Tighten Legal Cost Control With Brightflag’s Budgeting & Forecasting Features

Outside counsel engagements continue to present unique obstacles to all three objectives.

That’s why Brighflag is squarely focused on giving customers more of the budgeting and forecasting tools they need to confidently take control of their legal spend.

Brightflag’s Budgeting Features

Brightflag’s budgeting features allow in-house legal teams to easily: 

• Set “top-down” budgets by:
  • Fiscal year
  • Business entity
  • Business department
  • Matter group
  • Matter category
  • Legal vendor
• See visual budget breakdowns that categorize spend according to:
  • Approved invoices
  • Pending invoices  
  • Accrued costs
  • Committed (but not yet allocated) expenses
• Improve forecast accuracy by leveraging AI-powered spend predictions
• Prevent budget overruns by identifying potential risks early

How to Use the Budgeting Tools

It only takes a few minutes of setup to get these budgeting features working in your favor. Start at the financial management tab in the main control panel on the left, then click financial budgets.


The first thing to consider is setting an overall budget to track your spend against throughout a financial period.  Click on the add budget button and input your budget name, amount, and type. (Note: Be sure to select the appropriate currency.) Once everything looks good, click add budget and it will be automatically added to your dashboard.

Going forward, Brighflag will automatically update this budget tracker based on the invoices and accruals processed through our platform. That means you’ll always have real-time data describing amounts spent, amounts invoiced but not paid, amounts accrued, and amounts committed but not allocated.

Once the overall budget is set, we recommend monitoring specific areas of interest. For instance, maybe you’re anticipating a surge in matters associated with employment law. You could simply repeat the same steps above to create a budget exclusively for your HR department.

Finally, you’ll notice we’ve also started including a Brightflag Forecast in the bottom right corner. Our A.I. automatically projects your likely expenses based on not only your historic spending patterns, but those of all Brightflag customers as well.

That puts you in an even better position to make adjustments and avoid budget overruns before they happen. 

Want to Learn More?

If these new features look like they might offer you a better way to manage legal spend, let us know and we’ll present you with a more personalized demo.