Software for contracts for bookkeepers

Hi there, Linda Artesani from the Accountants Law Lab. So we've traveled this journey together on starting with the discovery call. You've done really well with that with your first potential attorney client, and now you've looked at the job and given them a price and figured out the price. Now you need to present it to the client. So we're working with the ultimate consummate professionals, working with attorneys. We want to give that beautiful presentation. And how do we do that? Well, I think the easiest way to do that is obviously you're not gonna type it out into Word. I know some people do that. You wanna have a good software, and I'm just gonna share the software I used for many years, and it's called 17 Hats, and it's a good affordable one. It's one that's actually a very good CRM for the price. So that customer relationship management tool. It's really good for that. And it's going to let you provide some details and really start to build out a customer chain. So you're gonna follow the lead because it'll start with the lead, and you can create leads in 17hats and embed that on your website. And then you're gonna be able to follow that whole process from the start of meeting the client, and that's when you start that discovery call. All the way through the journey of being your client. And even then more so because you can create some pretty cool workflows too. So it's got a lot of automation. It takes a little bit of time to set up. So know that you're gonna need to take the time to do this, but it, it's really gonna be a valuable tool to you. Let's dive in and we'll take a look at how it looks in 17hats. I'll give you a sneak peek under the hood. And then you can decide if you wanna use this software. There are lots of software out there that you can use for creating good contracts. There's some more pricey than this. This is just a great entry-level one because it's robust with features. Let me share my screen. So here we are in 17hats, and you can see we've got a dashboard. We got a place for contacts, leads, projects, calendar bookings. It's It's really a great software. I think it was made for photographers, but lots of different industries use it. And like I said, it's fairly affordable, and I'll provide a link in the article that's with this video. Documents, and you can do the workflows which I mentioned earlier. What I like about this is you can see that there's a— you can create a new contact in a project. So you start out with the contact details, and then you create the project. So if I had Peter the— Peter Pearson, the attorney, and he came to me with a cleanup job. I would name the project to clean— cleanup work. And if it's somebody who just wants accounting services, you would create the project for accounting services. And of course their name is required. So I'm gonna put in Peter Pearson. You are going to want to make sure that you put in the rest of these details. So the type of client, You can put any tags. I use the tags to kind of track my referrals and where they're coming from. You do have a referred by section. I can put a tag in here if it's maybe a Xero customer or a QuickBooks customer. We have a lot more QuickBooks than Xero, but any tag that you think logically will help you, that's something you want to track. Email, phone, company— want all of that because that's all gonna be pulled into your contract. So very important address and all of that there. Here's my notes section, and this is where I will, during the conversation. So what would happen first, I'll kind of take you through the workflow, is I've got a contact form that's got all the fields, what I would like for someone who's looking for an accountant that's, or a bookkeeper that's legal specific for the legal industry. And they're gonna answer questions, name, address, phone number, the basics. And then they're gonna fill in what software are they using in, What are their needs? And if they're looking for cleanup work and all of these things will come right on my contact form and they'll get embedded into this sheet so that the lead— I won't be typing this in manually. That'll come off of the lead off of my website that the client has typed all this information in. Now I will do my monthly financial meeting date. I will kind of put in a temporary placeholder there, expected start date. These are all fields that I created. That I think for my purposes are going to work well because they're all going to be custom fields kind of embedded in my contract. Current accounting software, like what they're using now. Maybe they're in PC Law and they're moving to QuickBooks. So I'm going to have current payroll. Maybe they're using ADP and they now want to move to Gusto or QuickBooks. We want to have that in here. Current legal software. What are they using now? Maybe they're using Timeslips and they want to move to LeanLaw. This is a great place to have all this in here. Open trust matters. That's a question I want to ask them. If they've got trust, how many open trust matters? Most attorneys can answer that question fairly quickly, but sometimes they don't know. And at least you have an idea. They'll maybe give you a range. And then the new legal software. So these are fields that are gonna populate in my contract, which is important, right? So you can make these fields be whatever it is. I like to have the current payroll, so I know In case they're moving from one to another, I wanna have that 'cause I'm gonna have that in my contract where that information will pull in for the client. That's kind of a high-level look at, at 17hats. Now the workflows are pretty cool. I think if I can pull a workflow up, I'm not sure. So here's just creating a brand new workflow, and I wanna show you how this kind of works. So there's this workflow isn't in place yet. I kind of created it on the fly, but I wanted to show you how this works because you can add tasks to do. So Maybe when you sign a new client, so the contract went out, the client signs, you might have a trigger in there to send a questionnaire or something else so you can get the client details. Maybe you have a sales receipt that goes and the client signs up with a deposit, but you get this to come in and, and you might wanna have staff on here. So maybe you wanna create a to-do, set up a new Slack channel or Teams channel for the client. So you can make the to-do whatever it is, you can activate it, you can assign it to somebody in the firm, and then you can leave some notes. So that that's going to send— when this first trigger happens, it's gonna send a note out to whoever's in charge, whether it's your admin or even yourself, to set up these different things. So you're getting a repeatable workflow here. So I'm just gonna make a to-do saying, set up new Teams channel. And Teams, Slack, whatever. So you can create this. And then the next thing you wanna do is you want to add a new piece so you can make it an action, and then you can send an email, or you can start to build this out to be whatever you need it to be. So maybe it's gonna send an email to the client inviting them in, or it can be really— the sky's the limit here, and there's some actual really good workflows already pre-built that you can purchase from my friend Kelly Parks. She's got like a great array of them. But These are all kind of— she pre-built them, and they're beautiful. You can buy them. There's also— you could have one for onboarding a new client. You can have one for cleanups. Maybe there's certain people that need to be told about a new file. You can create really whatever you want. You can, you can really create tasks and workflows to work for your firm. One of the other things that I like about 17hats is that it gives you the ability to build out not only your dashboard, but you can also build out document, a document workflow. So I can send out the contract with a cover email and you start to create those and then you start to build out from there. Like I have it listed, like number 1 is the NDA, number 2 is discovery. I need the, I need the documents. So I'll have like pre-built questionnaires that the client will answer questions on. And I kind of build out the, the documents that way so that you can see they'll let, they'll kind of go in order and then you can build out a workflow this way that it will trigger. So once the questionnaire is sent, there's an answer sent to that the client like, okay, we've received it. So you can kind of build out workflows in, in conjunction with the documents that you create. So let me go back here. So we, so now I'm in settings and I just wanted to show you that you have a lot of different variety how you can create settings and kind of customize your look and feel. So you can add images. You can see we've got the Law Lab here. You can select your colors and fonts. You can select your text. You can set your email settings. You make a default, a default signature for your, all your emails and you can select it when you need it. You have calendars. You can have a client portal. I've never used it. I always shut that off, but you could use that as well. I just don't wanna have that here. I prefer everything to be in Lysio once we get there. And then you can— this is where the integrations are, where you can actually integrate it with Zoom. You can integrate it with QuickBooks. You can use, you know, you can use Zapier for it. So it's quite a few integrations that are here now that they weren't here before. And like I mentioned, documents and emails are here. So you can see that here's all the appointment confirmation things. They give you boilerplate ones you could use, but you can also lead follow-up number 1. If you can name them like that, you'll know as your client's going through the process whether which— if you name it like that, you can actually follow through and, and just come into these and just take a look. So these are just the emails, but they've got them in here for you. So you can see, just wanted to follow up on your last email, and you create these, and it's helpful because then you don't have to keep repeating the process. You're creating tasks that are kind of automated, and that's what's really a time saver for most of us business owners. So it's just something you want to look at. Here's the custom field section. You can create and update that. So I have these for like, where, like, where did they come from? As a member of Accountants Law Lab, you can put the credit cards in here. You can go back to workflows. We don't really have a lot of workflows in this particular one, but there's a lot of different details here. There's a marketplace, and this is where you can find some of those things like my friend Kelly Parks made for that for sale. So you can find them for sale. I think even Mariette has some of these. My friend Mariette, uh, life cycles. You can look at the life cycle of your client and where they are. Maybe they're a lead, and it got stuck.