How automation made a 100-year-old law firm more efficient, accurate, and strategic

When you’re making 50+ payments every day, with values regularly exceeding £1m, you need both speed and accuracy in your processes. But with so many parties involved and your business growing rapidly, how can you reduce time spent on the task without jeopardising quality outcomes?

About Napthens

With 300 people, 25 partners, and six offices – Napthens is an award-winning north west law firm, with offices based in Lancashire, Liverpool City Region, Fylde Coast and Cumbria. Finance director Stephen Faulkner and his team are responsible for processing large numbers of payments swiftly and safely.

With clients’ businesses and livelihoods often dependent on these transactions, reliable and secure financial processes are crucial to business operations.

The Challenge

Reducing manual process & mitigating risk

The firm approached AccessPay as their previous payment process, while designed with robust controls in place to prioritise client finances, was highly manual, involving multiple checks and approvals. This intricate process was time-consuming and unfortunately, still susceptible to human error.

There were two main reasons we looked for a bank integration solution. Most importantly we wanted to mitigate the risk of fraud and error as much as possible with limited human intervention, and secondly, we wanted to allow the finance team to apply their technical skills and knowledge to add further value to the wider business by creating capacity within the team.

The previous process was highly manual with multiple human touch points from the initial payment request, through finance checking and then multiple layers of authorisation due to the human intervention in the process. The nature and volume of payments with a leading law firm, operating across multiple disciplines, required a solution to add security with efficiency as the business grows.

Working with a case management system and an online portal from the bank, the previous process involved a legal assistant creating a payment, the finance team checking it, a partner approving it, the finance team then uploading the payment, and then a finance manager approving it. If it was a high value payment, it required a second finance manager for dual approval.

This process involved up to six individuals, each with competing priorities. We often needed to ring for approvals, meaning a single payment could take hours to get through. There’s also the risk of miskeyed data, lost files, and accidental mistakes – especially because we needed to edit CSV files to make them fit different systems. It was an inherent risk of having too many people and too many steps.

The Solution

Bank integration & automation

Automation held the key for Napthens, as they turned to AccessPay to streamline their processes without sacrificing on their security.

More efficiency means more time to add value in other ways, but it also means we weren’t reliant on recruitment to cope with business growth or coverage for holidays and maternity. Our new process with AccessPay has completely automated the post-case management payments process. We now collect payments into batches, which then get uploaded automatically and pushed out from the bank automatically.

The bank connectivity delivered by AccessPay has rendered CSV files unnecessary, which reduces the risk of error as files don’t need to be manually edited to fit different systems. Fraud is minimised by reducing the number of involved team members, and by removing the need to log into and out of bank portals all day.

The Impact

More efficient, more accurate payments

From six people and hours-long payments, to just three people and payments completed in minutes, the process switch has made a world of difference to Stephen’s workload:

We implemented AccessPay to solve these two problems – efficiency and accuracy – and it has really achieved this in a significant way. In actual results, it means that we have had no need for temps or short-term backfilling to deal with resource variations. The increase in efficiency has allowed the finance team to support our legal teams much more with training and troubleshooting in a much more proactive manner than previously.

The firm’s financial hygiene is much greater, too. That time freed up in staff workloads means more resource allocated to account management, making sure there is a focus on residual balances and getting ahead of challenges before they crystalise.

The removal of manual touchpoints, which were vulnerable to fraud and error, has reduced the financial risk to the company.

We used to double and triple check things that we knew were correct when we uploaded them, due to the fraud risks associated with the existing process.
It’s not possible to fraudulently amend the data in the containment of AccessPay: if it’s right, then it’s right.”

Read more about AccessPay’s bank-connectivity and automated services or arrange a demo to see it in action for yourself.