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.
- Simplicity
- Flexibility
- Extensibility
- Extremely small IT footprint
- Comparatively small budget
- 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.
For a closer look and data sheets, select from the menu at the left.
Executive Portfolio
Instant access to accurate financial performance information is critical for effective practice management and development. Executive Portfolio employs a customizable data mart to create multi-dimensional views or portfolios of the information captured during Time & Cost Accounting and Client Billing, and is managed within ProVantage or your current accounting system. Once created, these portfolios can be viewed using the drill-down, charting and table views to:
- Analyze the performance of the entire firm by over 80 dimensions including office, practice area, area of law, or timekeeper. This can help you evaluate the contribution of practice groups, departments, and individuals.
- Graphically display key business indicators such as utilization, activity, and the value of billable work to improve firm management and profitability.
- Monitor critical success factors such as realization, billing and payment lags, variances, and write-offs to improve cash-flow management.
Download Datasheet Here. Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader. 
Wellspring
To stay current on your firm’s financial performance, you need instant access to critical information. Wellspring delivers your critical success factors the way you want to see them and helps you to create data marts and executive portfolios (drill-down hierarchies) expressly tailored to your needs.
Wellspring Designer enables you to create data marts that summarize transactional data into meaningful business intelligence for selected organizational dimensions across specified date ranges. It also builds portfolios from these data marts using a subset of the selected dimensions and date ranges supported by a given mart, and by specifying a drill-down order for the selected subset of dimensions. Wellspring can specify display and content for each presentation tab to include tables, charts and graphs for selected measures and expressions where measures are statistics or totals directly calculated by ProVantage®, and expressions are mathematic calculations of two or more measures. A separate security manager controls access to data marts, portfolios, dimensions within a portfolio and to presentations available within a portfolio.
Download Datasheet Here. Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader.
Focal Point
Instant access to financial performance figures is imperative to today’s professional service firm. With ProVantage’s powerful Business Intelligence Suite, gaining this knowledge is a mouse-click away. Backed by an extensive, customizable data mart, the Executive Portfolio application instantly delivers data for over 80 dimensions and 36 measures relating to your firm’s performance. This data is captured from routine time & cost accounting and billing functions maintained within the firm’s accounting software. From this information, managers can analyze the performance of the entire firm categorized by office, practice area, area of law, timekeeper, client and matter.
Focal Point allows you to export this important data into spreadsheets for further analysis. And Focal Point reports can accommodate hundreds of columns and expressions.
Strategic Reports the Way You Want Them
Using Executive Portfolio and Focal Point you can:
- Immediately create and view an Excel report mirroring the same dimensions and measures as selected in Executive Portfolio.
- Customize an Excel report using Executive Portfolio as a template.
- Create a totally new Excel report from the extensive list of available dimensions, measures and user-definable expressions in Executive Portfolio.
- Choose between Excel report types: traditional MIS, drill-down or pivot table.
- Create true ranking reports for a variety of dimensions, e.g., top 10 practice groups for profitability for the year.
- Create side by side two-period reports with optional variances. Store customized reports by name.
A Goldmine of Business Intelligence at your Fingertips
Focal Point can be launched from any summary level you’ve chosen with Executive Portfolio. A right mouse click reveals various Focal Point reporting options: custom or automatic; and format options: drill-down, MIS, or pivot table.
Focal Point enables you to choose criteria the way you want to see it. select from an extensive list including date ranges, measures, expressions, and sorting options. As with Executive Portfolio, numerous portfolio value tabs are available within Focal Point. These value tabs enable you to instantly access summarized information on your firms
- billable and non-billable work
- utilization
- activity
- investment
- standard and original realization
- variances
- billing and payment lags
Once you’ve made your selections, Focal Point will instantly export the Executive Portfolio summary tables directly into Excel–no wasted time looking for downloaded Excel files. From here, you are free to further analyze and manipulate your spreadsheet while enjoying full Excel functionality and features.
All Focal Point reports can be stored for future usage.
Even More Options at Your Fingertips
By choosing the Functions tab, you have access to many more statistical functions, including averages, variance percentages, percentages of total, ascending and descending rank.
Download Datasheet Here. Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader.