goods and services items, multi-currency, offers and units of measure.

The financial framework is designed as a set of dependent features that can be turned on or off to support different processing requirements. For example, you can choose to turn off Invoices but continue to manage payments in ShareDo or visa versa.

Introduction video to financial management

View the playlist on YouTube: Platform Deep Dive - ShareDoShow.

Functional Overview

This article provides a high-level functional description of the finance framework and is designed for use when both planning and configuring your ShareDo finance implementation.

The document is broken into the following sections:

Work The Way You Want To

ShareDo is designed to work in tandem with finance and Practice Management systems. It also recognises that there is not a “one size fits all approach” to what should be managed in an Operational application such as ShareDo versus what should be managed in your Finance Application.

To facilitate this, all ShareDo finance functionality is feature-driven. Simply put, through the feature framework, you can decide which elements of finance functionality should be available in the solution.

Hence, as part of your implementation planning, you can:

• Specify that a particular piece of finance functionality is not required in the Case Management System (CMS); for example, you may disable payments or time recording. When a feature is disabled, it will no longer be available to your end users.
• Alternatively, and this is typically the case, you may treat the feature framework as part of a phase roll-out strategy. Gradually enabling functionality over a period of months or even years to manage a phased rollout and limit the amount of change to your user’s experience.

Chart of Accounts

ShareDo supports a flexible chart of accounts in which you can configure multiple segments for both budgetary and transactional reporting purposes. While there is a single chart of accounts defined for the entire solution, this structure can be specialised for different work, matter types or even clients through matching rules.

Typically, segments will include items such as Account Type, Account Category and Account Code, although many clients extend this to include both internal and external related coding structures such as Cost Centres, Bank Accounts or JCodes.

While you configure a single chart of accounts and codes for the entire system, these can then be further specialised in a number of ways.

1. You can restrict the Segments that are used by Case Type – for example, Real Estate matters won’t be shown JCodes in their account structures.
2. You can restrict the Codes that are shown by:
   1. Case Type – for example, your real estate account structure will not be visible to commercial contracts.
      Adding rules to your chart of account values.
   2. Client – if you have implemented specific segments to support client reporting, for example, cost centres you can restrict the codes by client also.
   3. By Transaction Type – to avoid an endless list of codes that need to be entered when, for example, making a payment you can restrict the codes that are available for a given transaction type.
      
      Configuring the available segments and codes for a transaction type.

Using these configuration options enables you to have a single consolidated case chart accounts while also ensuring that any required data entry of accounting structures is minimised based on the context that a user is working within.

See Configuring your Chart of Accounts.‍

Account Posting & Visualisation

In ShareDo, Financial transactions typically move through various states such as draft, approving, approved, posted and the like.

For each transaction type (Payments, Receipts, etc), you specify at what point the transaction will record ledger transactions. Against these phases, you can configure when transactions are logged as:

• WIP – account transaction is marked as WIP and can be visualised.
• Posted – account transaction is posted to the case ledger.
• Reversed – account transaction is reversed from the ledger.

Ledger transactions can then be visualised in a number of different ways by configuring widgets on your case portals or blades. Examples of these widgets include:

• Account Summary Widget – shows a summary of the specified accounts against budgets.
  
• Account Balance Widget – shows a breakdown of a single account with transaction history.
• Account Balance Sheet – shows a tabular breakdown of accounts with relevant roll-ups.
• Account Balance List Views – configurable list views enabling you to specify the filters you require together with the columns that are shown.

See Case Ledger‍.

Budgets

Once the case accounting structure is defined, you can begin to create budgets. Budgets can be created for many purposes, including:

1. Tracking internal costs. These are described as delivery cost structures.
2. Tracking estimated settlements or awards for dispute matters (often termed Reserves).
3. Tracking Completion statements for asset transactions such as Real Estate.
4. Tracking costs for the purpose of external budgeting, e.g., Precedent H.

Within the ShareDo configurator, you can configure as many different budget structures as you wish. These are then made available for maintenance and reporting in the case.

The system then tracks changes to these budgets together with associated reasons, enabling you to see a picture of how your case financials progress.

See Configuring Budgets‍.

Delivery Cost Structures

Separate from financial budgets, ShareDo also allows you to estimate the amount of time and the internal cost budget for delivering a piece of work. This is described as the Delivery Cost Structure.

Within the delivery cost structure, you specify:

• The roles or people that will deliver a piece of work.
• The amount of time that is envisaged being spent on the initiative.

This information, together with the internal charge-out rates and time recording information, builds an estimate of how much effort is required to deliver the work, how much it is expected to cost and how much it actually costs.

Fee Budgets

Fee Budgets represent a specialist type of budget that enables you to break down your fee estimates granularly.

Budgets are fully version controlled with the ability to version version history and attach documentary evidence to each version.

Payments

ShareDo has a specialist work type design to assist you in managing Payments and Accounts Payable processes. This work type can be configured to assist you in managing payments of many different types – disbursements, settlement payments, debt and so on.

Each of these can be configured with their own:

• End-to-end processes, including approval and delegated authorities.
• Case accounting structures.
• Price lists (for pre-approved pricing).

Out of the box Payments support:

• Capture of Purchase Order details, including bulk assignment of POs.
• Capture of Supplier Invoice details and enforcement that full documentation is supplied before the PO is submitted.
• Dedicated finance events to enable seamless integration with backend finance systems.

In addition, like any other work item, you are free to extend this functionality via the ShareDo modeller as you see fit.

See Configuring Payments and Disbursements‍.

Invoices & Receipts

ShareDo has a specialist work type design to assist you in managing Invoices and Account Receivable processes. This work type can be configured to assist you in managing invoices for various types – settlement invoices, fee invoices and so on.

Each of these can be configured with their own:

• End-to-end processes, including approval and delegated authorities.
• Case accounting structures.
• Integration with Fees or Service Items.

Out of the box Invoices support:

• Due Date calculation and chasing workflows.
• Capture of Receipts.
• Dedicated finance events to enable seamless integration with backend finance systems.

In addition, like any other work item, you are free to extend this functionality via the ShareDo modeller as you see fit.

See Configuring Invoices‍ and Configuring Invoice Payments‍.

Invoice Payment Plans

Invoice payment plans enable you to consolidate one or more invoices under a single "plan" and then create, agree on, and monitor payment instalments with the payer. Invoice payment plans are used extensively in Debt Recovery Matters together with use of the recovery of Claimant Damages.

See Configuring Invoice Payment Plans‍.

Goods And Services

ShareDo enables you to maintain various predefined price lists for items that you purchase or services that you deliver.

While this list is extendable, goods & services items typically include:

• Purchase Items and Discounts – enabling you to define pre-approved pricing with your suppliers. These can then be “called off” from payment requests.
• Fixed Price Services – enabling the definition of any fixed fee schedules. These can then be incorporated as part of Fee Structures.
• Rate Cards – enabling the definition of external cost rates. These are then pulled into Fee Structures.

These flexible structures can facilitate either standard price lists across different clients or suppliers or separate price lists for every client. The choice is yours.

See Understanding Goods and Services‍.

Time Recording

ShareDo has inbuilt time recording. This time recording can be used in either or both of the following circumstances:

• Passive time recordings – time can be recorded passively, i.e. without user input. Passive time capture captures management information concerning the firm’s processes. For example, using passive time capture, you can understand how long a specific process, phase or activity will take and ultimately calculate the delivery cost.
• For billing purposes – passive time capture can be extended to specific codes for billing clients. Like other data items in ShareDo, the codes available can be “striped” according to the type of work or the phase that a case is in.

In addition to passive time capture, ShareDo supports a number of other time-recording productivity features, including:

• Automatic generation of fixed units based on specific events happening in the application, e.g., producing a specific document.
• Flexible time coding – time codes can be adjusted according to the case context.
• Automatic narrative generation based on case and activity context includes preventing time from being submitted if reserved words are present.
• Stopwatches – as each activity is undertaken, stopwatches are started, paused and stopped.
• Maintenance of time targets at both a case level and for individuals.
• Integration of time records with common time recording and PMS systems.

While time records are typically associated with a matter, they do not necessarily need to be. For example, you can configure the system to capture time-related to activities that are non-matter related.

See Understanding Time Recording‍.

Fees

Within ShareDo, you define a number of different fee templates that describe the overarching format in which fees can be captured. Examples of Fee Templates include:

• Conditional Fee Arrangement (No Win, No Fee).
• Fixed Fee (Hourly).
• Hourly (Capped).
• Hourly (T&M).

Fee Templates are then comprised of:

• Sections – this is the logical breakdown of the Fee Template into configurable sections. ShareDo provides a number of out-of-the-box sections, such as Fixed Fee (menu-based) or Hourly sections, that can be configured to meet additional needs. Where these Fee Sections do not meet specific requirements, custom Fee Sections can be created.
• Elements – a section is made up of a number of different elements; these provide the detail in a section. For example, an “hourly” fee section comprises a number of Role + Hours elements.

While Fee Templates define the structure for a specific fee arrangement, they do not necessarily define all of the commercial parameters. Instead, fee templates are assigned to a statement of work and client-specific fee arrangements are configured.
 
Once an Instruction or Matter is incepted under a given client statement of work, this Matter inherits these pre-defined commercial parameters, and users are provided with the correct starting point for the Fee Structure. Users can then update the Fee Structure to enter Matter-specific details such as Fees, Disbursements and the like.

See Understanding Fees‍.

Actual Fees

While Fee Structures define the overall structure for the fees to be charged, there are a number of different mechanisms responsible for the creation of actual fees:

• Actual Fees can be created by users manually.
• Actual fees can be created based on system events, e.g. when a document of a particular type is issued or a certain type of complexity is specified, then an additional fee is added.

It is this second method that is particularly powerful; ShareDo can be configured to capture additional fees which might otherwise be lost.

Integration With ERP/PMS

ShareDo aims to provide a single digital desktop through which you can manage all aspects of your legal work without the need to access external systems.

In most deployments, ShareDo will be integrated with external finance or practice management systems to achieve this “single desktop”. Some examples of common integrations are as follows:

Importing And Exporting Your Configuration

Given the large amount of finance configuration, it is natural that you will want to import and export this.

This is done via the following features: -

• Chart of Accounts Global Feature.
  • This export/import process will include: -
    • Base feature configuration.
    • Work Type chart of accounts configuration.
    • Segment code configuration.
    • Chart of accounts transaction configuration.
    • Chart of accounts code combinations configuration.
  • Budgets Global Feature.
    • This export/import process will include: -
      • Base feature configuration.
      • Work type budget configuration.
      • Budget Structure Segment Values.
      • Budget Structure Position Types.
      • Budget Structure Aspect associations.
      • Budget Phase Plans.
      • Budget Position Types.