What do you like best about Brightflag?
The tool does a great job at providing a single source of information for all matters and relating costs. It has also given us the ability to structure our invoice approval workflows and ensure senior members of our Legal and Compliance teams have sufficient visibility to control and report on costs.
We are now rolling Brightflag out for our global offices which is bringing the tool's ability to house conditional workflows, segregated matter access, and grouped user management to light nicely.
The tool has also given us the ability to store and track timekeeper rates which is something we were not able to do before and the upcoming developments to the timekeeper rates screen should bring much needed structure and improved information to the process allowing us to manage these rates even more effectively.
The support team is also one of the best I have encountered amongst the various softwares we use here at Glencore with the response time being second to none. I am also very appreciative of the customer success team and the time they take to listen and onboard our feedback, whether positive or negative, and the effort they have put into assisting me with demonstrating the tool's ROI to my superiors.
The level of detail we are able to report on via the reporting function gives us much needed insight into various costs aspects (e.g. rates comparison, project costs and where they originate etc.) and the scheduler also helps provide our senior team members with even further visibility into where we are incurring costs and why. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike about Brightflag?
There are some aspects of the tool that seem neglected. For example, if users leave comments on invoices, those comments are not visible anywhere nor are they notified to anyone unless other reviewers specifically open the comments tab on the invoice. The matter creation process has some flaws, for example, the allocations now no longer being a mandatory part of the creation process or the lack of being able to place approvals on matter creations with conditional workflows.
My biggest dislike is actually the AI review. There is now a lot that AI is able to do and for a tool that markets itself as being the best ebilling tool for AI, I find it lacks in some areas. For example, the AI does not always catch line-item discrepancies such as blocked billing or often flags communication between firm and client as internal communication. The ability to store and track whether agreed discounts lack and even with the VTDs, given the nature of the vendor profile, you cannot track VTDs for firms that have multiple vendor profiles as there is no ability to group these and aggregate the spend which is actually most of the large firms.
The tool should also be able to assist with the most basic admin review, such as invoice addresses, ensuring bank account information is included, and it would be helpful if we were able to store currencies paying entities can pay in within the tool so the tool can flag any instances where an entity has been billed in a currency it cannot pay in. The inability to also have redline comparisons between invoice drafts feels like an oversight, especially as the tool's biggest benefit is the invoice write-down aspect and not being to control or monitor whether the firms have actually made the changes is frustrating for our reviewers.
That brings me onto the next item which are the paying entities. It is not unusual to have multiple paying entities on a single matter, especially for clients that operate globally. It would therefore be helpful to have the ability to add multiple Matter Entities to the matter to help assist with this.
There are also some features of the tool that feel as if they have now been thought out fully. For example, the recent implementation of conditional allocations not being extended to the invoice review screen which can create more confusion that anything else on the client side, as well as the recent addition of having an order to the allocation fields, even for clients who use allocations that do not have any correlation with one another in practice. Setting these allocations on an entity level is also something that would assist given Accounting will only extend cost centres on an entity-by-entity basis.
Another example would be the inability to select whether an invoice is billed using hourly rates or on a fixed fee basis as part of the manual invoice upload process or the fact that currency conversions within the tool seem to cause issues with invoices uploaded by vendors that require their timekeeper rates to be converted to the invoice currency.
The tool would also benefit from having an integrated rate card collation functionality. We recently had to run this entire process manually outside of Brightflag, however, being able to run a rate review process within the tool would be most helpful not least because the contacts, the email notification system, and the rates are all already stored within the tool.
Finally, after having used the tool for a year, the cost savings via invoice write-downs were not as high as estimated. This of course comes down to very nuanced aspects that are difficult to control such as the ongoing matters themselves, the user engagement on the tool, and the agreements we have with firms outside of the tool. I do believe, however, that with improved AI functionality, we would see better user engagement which for me is clearest path forward to increasing the tool's ROI and providing higher cost savings. Many costs have of course also been avoided rather than saved thanks to Brightflag's functionalities and the awareness is raises amongst firms, but the cost savings number itself is of course always the number viewed as the most important by senior management. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
