ProVantage^® BI Suite Delivers
Hard-to-Get Compensation Information from Firm's
Accounting Software

Rutan & Tucker, LLP is a 125-attorney firm in Costa Mesa, CA, and it is the largest firm in Orange County. Rutan's diverse practice caters to multi-national corporations and private individuals, encompassing virtually all industries. Rutan uses CMS OPEN^® for its time and billing and general ledger system, and ARCS is used to help manage the collection of accounts receivable.

In 2002, Rutan had implemented a new firmwide partner compensation program. They began searching for an easier way to extract financial data, attorney statistics and client/matter information from the accounting database. Rich Boden, Business Manager for Rutan & Tucker, explains, "Running CMS reports by participating attorney would take three to four hours and slow the server down to a crawl. We had to run the reports at night to avoid impacting the daily accounting process."

Matter Profitability was an important element of the new partner compensation system. But when the participating attorney reports were run, they did not provide the total picture for matter profitability, and the sheer volume of the data was too cumbersome for the Compensation Committee members. "We needed to gather the annual billings and collections for each participating billing attorney by client and by matter, with a breakdown by type of working timekeeper, such as partner, of counsel, associate and paralegal. In addition, we needed to reduce the fees collected by a fixed percentage for 'working attorney credit' and then apply a per-hour cost against that income to determine the 'net non-partner profits' for each participating billing attorney in the firm. The information needed to calculate the per-hour cost for each timekeeper was not available from any reports in our accounting system."

Rich quickly determined that a business intelligence system would help meet his firm's special requirements and deliver the financial information that the accounting software could not. "We looked at other BI systems in the marketplace and ultimately chose the ProVantage® Business Intelligence Suite."

Since the ProVantage BI Suite works with a firm's existing accounting software, the installation was non-invasive and did not interfere with the CMS OPEN system itself. "The installation of the BI Suite was very easy. The product was installed on the desktops of the Partner Compensation Committee members, and they all learned how to use it with very little training," Rich remembers.

"The BI Suite allows us to easily extract client billing and collection data by participating attorney and enables us to drill down to lower levels such as client, matter, billing attorney and timekeeper. The BI Suite's ability to quickly retrieve data with multiple levels of drill down is impressive, and our ability to move the data into an Excel spreadsheet is a real plus. Through some creative programming by Jim Flateboe, ProVantage BI architect, we were able to add the information needed for the individual attorney cost-per-hour calculation."

Rutan relies on the BI Suite to identify matter profitability, specifically the non-partner profitability of a client/matter. Rich Boden explains, "This data provides the Compensation Committee with information regarding use of its employee, non-partner timekeepers. By using the ProVantage BI Suite, Rutan is able to examine matter profitability from a totally new perspective. The task of determining our matter profitability formula by each participating billing attorney, showing client and matter detail, could not have been done without the ProVantage BI Suite."

The ProVantage Business Intelligence Suite greatly assists us with providing matter profitability data for the partner compensation process at Rutan & Tucker. "Prior to using the BI Suite, it was impractical, if not impossible, to extract the necessary data for a matter profitability analysis. I am confident that the data extracted from CMS OPEN is accurate. I'm now exploring the features of the numerous portfolios within the BI Suite and learning how these additional portfolios can be applied to assist in the management of the firm."

Rutan & Tucker, LLP is based in Costa Mesa, CA and currently employs 125 attorneys. It is the largest firm in Orange County. Rutan & Tucker represents a wide range of clients, from multi-national corporations and financial institutions to family-owned businesses and private individuals. Rutan & Tucker offers its services to high tech and agricultural industries, real estate developers, governmental agencies, charities and many more.

The ProVantage Business Intelligence Suite is a powerful graphical analysis tool used by senior managers and partners to examine their firm's key financial and business performance measures and runs in conjunction with most accounting systems. The ProVantage Business Intelligence Suite instantly delivers multi-dimensional views of strategic information captured during time & cost entry, billing and application of payments to time & cost transactions. The BI Suite is delivered with profitability, designer and reportwriter modules. The reportwriter allows users to move performance data to Microsoft^® Excel for further analysis.

ProVantage Software, Inc. has been developing time & billing/financial management solutions since 1983, and our client base includes professional service firms both large and small and from a number of industries. ProVantage Software, Inc. is a Microsoft Certified Partner, a reseller of selected computer systems, and provides training, support and consulting services from its corporate office at 4040 Lake Washington Blvd. NE, Suite #208, Kirkland WA 98033. The toll-free number is 800-843-2188. Please visit our website at www.provantagesoftware.com.