Accounting for Immigration Law Firms

Welcome to Accountants LawPod, where accounting professionals and law firms converge. Hosted by Lynda Artesani, Sarah Prevost, and Stephen Libhardt.

Welcome back to the podcast, everyone. And this week we're going to discuss doing a client work for immigration firms. So law firms that do immigration and, um, the nuances around accounting firms and bookkeeping firms working with immigration firms. Sarah and I have a lot of experience in this. I'm not quite sure how much Steve does, but we very much— we have quite a few immigration firms that we work with, and we can talk all about the different things that we see and where we need to— what you need to really look at and think about when you start to work with an immigration firm. So I'll start with you, Steve, first. Do you have any immigration firms that you work with?

I don't have any that I've worked with, but I do custom tailor my presentations at the Bar Association to cover immigration firms. And the differences in taking trust money and how to handle it.

I love that. That's a great— because it is different for immigrants.

It is different. And so you have things like more cash comes in.

Yeah.

And so, you know, one of the things that I'll teach is, you know, make your trust account checks purple, make your operating account checks green, have a receipt book and a person in charge of that receipt book.

And you audit— Wait a minute, a book like a paper book?

Paper book or whatever works best for the firm.

Some firms still do it that way.

Yeah. And I like that with cash when especially in the immigration, I could be all wet here, but I like this with an immigration law firm because it creates a—

Paper trail.

—if you will, of accountability for the cash transactions. And so if, you know, Joe Smith comes in and he is hiring the immigration firm and he gives them $10,000 in cash right there, somebody's writing out a receipt and giving it to him and memorializing it. Take it from there and tell me what you think should be done.

Well, they also like the paper receipt. But I'm curious, like, Lynda, what are your thoughts?

Well, I think we ran into this because a lot of times we were told that when you're working with an immigration firm, the immigrant, the wannabe immigrant, is going to come into the firm and is going to have money. And sometimes it's not even that person. It could be somebody else coming in that can speak English well enough to get it started for somebody else. Which is the other complexity. And they'll come into the firm and they never want to turn the money down. I can remember back in the day when we worked at firms, there was always a, like you said, a ritual. It was more of a procedure around petty cash because petty cash was kind of big back, back in the old days. And having the little, remember the little box with the lock on it, Steve? And then it had a book, carbon copy in it that you would write it down. Sorry, Sarah, we're going to way back.

Oh, I, I know those very well. I'm older than you think. I know.

I keep on forgetting that you've had that kind of experience. But so we would do that and there was a procedure around it. And I remember I worked at a firm one time and I was like, they just handed me this box and there was no procedure. And I was like, well, first of all, as an employee, I didn't want to not be around because who's the first person if money's missing they're going to go to? Person with the keys for the box.

Yeah.

And I wanted some kind of accountability for the money. So that's the same thing here. And they always take the cash in. And you have to make sure that the firm has a procedure in place because as the cash walks in the door, who's ever receiving it has to follow a procedure to get it into QuickBooks. And sometimes they're doing that. And this is the problem we ran into is they're doing that before the client is a client inside of QuickBooks or the— any other platform. And one of the things we have seen with immigration firms in particular, some of them, depending on their jurisdiction, don't have to do trust. Some of them do. So that makes it totally different. And it's a good question to ask. Let's stop right there.

Let's stop right there for a minute. So just define that a little bit more. There are places where they can take the cash, but they don't have to put it in trust. Is that what I'm hearing?

Yes. Yeah, because they're front-loaded. So if you think about it, Steve, the originating piece of it is all front-loaded. It's being earned right at the gate.

At the time.

The part where it switches, the path where it's switching is once that court date comes potentially to fruition. Now, I understand that these court dates will shift drastically. So depending on where that case is, because they're working on the front end, so they're retained. It's not just so much retainer as much as it's operating, like they're actually doing the case.

So the immigrant walks in the door, gives them the $10,000, and they go to work right away. That's one thing.

It's not actually a full $10,000. So let's go back because that's in that regard. So it could be a contractual agreement of $10,000. Let's say, for example, you put $1,000 down and you're making payments. So those payments are accumulating. Well, those payments They're actually—

Paid over time.

The risk of what's happening, what we see happen, and this isn't just, this is a handful of firms that we see this. The risk that could happen here is that the case could go a lot faster and the firm doesn't have full payment. That's the higher risk. That's what's happening often.

Oh, I see.

Okay. The reverse order, what happens sometimes though, it depends on what type of case is walking through. That's when it's probably going to be determined which side of the coin is this going to be on, because you may just go straight into trust based on the type of, you know, if you're getting temporary status, that's a quick thing, right? If you're getting— if for the first part of it, not the full part, but the first part is probably a swift, quick move. The second part might be, you know, a longer status, a longer tenure, how maybe how you achieve all these other statuses, not just being able to stay and work, it might be further things down the road. Well, depending on what that looks like, that's where an attorney, most firms are going to have to make this decision, it sounds like from our point of view. But what we end up doing is working closely on, okay, let's see where these cases are. So it's like a monthly reconciliation in a way, but the opposite way. Mm-hmm. So then you see where the cases land. And then there's got to be a determination how much of that money for those individuals slide into trust, because we're not going to realize that's not going to happen.

So with that said, you know, we run across— we, us, run across lots of challenges with trust money in just your generic, let's say, corporate firm or what have you. And so what's the accountability trail for transactions like these? Well, you'd have to—

so what we do is so you have this payment, you know where every engagement is, you know what the pay— the first initial deposit is and what the payment plans are. And then inside of that, from there, on a monthly basis, essentially, as best you can, depending on your caseload. But the idea is to ensure that at minimum quarterly, you exactly know where these cases might be. Now, if these cases fall outside of a particular window, they do need to move in trust. And the funds that come in, we basically have to come in and they move over. Okay. Essentially.

So the court date gets moved, and so then, then that might trigger the money going over to trust or whatever.

Exactly. Yeah.

Either of you ever been in an audit on an immigration firm from the State Bar?

Are you wishing one on me? No. Yeah, don't do that.

I just want— I wonder what their approach is to immigration and these types of transactions.

Think about it. Each state— think about how each state works. State of New York, you do not have retainers, you do not have trust.

Yeah.

Unless it's a certain type. In the state of Washington, there are places where you do not need to have a trust account. You can operate in an operating, but you honor the space in the same vein.

Right.

Right? So you approach it with the same accountability regardless of what's going to happen. So knowing what you have to know and how you handle those funds But it is a lot more— you have to be more advanced in the accounting space to understand.

It's not one you want to—

And diligent. So I'm not saying shy away from them. I'm saying be prepared for the volume, for the intricacies of it. Some are corporate-level handling, some are individual-level handling. Some have places where, you know, somebody helps make those payments on their behalf because cash bank accounts are not established, but you need credit card or something, some other means. You're going to pay in cash, but then you have other— it's still legal, you're still signing documents, it's the same. It just— and from our understanding, it also depends on court cases, how court cases are going to work. Some court cases, depending on the state and where things are, are not going to push forward as fast. because of maybe their backlog.

Right, right.

Some have to shift pretty quick. So you really have to be very diligent in the approach and you have to understand the approach.

And you have to work with the client really closely because to know where you're at. One of the things, if you're doing a discovery call with an immigration firm and you've never done it before, ask to see— I call it their menu. They'll give you like— they actually have like a menu and they have that whole thing written up. You're going to understand like this is— they might buy this package. And this package is X amount but paid over time. So you have an understanding of, okay, if this person comes in, they pay the down payment, and then it's this, this, and this. You have to figure out those payment plans, which can get sticky if you're doing it. I mean, there's also software that will help you with this. Gravity Legal is really good at making these payment plan type of things. But sometimes you could use like a lien law. They have fixed fees, and you could set up payments, but that doesn't always work. We have a firm doing it, but that has broken on me. So you have to be careful when you do that. You have to be— have a a good team member. Like, these firms certainly have a whole AR department, multiple people working in it, and you need to have somebody really good that's maybe sitting boots on the ground, right? They're in that law firm and they know when the person came in and what, what percentage of the case or matter has gone by. That's why, um, getting good software in— we've, we're working with a client right now with Camp Legal. So that's a newer software that we're— new to us. I don't know how long it's been around. Sarah, is that a new-ish one or? But they're really working towards immigration. What's the other one that— oh, there was Lally Law, but we know what happened with that one.

I mean, irregardless of software, I think to what you're saying, Lynda, is there are nuances to a way a firm— now, not everyone has a package. That's not— I mean, some do, some don't. Some are dealing with corporations. So on behalf of an employee that they have, maybe somebody, let's say from Canada, is coming over to work.

Yeah.

It's an international firm. It's got roots in the States and they want their talent to come over from UK or London. So you have maybe counsel on site, you have offsite counsel to advise, and then how does that work? And on top of that, immigration in particular, with every case that they're dealing with, they have a long things, long different lists of filing fees that they're going to pay for. So they have their consult with them, right? And then they decide, okay, we're going to get init— we're going to initiate a whole bunch of stuff on the front end to get this going depending on the urgency, and they might have a bunch of filing fees. Well, what hap— what we saw happen for quite some time is whatever department those filing fees were going into, depending on which jurisdiction, not every single one of them cashed. So they had to sit on the ledgers as open advance payments. So you have also this additional layer of understanding, okay, you're going to have a lot of uncleared checks basically for filing fees, for client services retained, for cases. And we're talking hundreds of checks sometimes. And you really— it's not great to advise to say you should cancel and resend these in. That's not the— because once that's— once it's in, it's our understanding you got to leave it there for a minute. You can't, can't just go— it's more work to go the other way and try and reestablish and get a fresh new payment going. So There are so many pieces to this envelope of basically how to support, manage, understand, and you're not going to get it right exactly. You're going to learn along the way. You're going to have to advise in different ways. But those little pieces, you really do want to make sure that you are detail-oriented, that you understand—

If I've ever heard a need for SOPs, this is it.

This is it, right?

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, for sure.

Think of the pain needs. The names are so close to each other.

Yeah, the names are almost all the same. And then you're looking at like family law, you know, the $250, $350, $450. You're looking at those amounts constantly over and over and over again. And like Sarah said, you know, one person can come in, but they're paying for multiple people because they took in the cash and then they're coming in and paying with their credit card or whatever. And you keep seeing this name. You're like, how? This person already went through the system. Well, they're helping somebody else. So then that you have to know who that goes to, to tie that information back to that original person. So it's, it's, um, a huge big piece of what you're doing, and it's something you really want to have systems and processes in place for sure. You want to make sure that you've got that all set up. And I think that's the biggest part. Immigration attorneys, hard to nail down to get to talk to them. They're always so busy. They're growing.

The biggest part.

Yeah, they have the biggest hearts. That's why we love working with them. They're the nicest human beings you ever want to meet. And they, their firms are growing.

Well, it aligns for me. I mean, being you know, family of immigrants, it definitely— I— it touches your heart, the work that gets done, the conversations. You know, some— it depends on how you— what kind of way that you need to gain your legal status. I mean, if you think about where we are today with the current world news and the real sadness of it, and maybe those people have to flee for safety, It's like what we saw with Ukraine. You don't get to go back, right? So they— that, that just changes the dynamic of whatever immigration system is happening, not just in the United States, it's all over, and protective services.

Do you see a lot more pro bono work in the immigration arena?

I, I don't. I think— I'm sure there is a case of it. I'm sure there's We don't see it on the front end. That's not what we're talking about with them. But I'm sure that there are elements to it that they're offering that we're unaware of because we're obviously on the accounting side of it and trying to make sure we're managing to any sort of compliance level as best as possible.

You know, here in Colorado, I frequently see pleas for people to help with pro bono work in the immigration arena.

Yeah, you do. Yeah.

Different nonprofits and things like that.

Yeah, yeah. It's an expensive process. It's not easy.

Well, our friend at Colbox, who just met Darner, who was on here, you know, and that's a great firm to partner up with, with immigration firms. His wife just became a citizen. I said, I bet you she could answer more questions about the United States than we can, you know, because they have to do a lot of heavy studying to be able to become a U.S. citizen. It's not an easy pathway. The fact that when you work with these attorneys, they are, like Sarah said, they are just, they have the biggest hearts. And when you do get time with them, one that we work with, he's great about like making quick videos because it's easier just to grab it and tell us something that's happening in the firm. He's one that went back down to the border. He was really stressed and overworked, and he's one that gets these phone calls where there's somebody, maybe they brought a child into court and they don't have any representation, and he's so well known in his city that they call him up and he'll run down and take care of it. Wow.

He does his best. That's the kind of human being he is. Yeah. And most are. I mean, most.

Yes, they are, actually. Yeah, that's— yeah. The perk of it is if you want to work with somebody that is that kind of a human, it's a great— that's a rewarding part of our job to work with and help somebody that's just doing this, such a big thing. I think that that's the biggest part of it. But to tell a story, he was overworked, tired, and really like, oh, what am I doing this for? You know, you get all the things that happen at the office, firms growing. And he went down to the border just to remind himself why he was doing it. Wow. That's the kind of person he is. He's just a warm, loving human being. And so makes it hard to have—

The other thing reminded me of Lynda, which I completely forgot. We were— there was a show in LA, and I remember this feeling when I was walking past because I couldn't understand. There's a lot of immigrants there and they were lined up and there was a lot of American flags.. And I walked past one of the individuals who seemed like the main sort of main interpreter for some. And he said, oh, it's a blessed day because it was their citizenship day and they were hosting— it was downtown LA and they were hosting it.

That's cool.

And I have to tell you, it kind of hit me emotionally and I tried to like hold myself a little bit. But that thought process of what that felt like, probably for my own family and for others like them. And I'm looking around and they're excited, smiling faces of just that honor and the fact that they probably worked really hard to go through the system and do it the right way for themselves. And it was just really touching. They all had their little flags. They were all dressed really beautifully.

That is a wonderful story. Yeah.

Yeah. And you just, Lynda, by saying that just reminded me of that moment because I kind of forgot about it and I kept thinking, where did I see that?

Yeah, but I mean, that's the thing. So if you're thinking about working with immigration firms, I think the biggest perk is work with these amazing attorneys that are just incredible people and they're giving and they're very giving, not just to the people coming in, to their clients. They're also giving to their staff. So they take care of their staff very well. Sometimes we have to say, oh no, no, no, no, don't give that much. I like to rein them back in because they, that's how easily walked over if you don't help them with that. So the advisory work is there. If you work with them too, because they tend to be bigger firms, they tend to be a lot of working parts. A lot of them are multi-state too. So you're dealing with that level of tracking location. Multi-part. If you get multi-attorneys that are partners, you gotta track by partner. So it can, be a, you know, fruitful one for you too if you're thinking about working with them because there's a lot more complexity to it. So the complexity is there, means you can charge more and you can help them more.

And you probably would have an opportunity to have fewer clients in your stable.

Yeah. Yeah. And if you can set up a process that you can repeat, it's a repeatable process. Once you start to put some of these things in place, they might be tweaking per state, but still a lot of the processes that you put into place. I mean, but AR is huge. I mean, that is the biggest part of it, tracking that money coming in the door and seeing who still owes and who doesn't. And yeah, it's a, it's a definitely a big piece of it, a really big piece of it, more than anything else. A lot of checks also go out to the Department of Homeland Security during COVID and the pandemic. A lot of those checks were not cashed, but you couldn't void them. You couldn't void them because if you void them, you ruined it. So you had to leave them there for years.

What would one of those be for?

It would be for any of their application processes. That's what I was mentioning before, depending on what jurisdiction. And so you don't want to avoid those. Those will sit and age.

Where normally you go through at the end of the year and say, oh, these are like 2 years out.

Yeah, you don't want to do that with this. Those are not voided. So curious, Steve, as you're thinking about this, because I mean, you're experienced. What would you think as an experienced individual if you were— if one walked through the door, what would you think for yourself? Like, okay, I can do this. I'm going to roll up my sleeves. Or—

Oh, Steve, this is like right up his alley.

Oh, I totally pick up on it. I would think so. Yeah, I would. Yeah, my business mind is sitting here and worrying, and I know that's why I brought up the SOPs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's why I just made the comment of you probably, if you're watching this podcast or listening to it and you're thinking about, okay, I don't want to have, you know, 30 clients, I'm by myself, let's say, and I don't have— I rather than have 30 clients, I can work with 15 of them in immigration. Yeah. Really charge more, be that trusted advisor, really set up these systems and be a hero to these people who already have big hearts. This is one reason why I like criminal law. I love working with criminals.

I was going to ask you what's your favorite?

Because we— Well, they have hearts too and they're just the kindest people. But anyway, I'm digressing. But yeah, with— oh my gosh, we have my mind just whirring here.

Well, I think we should be, based on what we just experienced coming back from ClioCon and this amazing story, Yes.

That spoke to me. Oh, my God. Did that speak to me?

Did that? Yeah.

I was here in tears. I just—

Oh, yeah. I believe it now. Okay. I felt, Steve, that story and that moment—

I'm getting tears now.

I know. It has the same equivalency of passion, right, to what you're saying. If you're interested, if you're passionate about that, then yeah, that's what you— that would help you want to go into that profession.

One of my dearest friends is a former boss of mine in a big law firm that I worked with, and we touched the immigration arena because her family was immigrants, is immigrants, are immigrants, and she has worked her way up into the judicial system. She's a judge now in Colorado, and I went to her swearing-in ceremony a year or so, about a year ago, And they flew in her family who couldn't— you know, her mom couldn't speak English. And I sat down with my broken Spanish and talked to her, and I could just see the overwhelming pride and the family. And I was just so touched by that whole emotional experience, and I was so happy to be a part of that. And it was eye-opening, you know. It just—

So being in Nashville, we couldn't believe how many Arab speakers were there. This is the second year Nicole and I've been there, and we clearly.

Wow.

We're refraining from even having our little chit-chat dialogue that we tend to do in Arabic mixed with English. And I was amazed at how many Egyptians were there. And so one of the drivers that was driving us to our next place so we could fly out the next day, he said, we asked, we were shocked. And he even said, he goes, I know, I'm always amazed. And he brought up the story of how it works. And it was— it's definitely the story of how it works for probably every culture. One person comes over, starts the process, gets legitimate status, um, and then is able to, to safely— if that's what their family needs— to safely bring them over. Some families still are mixed, you know, half and half. Some are still in their original countries and some are not. Um, but it's— and, and I'm sure that this is faced when you think about criminal cases, when, when we hear the highlights of stories of criminal cases locally, nationally, and globally. Like, I've watched that family that's still dealing with their child that's still in Russia, that press, um, individual, and the national news of that. And it's— it— there's so much behind all this work that you do. And we, as compassionate, service-oriented accounting people, have that same passion. And if you can find that space that you can align with it changes probably how you work. So—

It does. And you can work with a heart. Not that you can't in the other genres of law, but, you know, when it really speaks to you, then you find a way to really make it work and move into that arena. Is it the hard work? Yeah, I think immigration law firms are probably a lot of hard work. But once, like you said a minute ago, once you get it down and you've got the procedures down, you can really keep on top of it. Wake up.

Yeah, it's so— I like that you brought it up because a lot of what we learned too in this, in the time that we spent together, Lynda, in those few days is people really delving into their passions.

Yeah.

And really probably working for the good of that, right?

Yeah. And if you start to work at these firms that tend to be a little bit bigger, though you can still get like a boutique. Immigration firm, and they have multiple locations, then you're looking at multiple trust accounts, multiple checking accounts, because they separate all of that. And you have to separate all that on the chart of accounts. If you do have a lot of trust, some of them do have trust. In some states, it's more trust-heavy depending on their rules. So the first thing I would do would be looking at the rules of the state of the attorney that you're— Definitely. —talking to. That'd be number one. And then look to see if they've got multiple locations. Look to see if they've got multiple partners. Look to see what kind of payroll they have. Payroll can be a heavy piece of this too, because if they got a lot of people, I mean, we have one that went from 4 employees to 40-something. So that's a huge leap in how— in growth that they had over time. But that's another big piece of it that if you'll see that growth, it's good to have Steve— I call it Steve's side spreadsheet. As these things start to grow and you wanna start giving, you know, things that you've done to save them money or how you've helped them along the way. Good place to put that side spreadsheet because when it comes to pricing, it is just important to have that notes because people forget. Mm-hmm.. And I think that, that I love that tip. I'll keep calling it Steve's side spreadsheet forever because it was really, I like that is a great tip because you know it when it's happening and you forget it. Never mind the fact that the, the, it's this, you know, the company forgets it when you go back to raise the pricing. It's always like, what are you raising my pricing for? Well, you know, you've had a lot of firm growth. You went from X to XXX, you know, you've got XXX now in, in revenue coming in. You've added as many attorneys to your staff. The other piece of this too is staffing. So staffing's difficult.

A lot of people coming and going.

That's a big part of it. Yeah.

You have to look at the compensation that they get.

How are they being compensated? Are they getting bonused out? A lot of them get bonused out. So you wanna look at compensation, but you also wanna look at staffing because staffing can be a major pain point for the law firm. And you might wanna dig in to find out why. If they've got a revolving door of people, that's your opening of the door for you to go find out what's going on. Is it they're not having the right benefits? Are they not being compensated properly? Those are things that you need to know too when you're working with at these types of law firms, any law firm, any law firm. I mean, these are things that are for any law firm, but in particular when working with a bigger firm, you want to really start to look at those things because it's a way you can help your client. And that's basically what we're talking about when we talk about advisory, is helping the client, making their life easier and taking off their plate things that they don't want to have to be really worried about. And when you can hand them, Sarah, you know, made this beautiful presentation for this. One law firm, and we kind of jumped in. We worked on a little bit together, but she made this beautiful presentation literally on the fly. And he was like, what? How do you say, Sarah? I was playing checkers, but you were playing chess when he saw what you produced. Wow. I mean, I love that.

And that was very kind of him.

Yeah. And because he was— we were working with him and a couple of staff members that were looking to make more money, and we looked at the way they were compensated. And helping the— a lot of times it's helping the— we've realized that a lot of the law firms, the attorneys on staff, they look at what they're getting paid, and then they go out and look at what other people are getting paid at other firms, and they don't factor in, well, this one's getting Blue Cross, 401(k), 401(k), they're getting paid for their CLEs, that to their training, they're getting paid for the training. Those things have a number to the law firm. But sometimes maybe they're paying for malpractice. Maybe the law firm's paying malpractice insurance. So those are things that they don't equate to money and a pay where they could up and leave someplace else to make $10,000 more, but they left all that other stuff that was being paid for. So making sure the employees understand what they're getting in their package. So they're comparing apples to apples, and that's kind of what falls on the accountant's lap sometimes.

Yeah. And I need to find that because we're talking about some others. And, and—

Oh, yeah, it was beautiful what she created. I thought I was like, we put it together. We did work on it together, but you put the whole package together. I was like, wow, that's really good, Sarah. And literally did it like we knew it was like imperative to get it to him right away.

Well, compensation, which you've— you're leading into, which is— Steve, I know that you get involved in this, is sometimes you have to look at restructuring the compensation as they grow to remain competitive but not be so burdened. And so some compensation models don't support ideally the growth of the firm in the way that I'm hearing you talk about it and what you'd like to see versus the burden of like tracking and all of these things. So it was a twofold benefit of, okay, let's— let's take what selfishly I don't want us to have to track anymore and with you as the owner, and how do you do it?

Well, I would imagine that the KPIs are going to be even that much more important and different than other types of law firms. And number two, the marketing budget. I'd really like to hear what you guys think about what the marketing budget would look like compared to other types of firms.

That's a good question. I think Lynda would probably be more versed in answering that because when this individual does it, and there's several actually, when they do it, a lot of it's referral. It's not very much—

He's got an amazing YouTube channel.

But other— You see a billboard.

Yeah.

So what are they—

Those billboards are expensive. Those billboards are really expensive.

But Lynda, I'm thinking of the other ones that we work with. That's not— it's almost like the grassroots is happening.

It's a lot of referral. I think it goes through. They must have laid down the groundwork for that network where, like, so-and-so, how did you get to become a citizen? And it just goes from there. It's a lot of—

It's a lot of trust, right? Inside of the type of firm and regional, I'm sure. You know, if you think about it, there's a lot of, like, just our friendly neighbors, our Canadians, there's a lot that work down here in all different industries. That's also a market. I mean, we talk so much about America.

I mean, there's markets everywhere. I mean, if you think about it, we got these big major corporations like your Google, your Amazon, all that. They hire big firms to bring in, make citizen, you know, help them with getting the immigrants into the country that they need this staff to do. So I mean, there's opportunity in all of those. And then you have to look at if you're the accountant or bookkeeper on staff, you gotta look at, okay, Google's my client, but these are the subclients because they're all usually named. So now you're getting into third layer, right? So that's, yeah, it's, it's a lot of complexity, but I think it's, if you like to move around big data and do that stuff, and then of course you can have the complexity too of taking them off of some other method, which might be an Excel spreadsheet. Mm-hmm. And moving them into like QuickBooks and getting them set up properly. That's another big one, data migration for firms like this. If they're coming off of something that's just not working for the firm because the firm grew that fast, it outgrew the software. You want to put them in something—

You had to track it. Yeah. Yeah. And some we noticed, Steve, I don't know, this is not just indicative of this industry, but some when you're paying for consults, it depends on the the depth of knowledge each attorney has, right? Or each partner has. And then the individual needs to pick who they want to work with, and that's a paid space. Not all the softwares, the practice management software, support the style of nuances that the firms are looking for. Yeah. And I really think that if you're gonna want to deepen what this looks like in this practice area, you got to look at how it works or doesn't work to support the firms.

In that case, you want to talk to the attorney too, because they look at consults in a different way.

They do.

It's not— they're not a client yet, but you have to explain, well, you still have to put them in. You're taking in money, so you need to take, take care of following that money in because they might become a client later. You want to be able to tie that back. But sometimes they're just— it could be a consult, one and done. You never come back again.

Well, texting also is super important. Yes, texting. I mean, we're in a day where we're used to getting a text message to remind us to pay a bill. And if you have the opportunity to have that thing right there to pay it, that needs to be more fluid. Yes. So there's some—

Yes, texting is huge for them and getting the ability to pay by text is huge because they might not have a computer. All they have is the phone. Yeah. So—

Oh, I didn't think of that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Because that's the way they're set up. And then, of course, you know, if you're in a different state and you're hiring one in the state that you're going to and you don't have the means for cash, how do you pay? Like, is it Western Union? Is it a cashier's check? Like, what are all these things? And naturally, I get it. After all these bank issues that we've had, I can understand why people don't want to trust the banks. I have no problem understanding that one now.

Yeah. So yeah, there's a lot of nuances to working with immigration firms. But if you're thinking about it and you're a bookkeeper and accountant, I would say if you think you want to work with an amazing client and you're okay and you're up for the job of doing all those, tackling all the things we talked about today, then go for it. I mean, it's very— we love them. So I would say for sure that getting that, try to get them out of writing checks, handwriting checks. That's always bad when they're writing out checks to pay for things. The more you can digitize this and automate processes here, the better. And any, any, a lot of this can be ported over to any practice area. But yeah, I think that that's one of the things you have to think about too.

Yeah.

It's to make our job easier, right? It's all about us. Does anybody have any final things you'd like to mention? I think we might have hit on all of them, right?

Unless Steve, Steve, you take it away if you have.

He's thinking KPIs. I know him.

Oh, my mind is worrying. I'm like, okay, we may have to come back and revisit this.

Or maybe we interview somebody at some point. I mean, I just know from our standpoint, all the heavy lifting we do, I can't imagine what the heavy lifting is inside the—

Exactly. Yeah. And it's so personalized and emotional. So I'm going to—

And then you have a solo, a solo versus a medium versus a large size immigration firm trying to do all these steps. Boy, I think they could get in trouble really easy. Yeah. That's where we come in.

Yeah, exactly. So we really— this is definitely more on the advanced. It's not something that you just, ah, let's just rip this off and get it.

So, yeah, if they do, what do you say, Steve? Bless their heart. I just came back from Tennessee, so I heard that a lot. Bless your heart.

I bet you did. Wow, this has been super interesting.

Wow.

Very interesting. So I hope you all liked it. We will ask our beautiful assistant to take us out, and I'm sure she's here. She's going to take us out on the show.

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Thank you, Tiara. And Steve's staying put so we don't have to ask him where he's going anymore. Probably gonna shift now to where's Sarah going? Where are you going next, Sarah?

Denver. And then—

Okay, don't go any further. We'll ask the next time we do it 'cause I know she's hopping all over the place.

Yeah. Well, we got Denver first coming up, which I'm excited about for Zero. And spending some time there with the council and it's the partner council and I'm looking forward to it.

So not Steve, you're not going to run to Steve? No, you're not going to be there long enough, huh?

I don't know this one if I will. I'm wondering on my second one, which would be early December for something else.

We're going to see him at QuickBooks Connect, which might be after the show. So I don't know when, depending on when this lands. So we'll all be together and we'll get some good photo ops for our Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Oh man, I'm so looking forward to all the fun we're gonna have.

Yes.

And all the learning we're gonna do and speaking.

Absolutely. We'll have a lot to share. So thank you all for joining. Bye now.

Thank you. Bye-bye.

Thank you.