How to Manage Spend

To track your forecasted and actual spend against your budget, you must first know your budget!

Go to Settings icon / Vendor Management / Service Provider Budgets.

You can specify your budget for each service provider by month. To simplify things, you can copy and paste the figures from an existing spreadsheet (ensure the service provider names are in the same order). If your budget is an annual figure broken evenly over 12 months, type the figure directly into the total column, and we will automatically populate the monthly figures for you.

LawVu manages forecasts via the scope management feature, which you can enable within the matter type. To ensure you provide a forecast for all matters sent to outside counsel, please ensure that scope management is set to on or optional.

The scoping fields you add will help you negotiate effectively and limit the options available when you send a matter to outside counsel. They will also remind your service provider to provide a forecast at the start of the matter and update it whenever the actual spend exceeds the latest forecast.

You can read this article to learn more about which LawVu fields you can add to your scoping form. While you can add custom fields, only data captured in LawVu fields ties directly to the reports in the Reports module.

Please note: Service providers are not required to update the forecast if the fee arrangement is an estimate.

Service providers upload their invoices on each billing date and submit them to you as a batch. LawVu rejects invoices exceeding the agreed-upon fee and prompts the service provider to update the forecast and explain the increase.

Please note: Only once the updated forecast has been approved may the invoice be submitted and service providers are not required to update the forecast if the fee arrangement is an estimate.

You can monitor how forecasted and actual spend are tracked against your budget at any time in the Reporting / Service Providers section.

For more detail, click on any data point to determine how that spend has been distributed within the selected period.

You can further drill down by clicking on the data table icon at the bottom left of the chart.

This will let you see the data represented in a table format, which can also be exported to excel for further analysis.