The new capability enables law firms to manage the full lifecycle of their financial operations \u2013 from client retainers to month-end reconciliations to year-end tax reporting \u2013 without ever leaving PracticePanther.<\/p>\n
The launch represents a significant expansion of PracticePanther\u2019s financial management capabilities, building on its existing billing, invoicing, time tracking and PantherPayments features. PantherAccounting Plus is available to PracticePanther users on its new Business Pro plan, at an additional $25 per user per month above the standard Business plan.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor years, law firms have had to stitch together their practice management software with separate, often generic accounting solutions \u2013 creating data gaps, double entry, and compliance risk,\u201d said Soumya Nettimi, CEO of Paradigm, in a statement. \u201cWith PantherAccounting Plus built natively into PracticePanther, law firms now have a single platform that handles everything from client intake to financial close.\u201d<\/p>\n
Last week, I was given an exclusive pre-launch demonstration by Colin Li<\/a>, Paradigm\u2019s president, chief financial officer and chief revenue officer, and Chad Todd<\/a>, the cofounder of the trust accounting platform TrustBooks, which Paradigm acquired in 2022<\/a>. They walked me through the product\u2019s features in detail.<\/p>\n What permeated their presentation was a picture of an accounting system designed with a clear guiding philosophy \u2013 that legal accounting should be simple enough for any member of a law firm\u2019s staff to handle, yet robust enough to fully replace standalone accounting tools such as QuickBooks.<\/p>\n Todd, who has spent over a decade focused on accounting for law firms, emphasized that PantherAccounting Plus is not simply a re-skin of the TrustBooks product.<\/p>\n TrustBooks \u2013 which was a contestant in 2016 at the inaugural ABA TECHSHOW Startup Alley that I run \u2013 was a standalone trust accounting application built around the principles of simplicity and bar compliance. Those principles carry over, Todd said, but the product itself is entirely new.<\/p>\n \u201cWe took all the lessons learned from building out that little niche and from talking to thousands of attorneys, and we wired that straight into Practice Panther,\u201d Todd said. \u201cInstead of just rushing TrustBooks and dropping it in and saying, \u2018Hey, we\u2019re done,\u2019 we\u2019ve taken a couple of years, and we rolled this out in phases, and we\u2019ve talked to hundreds of law firms.\u201d<\/p>\n The result, he said, is an accounting system that extends workflows attorneys and their staff already know within PracticePanther, rather than requiring them to learn a separate system.<\/p>\n \u201cOur philosophy is that accounting in your LPM shouldn\u2019t be big or scary or difficult,\u201d Todd said. \u201cIt shouldn\u2019t feel like learning something new. It should be an extension of what you\u2019re already doing.\u201d<\/p>\n PantherAccounting Plus covers both trust accounting and operating accounting \u2013 the two essential pillars of law firm financial management.<\/p>\n On the trust side, the system provides full IOLTA and trust ledger functionality, client and matter-level tracking, safeguards against co-mingling of funds, and a guided three-way reconciliation wizard.<\/p>\n On the operating side, it offers a general ledger, a customizable chart of accounts, expense tracking and full financial reporting including profit-and-loss statements, balance sheets and cash flow statements.<\/p>\n Asked whether PantherAccounting Plus is a full replacement for a product such as QuickBooks, Todd was unequivocal.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a full replacement. Our Panther product as a whole has everything you need around invoicing, collections, reporting, clients and matters. And the additional accounting stuff we\u2019ve layered on top gives you an end-to-end solution just as good, if not more robust, than QuickBooks, but in the way that it speaks to the normal person that\u2019s going to be using it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou don\u2019t need another accounting solution,\u201d Li added. \u201cYou can get rid of everything except for your bank.\u201d\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Li and Todd said they deliberately studied the shortcomings of accounting features in competing practice management platforms to avoid repeating those mistakes.<\/p>\n The most common complaints they heard from attorneys were that competitor products felt like two separate systems awkwardly stitched together, and that they were written in accounting jargon that made them inaccessible to non-accountants.<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of the competitors, it feels like two systems, not one,\u201d Todd said. \u201cThe bookkeeper feels okay in one system, but not the other. The paralegal feels okay in one system, but not the other. And you can literally feel the friction as these two systems try to sync and pretend to be one. So that was a deal killer for us.\u201d<\/p>\n The solution, he said, was to build accounting directly into PracticePanther\u2019s existing workflows. When a staff member records a payment, for example, the only additional step required for accounting purposes is selecting the appropriate chart of accounts category.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you build accounting into your LPM correctly, one feeds the other,\u201d Todd said. \u201cIt\u2019s just one simple workflow.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong>Streamlined Onboarding<\/strong><\/p>\n During the demo, Todd walked through the product\u2019s onboarding process, which he described as one of its most important features. For a trust account, the onboarding requires just three steps: enter the date of onboarding, enter the ending balance from the firm\u2019s bank statement, and identify any uncleared transactions.<\/p>\n The system is designed to accommodate firms whatever their state of bookkeeping readiness. Firms with clean records from a prior system can import their balance sheets and chart of accounts via CSV. Firms with messier records \u2013 or no prior accounting system at all \u2013 can still onboard without friction.<\/p>\n In those cases, PantherAccounting Plus uses placeholder entries for retained earnings and deferred revenue to balance the books, allowing the firm to clean things up later with the help of a bookkeeper.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s important to us that anybody can onboard,\u201d Todd said. \u201cA lot of other systems, you get here, and if you don\u2019t have the perfect technical understanding, you don\u2019t have a financial background, if anything is off at all, you\u2019re toast.\u201d<\/p>\n For operating accounts, the onboarding follows the same workflow, with one addition, which is setting up a chart of accounts. PracticePanther provides a default chart of accounts tailored to law firms, built from data gathered from thousands of firms. Firms can also import their existing chart of accounts or customize the defaults, toggling categories on and off before importing.<\/p>\n Todd said he has personally walked hundreds of customers through the onboarding process and that it typically takes about seven minutes \u2013 far less than the 45 minutes he typically schedules for the call.<\/p>\n In designing the trust accounting features, Todd and Li said, compliance was a central concern. The system requires that every trust transaction be assigned to a specific client and matter \u2013 a core requirement for IOLTA compliance that some generic accounting tools fail to enforce. The system also prevents users from taking a client\u2019s trust balance below zero.<\/p>\n PantherAccounting Plus maintains two separate ledgers for trust accounts. A bank ledger tracks the financial activity at the bank level, and a client-matter ledger tracks funds at the individual client level. Todd emphasized the importance of this separation, noting that misappropriation of client funds remains the number one cause of attorney disbarment.<\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t leave it to chance,\u201d Todd said. \u201cWe don\u2019t co-mingle funds. We don\u2019t muddle accounts.\u201d<\/p>\n Li added that the system provides full traceability from the moment a client payment is entered through to where it appears on the ledger, enabling firms to trace the origin of any transaction if questions arise during a reconciliation or audit.<\/p>\n One of the most important capabilities of legal accounting software is three-way reconciliation \u2013 a procedure that most state bars require but that many attorneys find intimidating.<\/p>\n In PantherAccounting Plus, the process follows the same simple workflow used during onboarding. Enter the statement ending date, enter the bank balance, and check off which transactions have cleared.<\/p>\nA Ground-Up Build<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Full Replacement for Standalone Software<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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<\/a><\/p>\nAddressing Competitors\u2019 Shortcomings<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Built-In Compliance Guardrails<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Three-Way Reconciliation Made Simple<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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