What is business intelligence?

A BI system extracts information from your accounting and other systems, refines and transforms it where necessary and finally aggregates it into a flexible format useful for making strategic business decisions.

BI answers questions like:

  • How profitable are my firm’s practice groups, offices, timekeepers, clients and matters?
  • Which practice groups have a high profit margin but low billing volume and vice versa?
  • How can I determine realization differences between practice groups?
  • How can I get supporting information when determining partner allocation and compensation?
  • What are the underlying billing and collection lag differences across billing partners?
  • What are the firms carrying costs by billing timekeeper?

The ProVantage Business Intelligence Suite is a powerful, easy to use graphical analysis tool used by senior managers and partners to examine the firm’s key financial and business performance measures, and it works with most accounting software. The ProVantage Business Intelligence Suite instantly delivers multi-dimensional views of key information stored in the firm’s accounting software. Best of all, the ProVantage BI Suite is very cost effective, and key information is available without costly infrastructure investments and without reliance on IT resources.

The ProVantage® Business Intelligence Suite consists of the following:

Wellspring® – point and click data extraction and portfolio-building tool

Executive Portfolio® – user interface supporting executives and senior administrative staff

  • Drill-down and flat views of information –– a flat view is a recap of any dimension in the drill-down
  • Dynamic selection of tabular and graphical presentations
  • Dynamic time slicing choices:
    • monthly, quarterly, and yearly
    • calendar and fiscal basis

Focal Point – point and click Excel report writer

ProVantage BI Suite reveals performance within the context of organization dimensions. We support the following measures and dimensions (unlimited user-definable measures can be obtained by using expressions):

Performance Measures – 36 basic measures (by month worked, billed or applied) the number of which can be extended with expressions

  • Utilization
  • Realization
  • Profitability
  • WIP and AR aging
  • Collections
  • Compensation formula
  • Billing lags
  • Payment lags
  • Carrying Costs
  • Standard Costs
  • etc.

Organizational dimensions – 80+ Date effective or current assignments

  • Office
  • Department
  • Area of law
  • Originating, responsible, billing partner
  • ABA code
  • Industry
  • Client/matter
  • Practice group
  • Attorney type
  • Working attorney
  • Participating attorney (matter credit splits)
  • etc.

The ProVantage Suite is unique in its:

  • Simplicity
  • Flexibility
  • Extensibility
  • Extremely small IT footprint
  • Comparatively small budget

A relationship with ProVantage Software, Inc. is characterized by:

  • High quality support
  • Accessible expertise based on intimate knowledge of your industry
  • Available customization services
  • Preferred upgrade status to other software offered by ProVantage Software

Read about how the BI Suite helps a firm access information they couldn’t get to before, what our clients are saying, overview of the Business Intelligence Suite. We also have a published article in the LawNet Knowledge Management white paper.