Redwood Analytics

Excel(r) by Microsoft (r) is a very powerful tool. Excel is pretty amazing with all of the advanced and even complex functions. A recent article online in CFO http://bit.ly/wlDGoc highlights what you have to do if you want to account for seasonal changes to your data over a course of a period. It makes sense, it happens in law firms as you project work in progress and expected case settlements, etc. But as I am reading through "how" to do some of this wonderful stuff, I had to say, getting what you want comes at a cost of deep knowledge of spreadsheet technology and a lot of time to manipulate data that should be available from a financial reporting system. Granted, some information is not captured in your financial system, you might need data from your external electronic payroll provider, or from your HR employee management system, or there might be variables for how you compensate a partner that needs to be included and perhaps calculated to get to a result needed for a report.

Business intelligence (BI) tools fills a void - The business world has been using them for many years and some of the common ones come from large enterprise companies like IBM, SAS and SAP.

What do business intelligence tools let you do that Excel doesn't? For one, you can pull data from multiple sources, and it doesn't have to be manual. Many of these tools come with a team who can integrate the information into the BI system and from that point forward it's automated. Also, most of us has experienced working day and night on a report to only be reviewing it with a stakeholder to have them say, "Can you just take this and use that....", "Only if you can show it to me this way...", and so on. You have to be able to manipulate the data, slicing and dicing it to get the results you need. BI tools help you make better decisions to get better outcomes. Click here http://bit.ly/wvlfwe  for a short article from Larry Bodine on Client Profitability at a Glance using a BI tool.

How to get started - First, you start by identifying and understanding what problems you have. Then as you look at BI tools, some other considerations to keep in mind are:

• 1) Is the vendor a proven player in the legal profession?
• 2) What type of underlying technology do they use and why?
• 3) Does it integrate with my existing systems?
• 4) Do they have professional services and consultants to get it up and running?
• 5) Does it solve my problem(s)?