This personal injury firm — active in mass auto litigation — ran disbursements by hand for two decades. When the classic stack-of-checks workflow was described on the call, the partner cut in: “Okay, look, you're 100% right. This is absolute misery. And [our partner] has been doing this for the firm for the past 20 years.” Two months into a Bill.com migration, the misery had just changed shape.
What Their Old Flow Looked Like
- The “fixed” flow still took a village: a disbursement preparer, a signed sheet and reduction letters emailed to a paid outside accountant, manual QuickBooks entry, a payee data-entry team that ran only every Tuesday and Thursday, and finally the partner logging in to click pay
- “bill.com is printing the letter, the check, and FedExing it to people. And that's BS.”
- Stop-payment fees on every voided check — “like, ridiculous” — on top of two months of platform fees
- The bottleneck stayed exactly where it had been for 20 years: “on paying our clients and the providers”
How Disbo Replaces This Flow
- Disbursements are prepared and paid in one system — no preparer-to-accountant-to-data-entry-team relay, no Tuesday/Thursday batch windows
- The trust account view shows exactly how much remains on each matter, so every case can be disbursed to zero: “your system shows exactly how much is in the account… so you can get it to zero. Theirs doesn't really do that.”
- Clients and providers are paid via Quick Pay and Standard Pay, with tracked Lob checks only where paper is unavoidable
- The outside accounting firm reviews records generated by the platform instead of keying in every disbursement by hand
One System
Prep Through Payment
To Zero
Per-Case Trust Balance
No Batches
Tue/Thu Cycles Eliminated
Anticipated
Accounting Workload Cut
These are anticipated savings, in the partner's own words — not yet a realized result: “I think for our purposes, you are a replacement for Bill” … “So we can cut the accountants potentially, right? … We cut them in half” … “if I would have known about this a year ago, we probably would have just gone straight with you.”