Overview
Lally Group is a full-service accounting firm with two offices in Jackson and Lansing, Michigan, serving family-owned businesses with a specialization in the telecommunications industry. With just under 30 staff members and four partners, the firm had long operated as a heavy Thomson Reuters shop — using separate tools for documents, projects, time and billing, and collections.
When Nathan Eads, a partner who also serves as the firm’s de facto technology lead, began looking for a better way to manage operations, the answer wasn’t another point solution. It was consolidation. This practice management software case study covers how Lally Group made the switch to Firm360 and what changed when everything finally lived in one place.
Challenge
For years, Lally Group ran its practice across four separate platforms:
- GoFileRoom for document management
- FirmFlow for project tracking
- Thomson Reuters Practice CS for time and billing
- QuickFee for collections
The tools worked well enough individually, but managing a client across all of them created friction. Updating client information meant updating it in multiple places. Visibility into any single client’s full picture required toggling between systems. And onboarding new staff meant training them on four different platforms, each with its own interface, licensing structure, and support model.
“There was disconnect. If you changed something in one system, you’d have to go change it in a couple of others. We needed to get to a place where it was all in one system.”
The firm had been actively looking for a better solution for roughly two years before finding Firm360. As a Thomson Reuters shop, leaving that ecosystem came with real hesitation. The firm knew the tools, even if the tools were slowing them down. The bigger question was how any new platform would integrate with the rest of their tech stack.
Solution
After evaluating their options, Lally Group selected Firm360 as the single platform to replace all four tools. Eads credits the onboarding experience as one of the most structured he’s seen in decades of managing technology at the firm.
“I’ve never had an onboarding experience like we’ve had with Firm360. Every Monday at 10 o’clock, we had a call to talk through where things stood, what questions came up that week, and what the next steps were for getting data out of the previous vendor and into the system. It was consistent communication with the same person from start to finish.”
The firm appreciated having technical documentation available to share with their external IT team — covering setup, security, and permissions — without having to create it themselves. Combined with a staged rollout that let different departments come online at different points, the transition stayed manageable even during a multi-month migration.
Results
Four Tools Down to One
The most tangible outcome for Lally Group is straightforward: four platforms are now one. Firm360 handles document management, project tracking, time and billing, and collections in a single environment. Staff no longer need to be trained on multiple systems, and the firm has eliminated the cost and complexity of managing separate licenses for each tool.
“When it comes to staffing, instead of training someone on four different platforms, we can just train them on how to use Firm360. Having it all in one place makes it way easier.”
Recurring Billing and Collections Running on Autopilot
Lally Group has moved almost entirely to subscription-based pricing, and Firm360 has made that model simple to operationalize. Engagements are set up once, progress bills generate automatically each month, and clients are drawn via ACH on the 20th. Payments through Stripe are automatically applied to client accounts, removing the manual reconciliation step the firm previously had to do after every deposit.
Better Visibility Across Projects and Clients
Before Firm360, getting a clear view of where a client stood across projects, documents, and outstanding receivables required checking multiple places. Now, the team member responsible for a given client can see everything in a single dashboard: project status, billing, open documents, and more.
As the firm has continued redistributing client relationships across a more diversified staff, this visibility has made delegation cleaner. Leaders can set up customized views for each team member without the information getting lost in a handoff between systems.
“If you’re looking for a way to consolidate your information — billing, collections, projects, documents, client linking — all in one spot, Firm360 is worth a serious look.”
