Managing matter budgets is critical to ensuring good time recovery, and yet can be a challenge, especially when things get busy. Luckily, with ayora, staying on top of budgets has never been easier. Head to the Dashboard tab to make that happen.
Make sure the budget column is visible. If you can’t see it in your dashboard, ensure the Budget column has been turned on (using the Columns feature)
Setting a matter budget
Click on the budget field next to the relevant matter and input the new value. It’s that easy!
Setting a recurring monthly budget (retainers)
Do you work on retainers where you deliver monthly work up to a pre-agreed amount? Good news - you can keep tabs on that in ayora and see how your in-month time compares to the monthly budget.
To create a recurring monthly budget, click onto the budget field and then click on the Recurrence icon (🔁) that appears on the right hand side of the input box.
Enter the monthly budget amount, and you're all set! You can also add columns to the dashboard to track unbilled, billed and total time added within the month. To do that, select the following columns:
- Monthly Budget Unbilled Time
- Monthly Budget Billed Time
- Monthly Budget Actual (unbilled + billed)
Ayora will alert you if you get close to exceed the budget in any given month. Further, ayora will let you know if any time remains unbilled after a given month's end (with a 5 day grace period).
The budget resets on the 1st day of each month, and any unbilled time that remains from the prior month is not counted towards the current month's budget.
Phased budget (coming soon)
Is your matter budget tied to phases or workstreams? To reflect that in ayora, click into the budget field and then click on the “See phases” link. That opens a window where you can add a breakdown.
Going forward, ayora will pick up time entry phase codes to allocate time against budgeted phases (the Actual column). Remember to correctly code your time for this to work smoothly!
Automatic budget alerts
ayora will automatically alert you of time mounting against budget in a few scenarios:
- The matter is 80% into the budget, or
- The matter is less than 80% of the budget, but the system has detected activity patterns that strongly suggest the budget will be breached
If there is no budget set for a matter, ayora will still monitor that matter for anomalous patterns of time addition and let you know when the risk of write-offs materially increases.
Creating a custom budget alert
You can create a custom alert to help prevent “mounting WIP”. You can configure ayora to notify you (or someone else) when:
-
Actualreaches £x (e.g. £20k); -
Actualreaches x% of budget (e.g. 50%)*; - every time £x (e.g. another £10k) is added to the matter.
Actual is defined as total time billed and unbilled.
*By default, ayora notifies you when you reach 80% of budget on a matter, so this is an option to add more thresholds.
You can select to apply a given alert to every matter (current or future) belonging to a given client - handy if you are running multiple similar matters for the same client.
Custom alert can be created by clicking on the alarm clock icon ( ⏰) next to the “Unbilled time” cell.
- A green dot next to the alarm clock icon (⏰🟢) means that a custom alert is already associated with a given matter.
- More than one alert can be created for the same matter.
- Every timekeeper on a matter can create a custom alert.
What happens to budget data
Worry not - ayora does not overwrite anything in your core Practice Management System. Instead, budget inputs are securely stored by ayora; we can make the history of budget changes available to your Finance team.