“I can’t blink”: How this law firm traded daily anxiety for clarity while matching payments

This law firm is one of the largest and fastest-growing in the United States, having expanded rapidly over the past half-decade through targeted attorney hiring and steadily opening new offices. With 800+ lawyers across 25 offices nationwide, growth has been the defining story of the firm’s recent history. 

But that growth placed mounting pressure on a cash receipts function that had long operated in a deeply traditional way. Manual processes that had worked for decades were becoming untenable, and leadership knew something had to change.

What began as a search for operational efficiency became a broader transformation: one that changed how the firm reconciles payments, how its team spends their time, and how leadership thinks about the cash receipts function altogether. 

Before Versapay, cash application at this law firm was entirely manual. Every step, from receiving checks to creating journal entries to filing backup documentation, was a human task, executed daily by a team of seven: five accounting assistants, a team lead, and the cash receipts manager. 

The volume they were managing was significant: approximately 4,000 to 5,000 checks monthly, alongside 6,000 ACH and wire payments — a payment mix running roughly 40% paper and 60% electronic. 

Seven people were entirely consumed by these daily cash application and reconciliation tasks, day-in and day-out. The work demanded a level of sustained focus that left little room for error — and little capacity for anything else. 

Every morning, the mailroom sorted incoming mail, paper-clipped checks to any accompanying remittance documents, and delivered the collated stack to the cash receipts team. Before a single accounting entry could be made, someone had to spend one to two hours simply scanning and imaging all of that paper.

Approximately 80% of incoming check payments came with a detachable remittance document. Of those, more than half were single payments covering multiple invoices. That payment data was then manually matched and keyed into this firm’s financial management software to reconcile it. 

The remaining 20% — checks with no remittance at all — were harder still: handwritten, from unfamiliar payors, with no clear application destination. 

A daily bank deposit cutoff of 4:00 PM meant there was never enough time to fully investigate ambiguous payments before they needed to be deposited. The team’s only option was to deposit everything, assign unclear credits to general ledger holding accounts, and deal with the cleanup afterward.  

By month-end, this created a recurring backlog of 50 to 100 payments sitting unresolved in holding — a persistent liability that complicated revenue reporting and consumed additional hours to reclassify

The team had considered competing cash application automation offerings — before selecting Versapay — including ones from Esker and HighRadius, each of which were carefully evaluated against the firm’s specific requirements. 

In the legal sector, financial and practice management system compatibility is non-negotiable. The firm uses Thomson Reuters Elite 3E — one of two platforms that dominate the space — so finding a solution already proven to integrate with the same system was essential. 

Rather than relying on vendor promises, the team asked for customer references. Versapay produced one that was particularly compelling: another law firm, already live on Cash Application, running on the same system, and larger and more internationally complex than their own organization. That reference described handling its full cash receipts operation with just one or two people — a testimonial the competing solutions were unable to provide.

From start-to-finish, the cash receipts team understood that a smooth implementation would determine how successful the project would ultimately be. Teams, like this one, are not looking for complicated transformation projects. They’d much rather have a practical path forward, and Versapay’s backedreassurance and clearly-supported implementation plan proved invaluable.  

The implementation process centered on daily check-ins with the Versapay team in the week leading up to go-live. The cash receipts manager identified these open, conversational sessions — not formal training materials — as the most impactful onboarding elements.  

He extended that same approach to a roughly dozen-and-a-half additional remote Cash Application users — who needed access as they regularly capture checks onsite — migrating them off a legacy bank deposit system and onto Versapay’s remote check capture solution through one-on-one conversations and small group sessions. 

Where seven people were once needed to keep pace with the firm’s daily payment volume, that same workload — across a firm that has continued to add attorneys and open new offices — is now handled by five. And the firm is not planning to add headcount as it grows. That is what efficiency looks like in practice: creating genuine capacity for a team that was previously running at its limit. 

The most time-consuming task in the team’s daily routine has been removed entirely from their workflow: scanning and imaging incoming checks. What consumed nearly two hours every morning before any accounting work could begin is now handled automatically through Versapay’s remote check capture and optical character recognition (OCR) capabilities.  

The cash receipts team also no longer has to manually assemble daily backup PDFs and save them to a network drive to document each deposit. Now, all filing is contained within Versapay’s system. 

Beyond these time savings, the check capture capability solved a data quality problem the law firm had long lived with. The name of the account a check was drawing on — the drawn-by field — had routinely been left blank in the firm’s financial system because it wasn’t a required field. Now, it’s captured automatically, making payment history searchable and dramatically reducing the time spent researching ambiguous or unrecognized payments.  

The 50 to 100 regularly unresolved payments sitting in general ledger holding accounts at month-end have been eliminated. Versapay’s validation workflow surfaces unclear or unmatched payments before they are deposited, giving the team the information they need to make informed decisions in real-time — rather than depositing everything under pressure and sorting out the consequences later. 

The downstream effect is meaningful: fewer payments in holding means fewer journal entries to reclassify, a cleaner accounts receivable ledger, and a month-end close that no longer begins with a backlog to work through.  

Because unapplied cash cannot be recognized as revenue under standard accounting principles, the speed and accuracy of cash application has a direct impact on the firm’s financial statements. The cash receipts manager runs daily revenue reports tracking how cash received has contributed to the gross revenue budget — and describes that process as measurably cleaner since implementing Versapay Cash Application. 

But beyond the numbers, there is something harder to quantify that the team describes with particular clarity: the removal of ambient worry. The constant background anxiety of wondering whether something had been missed — a payment overlooked, a bank balance that didn’t reconcile — is gone. 

The most durable outcome may be the simplest: the team has time now. Time that was previously consumed by scanning, sorting, depositing, and reclassifying payments is now directed toward higher-value work — work that is more engaging, more strategic, and more visible to the rest of the organization. 

That shift — from reactive to proactive, from administrative to analytical — is exactly what finance leaders are looking for when they invest in payment matching automation. And it’s what this law firm got.