Who cares what’s happening to your law firm finances so long as you’re taking home a check at the end of each month? You do—trust me, you do.

I learned a few things about law firm finances after running a firm for years. By then, I thought I knew it all. I thought I had a good grasp of the mechanics of how to make money practicing law.

What I found out was that I knew a great deal about making money in a law firm in a climate where revenues kept rising. I discovered I didn’t know much about running a firm when revenues leveled off or declined. I got a quick education at the school of hard knocks.

Here’s the deal: when revenues go up month after month, year after year, any idiot can run a business. Increasing revenues make it easy to cover your mistakes. You don’t have to be a particularly good manager when the revenues keep climbing.

The minute things change course—and inevitably, they do—you need to kick into gear. You can’t make mistakes and have rising revenues solve the problems for you.

When revenues flatten, you need financial information. You need to know how much work is coming in, and you need to know how much it costs to produce the work. At that point, I learned about the benefits of accrual-based accounting systems and the detriments of cash-based systems. I learned about building dashboards so I could keep up with the trends and identify the problem areas. It was quite an education.

In an ideal world, you’d learn these things before you’re forced to learn them. It would be nice if you could find the time to build proper systems during the run up and before disaster strikes. However, most of us focus only on the immediate crisis. I understand.

How about we come to a compromise? How about we put a bit of time into solving this problem before it grows out of control? How about we spend a tiny bit of time building a dashboard you can use to keep up without the need for implementing a full-fledged accounting system with people, software, and big expense?

That’s where inDinero comes in. inDinero monitors your financial situation 24/7 by linking directly to all of your financial accounts. It automatically and securely imports your financial data and makes it available to you via dashboards in a format that gives you advance notice of trends and helps you avert disaster.

inDinero is the Mint.com of the small business world. It aggregates your data from more than 10,000 financial institutions, monitors cash flow, and predicts shortfalls. It’s doing the work you’d pay many thousands of dollars to an accountant to do for you. You can try inDinero free and see whether it helps. I think you’ll be hard pressed to find a reason not to use it.