Aurum has easily halved the time we spend on reconciliation, freeing the team up to engage in other value-adding work.

The letter of the law and the figures in accounts, whilst different in form, are both held to the utmost scrutiny. The finance team at Slater & Gordon – one of the UK’s leading law firms - therefore know that they have no margin for error. 

Being specialists in medical law to protect people’s health, reputation, money, and more, desire for accuracy is not only imposed on Slater & Gordon’s finance team by their sector and their profession, it is also present because of what is at stake during their legal cases. Read on to find out how they preserve financial integrity through their use of Aurum. 

The solution 

Whilst legal cases hinge on exposing the facts that matter, accounting is a practice of double-checking that every single one is correct. However, when volumes of transactions are high, performing manual reconciliation to ensure that this is the case can take a long time and result in errors.  

Slater & Gordon could therefore not continue with manual reconciliation after their acquisition – it skyrocketed the number of legal cases they were involved in and did the same to the number of transactions they were reconciling. Instead, they needed automated reconciliation software built on intelligent matching rules. This way they would be able to power through not just over 1,000 transactions a month, but nearly 100,000 without compromising on accuracy. 

The result 

Adopting Aurum was a necessity for Slater & Gordon. After all, they previously had people manually spending an entire morning on bank reconciliation at a point in time when their transactions were fewer and so too their number of bank accounts. Yet with Aurum implemented they have not required any additional hires despite transactions soaring and their number of bank accounts quadrupling. 

Aurum has easily halved the time we spend on reconciliation, freeing the team up to engage in other value-adding work. ‍

Chris Kevin, Head of Finance Systems and Processes 
Slater & Gordon

To truly save Slater & Gordon time though, Aurum was never going to be able to rely on its speed alone. It would also require intelligent matching due to the large number of split payments they receive, which are notorious for causing complications during reconciliation. Fortunately, with Aurum, separate payments contributing to an overall transaction are easily recognised and reconciled correctly, removing a tricky stumbling block for Slater & Gordon. 

Intelligent matching by Aurum is intelligent for a reason – it spots and adapts to things like split payments which previously led to lots of manual errors.‍

Chris Kevin, Head of Finance Systems and Processes
Slater & Gordon

However, it soon became clear that Aurum brought with it many benefits beyond simply being able to reconcile transactions faster.  This is crucial for the long-term strategy of Slater & Gordon’s financial operations because no matter whether they are handling low-value personal injury cases or high-value specialist cases centring on clinical negligence, their responsibility to safeguard client money in line with CASS regulations remains.  

Aurum allows Slater & Gordon to fulfil core parts of these regulations with its ability to read unique reference codes that are linked to client cases. As a result, Aurum can check whether individual client money accounts have the correct amount of funds in them after fees, compensation, and more are paid in and out of them. 

Slater & Gordon must also provide evidence that they are carrying out the demands of CASS 7 to meet them. Given that Aurum allows Slater & Gordon to conduct client money reconciliation, it should come as no surprise that it also provides the required evidence in the form of automated audit trails, inspiring trust in auditors and in turn the Aurum software amongst Slater & Gordon’s finance team. 

We’ve not seen a single inbuilt finance tool that has the same level of detail when it comes to producing audit trails like in Aurum. The audit trails are fantastic, they bring you all the information you need.‍‍

Chris Kevin, Head of Finance Systems and Processes
Slater & Gordon 

Slater & Gordon’s trust in Aurum is so significant that it is not limited to handling financial actions – as it was designed for. It also contributes to regulated legal matters for the firm. An example of this is that the Solicitors Regulation Authority demands that no cases close with outstanding reconciliations – something Aurum is in the best position to know. As a result, thanks to an API between Aurum and their back-office, Slater & Gordon can close cases with minimal fuss and without errors, saving them an extra task. 

Overall, in Aurum, Slater & Gordon has found the perfect reconciliation partner for an operation of significant magnitude. This is best reflected in how as a firm that leaves no stone unturned for their clients, they are now working towards integrating all their financial systems with Aurum to make it a central hub for providing ultimate data visibility.