Attorney-Client Top Nine Tips

Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. This week is all about my top 9 tips for helping you help your clients, especially at this time of the year, at the end of the year, helping them grow, helping them be profitable. So I'm just going to kind of lightly go through the list. And you can see the list in the blog that's attached to this video. And I'll go through it, then I'm going to take you into QuickBooks and take you into HubSpot. So you can see, since my favorite tool with working with the mid-market clients, it's very easy to set up and it helps them with marketing and following the leads and such. So the first tip I have is analyzing your sales. So help your client take a look at the sales, and attorneys are great for this. They love looking at how many, how much, you know, how much did Harry make, how much did Mary make, how much did Peter make. They love comparing themselves in the sales from person to person, but they, they don't, you know, sometimes they don't even look at the sales as a whole. This year has been an interesting year. Some of the attorneys have been really, really good about recognizing some of the pitfalls of 2020. And if the courts were closed, it definitely threw a little monkey wrench into the sails. We've got immigration firms that we work with that the courts were closed for a bit of time. They're really not doing the Zoom meetings. So they're kind of backlogged, and they know that the floodgates are going to open next year when it becomes time to open the court system, or maybe they're just partially open now. So they're trying to prepare for that. But they're also— we also help them prepare for cash flow and how can they get the money in the door now to— and recognize some of that revenue. So it's easy to get the retainer, right? But you need to recognize some of that revenue. So this is something we're helping our clients through if they've got that situation. Divorce attorneys have been doing very well, unfortunately, as a matter of fact of COVID Some of the other law firms are doing pretty well as well. But they're all— they all have the different challenges, especially if they're very court-driven. They might find that there's— it's been a little bit of a difficult, difficult or rocky road. The good news is all of them have been very optimistic for 2021, and it's a great time for the conversation, even to have that conversation with the client, maybe putting some money away for that rainy day. This year of all years really helped us realize that this is something that we should plan for. Maybe getting a savings account. QuickBooks Capital is a pretty cool checking account that you can get that will give them 1% interest. So it's, it's a thought there. I really like Relay. It's kind of cool to have that there. Just preparing. Another area that I didn't put in the blog, but a lot of the law firms are partnerships or they're just a sole proprietor. And you want to start to take a look at, did they pay the right amount of estimated taxes? So that they're ready for the year end when they do their tax returns. So it's another area where you can add that advisory service or add that advisory advisor role to your repertoire of services that you provide to your clients. Again, I've mentioned looking at leads. So HubSpot, when we get into HubSpot, I'll show you, but you can really trace a lead for the client from the initial contact with the client, just training the staff. Where do I Take where did the lead come from? So the receptionist, the person at the door who was ever involved with the flow of clients, influx of clients coming in, finding out where the leads come from. I do that in my own firm because I use 17hats. I have a contact form, and on the contact form, it's a simple box that I require them to answer. So I know where my marketing is effective. It's the same thing. HubSpot's just kind of like that on steroids, where you have so many ways to follow the lead all the way through. You can get HubSpot for your own firm, and HubSpot is now integrated with QuickBooks. So it's really exciting that we have HubSpot and we have Salesforce, 2 of the big players that will really help you with that type of marketing and following the leads and helping them grow their leads and figure out where— where the leads are coming from, and then where are they more profitable? Are they more profitable doing estate planning, or are they more profitable doing family law? If you've got a multi— A variety of practice areas in the law firm, especially when you get in that mid-market firm. I touched a little bit about the courtroom reporting reopening and how that's affecting some of the clients' expenses, analyzing expenses. And you can do this even in your own firm. Take a look at all the apps that you pay for every month. There's probably 1 or 2 or 3 in there that you maybe don't need, don't use, didn't use all year, and you might want to cancel. That's the first place I look. And then of course you can start to look at insurances, when the insurance policies— book that into your calendar when the insurance policies are ready to roll over, start to take a look at the pricing of them, more likely about maybe 4 to 6 months out, because it'll take time to price them. And then if you're making a change or shift, it's a good time to really start to look at that. Workers' comp is another place that if you're using QuickBooks Online payroll, you can get AP Indigo, and you can get that with other, with other outside payroll sources as well. Great company, great resource. I can't say enough about it. It's a really great platform so simple to sign a client up with that. It's just a couple of places that you can look at expenses. But as you go through the expenses, the best part about being a specialized accountant is I'm able to see multiple files, I'm able to look at all these different companies that are all doing the same thing, and seeing where maybe some are doing a little bit better, and then noticing maybe my client over here can be using this same service over here to automate some processes. So that's the beauty of being that cloud accountant. Of course, you've heard me talk about accounts receivable. There's probably 5 or 6 articles in my blog about accounts receivable. Number one pain point with the attorneys. I see that over 90 column all the time when they come to me. And when I start to have that painful conversation about why is there so much here, then they kind of feel guilty that they didn't really follow up and keep that going. So you want to really take a look at that. Really take a look at the flow, how that's being handled at the firm. When you get into the bigger firms, there's multiple, multiple— how do they say it— multiple chefs in the soup or something like that, but multiple hands, multiple people, multiple working parts. Look at— have the people in their staff, if they're touching accounts receivable, what are their duties? You'll probably take a look, have them all fill out a survey or a Google Form. What is your duty? What parts of accounts receivable are you handling? You might find that there's overlap, or you might find that there's a way that you can automate and make that process better. I always tell them that my goal is to get them to that under— over— under 30-day column and get the 60 and 90-day column cleared out, whether we write it down, write it off, send it to collections. I've got a great firm you can work with in Seattle that can do a very nice collection, very professional, not that kind of mean collection. And there's ways you can do it with CoolBox, which is another great app that can handle that for you. A lot of law firms— I always thought, well, the law firm could handle it themselves, but they don't really want to do that job. So you can outsource that. Compensation reports is another area. When we start to work with law firms, we're finding that they've got these crazy compensation plans and that most of them are doing that work on Excel. How can I help them automate that from the accounting? And we find this all the time as we start to go through the files and look at the Excel spreadsheet and try to validate the numbers in these— in the financial software, they don't always match up. We need those numbers to match up because the attorneys and the partners are being paid from that. So how do we make it match and validate it to the source, which is your financial records? You can use a platform called Reach Reporting. I'm a big fan. It's a little pricey, but it is such a great product. It's very versatile. And then also custom fields. So now the API has now been open for custom fields for my favorite app, LeanLaw. And now the 2 platforms talk directly to each other. So that's what opening up the API means. Why is that beneficial? I can create custom fields in LeanLaw, create the same custom field inside of QuickBooks, connect the two. And so when the attorneys and everyone are working in LeanLaw, that data is pushed into my QuickBooks file. And now I'm able to get these high-level reports for the, for the staff that's, that's there and for the, and for the partners. And it's really, I mean, you can really start to think outside the box. And think of ways that you can work with custom fields to get them some really great data. So I'm going to share my screen and take you a little bit through HubSpot, take you a little bit of where the areas I look at inside of a sample file, and then I'll just end this video but give you some ideas, maybe get your brain sparking on ways you can really get to that place that you are really that trusted advisor. Now I like to run the balance sheet here that I have here by month. So I've got all dates because I didn't want to— I have a lot of data that's fresh inside this file, but you could actually do this comparing 2020 to 2019. And I'm sure you're going to find striking differences inside of your program when you start to compare actually year over year, especially this year, it was so different and so strange. Some of my firms are thriving, they're doing really, really well. And some of them are just kind of making their way there. I think that It's a good place to start with the balance sheet. Make sure everything's balanced. You should be doing this on a monthly or weekly basis with your IOLTA, your, you know, your IOLTA account and your, your trust accounting. Take a look at the advanced client costs. That's another place you'd want to look. And obviously you're going to go through your profit and loss and things like that. Start to look when you get into the profit and loss. I'm just gonna pull one of those up now. Start to look at— I'm just going to pull it up as all dates only because I guess 2020 is going to work. Start to look at what you have here. Like when you see something deleted, company car deleted, why was it deleted? Was this moved up into an asset and somebody didn't actually put this here? This is probably not an asset, but you never know what's in here. So take a look and see. Again, the insurance is another place to look. Look at how much money they're spending on advertising. Why are the soft costs negative? This is just some places you want to take a look and see. If you've got miscellaneous expense, that's always a place. Anything uncategorized is also a place. But this is your current client file, you shouldn't be seeing any of these kind of glaring issues. Make sure your payroll ties back to all the payroll reports in your payroll system. If you've got QuickBooks payroll, that's one thing. But if you've got an outside source, you want to validate that. See if you can get the client to really work through anything that's uncategorized or any ask my accountant questions or things of that nature that you want to really clean up. I'm going to take you over to HubSpot now. So I didn't want to scare you with HubSpot. It's a pretty beefy dashboard. And this is some— I just have it for my own firm for free. I haven't even set this up. But you can see that there's a chat overview, email overview, you can really get down and dirty with all the details of client and lead generation. Where are they coming from? Where are you spending the money on the leads? Are you doing advertising, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, you can really get into that and figure out what is really effective for the law firm. There's a marketing channel performance center with dashboards of 10 reports, key metrics, you can start to track these things. It's important because a lot of law firms spend a lot of money on those on marketing and they hire a firm and they really don't track it. So if you've got a good firm, they will look into this and see, they'll help you follow the leads. And I've had that happen where I'll ask them where their leads coming from and they'll just say, I don't know, I paid somebody to check that out. So you want to help them through this to see, is the money being spent worth what they're getting back in return? Are they finding out? Because you really need to work with— it's not just about the lead side, the accountant needs to be involved to see Where are they profitable? What services are more profitable? And obviously with some law firms, you have to sell certain things to see other things, but it's a good way to kind of track that kind of stuff. If you have a sales manager or a person that's generating leads most of the time in the firm, we classify the attorneys so we can track all the income. They could have revenue goals. We could have a Slack channel and have them put the goals in and then try to meet the goals. That's another way that you can really help the law firm grow. And help them strive to do that. Also with the accounts receivable, if each individual attorney isn't— is involved in tracking their own accounts receivable, then maybe you keep an eye on that with the reporting inside of LeanLaw that can track to see if there's a lot of WIP or work in process that hasn't been billed. That would be a red flag for the partners or somebody that's in charge to find out why this is sitting there and why it hasn't been billed out. It's all about cash flow, folks, all about cash flow. So you can just see there's a lot here. You can look at the website, how that's working. There's just a lot of different things inside of HubSpot. Don't want you to be afraid of it, but you can see that we've got all the dashboards here. And you know, you can go to marketing, you can kind of filter it down so it doesn't look as scary. But it's a good app to learn. I think this one's a lot more easier than Salesforce. Salesforce is a lot beefier, a lot more pricey, and this one seems to work with most of my clients. And if they haven't even looked at using a product like HubSpot or Salesforce, now's a great time to start to have that communication. Because you can start using that January 1st. It's always a good time to do that refreshing thing. You can maybe look at their payroll if they're using a payroll provider that's not really working out. It's a great time to offer that. I'm going to be doing a webinar with QuickBooks on QuickBooks Payroll, QuickBooks Online Payroll, and all the new SKUs that they have. They do have one that's the most expensive, but there's help with onboarding, there's help with HR. I think they use Mammoth for HR. They've got Guideline for 401. It's just got a lot of features in there that maybe people don't really know about. So we'll be doing that very shortly. You'll seeing that floating around mid-December. But that's about it for this week. I hope that was helpful. If you are an attorney and you need help with your books or you think you might want some help with growing your firm, please reach out. If you are a bookkeeper or an accountant that needs help with learning how to work with accountants— work with attorneys, feel free to reach out to me. I'm more than happy to help. We've got a cool ebook in here. And on that note, I hope you all have a wonderful, wonderful week. Bye now. Bye.