If you are a bankruptcy petition preparer, the software you choose can have a big impact on how efficiently you are able to prepare cases.
The challenge is that bankruptcy software has traditionally been built primarily for bankruptcy attorneys and law firms. That often means petition preparers are left paying for features they may not need, dealing with complicated workflows, or paying much more than makes sense for their business.
A bankruptcy petition preparer has a much more limited role than a bankruptcy attorney. Petition preparers can assist consumers with preparing bankruptcy documents, but they cannot provide legal advice or represent a debtor in court.
Because of that, I think the best bankruptcy petition preparer software should focus on something fairly simple: helping you accurately and efficiently organize the information your customer provides and prepare the required bankruptcy forms.
Here are five of the features I would look at most closely when comparing bankruptcy software for petition preparers.
1. Affordable Pricing
Price would be at the top of my list.
Bankruptcy petition preparers generally operate a different business model than bankruptcy law firms. A bankruptcy attorney may charge thousands of dollars for representation, while a petition preparer is providing a much more limited document preparation service.
That makes it difficult to justify paying hundreds of dollars every month for software. Here's a pricing model I created for Best Case vs Jubilee vs Next Chapter vs Fresh Start pricing.
I would also pay close attention to whether a bankruptcy software company charges per case or offers unlimited cases.
Per-case pricing might seem inexpensive when you only have a few clients, but the cost can grow quickly as your petition preparation business grows.
This was one of the reasons I helped create Fresh Start Finance for bankruptcy petition preparers and for attorneys.
Fresh Start offers bankruptcy petition preparers a $39 per month plan with unlimited cases. If you prepare three cases per month, that works out to roughly $13 in software costs per case. At 10 cases per month, it is about $3.90 per case.
The goal is simple: your bankruptcy software should help you make your business more efficient, not become one of your biggest expenses.
2. Easy Bankruptcy Form Preparation
The second feature I would look for is how easy the software actually makes it to prepare bankruptcy forms.
A long feature list does not necessarily mean software is easy to use.
What matters is how many steps it takes to get information from your customer into the bankruptcy petition.
Good bankruptcy preparation software should let you enter information once and use that information wherever it is needed throughout the bankruptcy forms.
For example, the software should make it easy to enter information about:
- Creditors and debts
- Assets
- Income
- Monthly expenses
- Bank accounts
- Vehicles
- Real estate
- Financial transactions
- Other information required on the bankruptcy schedules
Fresh Start Finance is designed so users can enter information while viewing the corresponding bankruptcy schedules. The forms update as information is entered, which makes it much easier to see where the information is going and identify something that may have been entered incorrectly.
That is one of those features that sounds small until you prepare a lot of bankruptcy petitions.
Being able to see the actual forms while you work can save a tremendous amount of back-and-forth review.
3. Simple Creditor Management
Creditor entry can easily become one of the most time-consuming parts of preparing a bankruptcy case.
Some consumers may have only a handful of debts. Others may have 20, 30, 50, or even more creditors.
Your bankruptcy petition preparer software should not make adding creditors unnecessarily difficult.
Ideally, you should be able to quickly add creditors, edit their information, enter balances, and organize the information that your customer provides.
The software should also handle cases with large numbers of financial accounts without forcing you to create unnecessary extra pages or jump between different sections.
Fresh Start, for example, allows users to add large numbers of financial accounts and see the related schedules update in real time. The platform also has creditor import functionality available within its broader bankruptcy software.
For a petition preparer working with consumers who have significant credit card, collection, medical, personal loan, or other debt, this can save quite a bit of data-entry time.
Of course, petition preparers still need to stay within the limits of what they are legally allowed to do. Software can organize the information the debtor provides, but the software does not give a petition preparer the ability to provide legal advice about how a particular debt should be classified.
4. PDF Generation and Easy Form Review
Eventually, all of the information you enter has to turn into actual bankruptcy forms.
That sounds obvious, but I would spend some time testing how easy a software platform makes the final review process.
- Can you quickly preview the petition?
- Can you identify missing information?
- Can you see whether a creditor's address is incorrect?
- Can you easily generate the completed forms as a PDF?
Good bankruptcy petition software should make it easy to move from data entry to completed forms without requiring a lot of separate PDF manipulation.
Fresh Start's platform is designed around a workflow that moves from intake and data entry into completed bankruptcy schedules and generated filing documents.
I would recommend actually preparing a sample bankruptcy when evaluating any software rather than relying entirely on a demo.
You often discover the biggest differences between bankruptcy software products after you have entered 20 creditors, several vehicles, multiple sources of income, and a long list of expenses.
That is when you find out whether the software really saves you time.
5. Good Support When You Need Help
Software support is easy to overlook until something is not working.
Then it becomes one of the most important features.
If you are preparing bankruptcy documents for customers, you probably do not want to spend hours searching through help articles because you cannot figure out where something goes in the software.
Look for bankruptcy software that provides access to real support when you have a technical or software question.
Fresh Start Finance currently provides support by email and telephone, and because the software is still actively being developed, we also spend a lot of time listening to feedback from the people using it.
There is an important distinction here.
Software support can explain how the software works, where a feature is located, or how to complete a task inside the platform.
Software support should not provide legal advice about a bankruptcy case, and neither should a bankruptcy petition preparer.
If a customer needs legal advice about whether to file bankruptcy, what chapter to file, which exemptions to claim, or how bankruptcy law applies to their particular situation, they should speak with a qualified bankruptcy attorney.
A Few Other Features Worth Considering
Those are my five biggest factors, but there are a few other things I would consider when choosing software for a bankruptcy petition preparation business.
First, I strongly prefer cloud-based software.
Being able to log in from different computers is much more convenient than having your bankruptcy cases tied to one desktop computer. Fresh Start is an online platform rather than traditional desktop-only bankruptcy software.
I would also look at how frequently the software company updates its product.
Bankruptcy forms change. Local court requirements change. Technology changes.
You want software that is actively maintained rather than something that has looked essentially the same for the last decade.
Finally, consider how difficult it will be to learn.
A bankruptcy software platform can have hundreds of features, but if you only use 20 of them and it takes twice as long to prepare a case, the extra features are not helping much.
What Is the Best Bankruptcy Petition Preparer Software?
There probably is not one perfect bankruptcy software platform for every petition preparer.
The best option depends on your case volume, the types of cases you prepare, your workflow, and how much you want to spend.
But I would start by comparing these five things:
- Price
- Ease of preparing bankruptcy forms
- Creditor management
- PDF generation and form review
- Customer support
For us, price was particularly important.
After speaking with bankruptcy petition preparers who felt existing software was becoming too expensive, we created a $39 per month Fresh Start Finance plan with unlimited cases specifically for petition preparers.
Our goal is to provide modern bankruptcy preparation software without forcing a petition preparer to pay law-firm-level software prices.
If you are currently using another program, I would encourage you to calculate what you actually spend on bankruptcy software each year and divide that by the number of petitions you prepare.
You might be surprised by your true software cost per case.
And when you compare bankruptcy petition preparer software, do not just count features.
Look at how quickly you can prepare an actual case, how easy the software is to use, what it costs as your business grows, and whether you can get help when you need it.
Those are the features that are likely to matter most after you have prepared your 10th, 50th, or 500th bankruptcy petitions.
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