This injury firm runs SmartAdvocate for case management and Sage for accounting. Checks are printed manually in the office, an escrow manager cuts every provider check, three-way reconciliation is done by hand in Sage — and the firm was halfway through building its own SmartAdvocate-to-Sage integration to stitch it together. When the full manual flow was described back to them — deposit, settlement sheet, document chase, accounting entry, print, chase signatures, stamp and mail, resend lost checks, reconcile three ways — the answer was one word: “Exactly.”
What Their Old Flow Looked Like
- Every settlement ran the full manual gauntlet: print checks in office, chase partner signatures, stamp, mail, and resend the ones that got lost
- An escrow manager personally cut every provider check across the firm's caseload
- Three-way reconciliation performed by hand in the accounting system
- Months of internal dev time sunk into a custom case-management-to-accounting integration — “we're probably 50% through it” — just to move data between systems
How Disbo Replaces This Flow
- Disbursements are initiated from the case data the firm already keeps in SmartAdvocate — no custom integration project to finish
- Providers and clients are paid electronically via Quick Pay and Standard Pay; anything that must be a check is printed and mailed through Lob with tracking
- The escrow manager approves disbursements instead of physically cutting every check: “This would be ideal for the escrow management… Absolutely.”
- Three-way reconciliation runs automatically as payments clear, replacing the manual Sage process
The firm's own verdict on its half-built integration after seeing disbursements run from SmartAdvocate data: “So, almost like the integration we're doing right now is useless.” No realized before/after exists yet — the firm called the timing “really interesting… definitely something we are very much interested in.”