Attorney financial reports

Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. This week I'm going to talk about the monthly reports that we give to our attorneys and give you a couple of little short tips that will help you determine what's the best group. So not every attorney gets the same reports. Solos get different reports than the partners in a bigger firm, but we try to keep kind of a standardized report grouping and we keep it pretty general. So this time of the year, you're absolutely looking at more reports. You're looking at the year-to-date, you know, last year's reports. You're looking at month after month, maybe running a balance sheet and grouping it by month. So you've got a larger view of that. Year-end, I like to give the attorney a balance sheet for year-end, and then I will actually collapse it down for the tax professional because I know they don't want to see all the noise that we have in there that is important to us and important to the client. But for the tax professional, they don't need to see a lot of the detail. Do the same thing with profit and loss as well. If they need to see it expanded, that's okay. But if you can give it to them kind of shrunk down in less, less categories, it's better. Let me share my screen. I'm going to take you on a little tour through a little bit of the Performance Center. If you haven't investigated that with QuickBooks Online Advanced, it's really a powerful tool. If you have an attorney or attorneys that actually have a login to QuickBooks and they are really invested in their firm, it's a nice way to let them see little, little cards and little a quick look at their firm and you can customize it. Let me share my screen. I'll show you what I'm talking about. So here we are in QuickBooks Online Advanced, and I'm in the reporting. But if you come up here, here's a Performance Center. And this is what I mean by giving your client a dashboard to look at maybe revenue streams, maybe cash flow, anything you want, accounts receivable aging periods. And it gives it to them in a graphical view so they can see how the firm is doing. As you've heard me mention in other videos, accounts receivables, typically a pretty big pain point, and it's a way we can swoop in as the accountant, get that cash flow coming in, help them start to collect. And there's multiple ways, and I can probably ping back to a prior article that you can see I've laid out what we do with the firms. But this is a great little snippet to— so they can see like that where they're at, and you don't have to give them a paper report or a PDF. They can come right into their QuickBooks file if they're active in it and see exactly where they're at in the Performance Center. And I'm going to come back here to Reports and show you that I favorite the reports that we have. I also use my accounting tools, so you can come up here for Report Options and you can set it to be last month. I set it for accrual as the year goes through. I let them see an accrual basis. But then when I come back up to going to the Reports section, I've customized a little grouping of year-end. And in here I would do like my balance sheet cash basis collapsed for Profit and Loss, Cash Basis Collapsed. So I'd have my monthly group, but I'd also have this. And then I've got my Advanced Client Reconciliation Report and your Trust Ledger, obviously. And these are shared reports that we share with our clients. But if I come in here, I'm going to show you my General Ledger because I did take their General Ledger and change it a bit. So their General Ledger has balance and account balance, total balance, and doesn't have debit and credit. So I've cleaned up my, my listing here. You just come in here and you can make it be whatever you want. But you can come in here and just select— I took off adjustment, I took off some of the things. If it's got classes, you want to definitely select classes. So you can create this report. And this is kind of the fun way you can play around with reports in QuickBooks, where you can make it so that the account— the client can see a cleaner version of a balance general ledger. And then one of the things that you do here, once you do decide, if you decide to do the debit and credit column, you can have to come up here and kind of customize it and rearrange it so that it shows up here. Because when you first select it kind of puts balance and then— or amount— and then it puts debit and credit afterwards, which looks weird. So you need to fix that part of it, which is just coming up here to Customize and Change Columns. So it's as simple as that. One of the other reports that we do give to our attorneys is we will reconcile IOLTA, we will grab the bank statement, which I don't have a copy of one because this is a demo file, and we will take the reconciliation, we will take the register balance. And we go to lien law. So when we're in lien law, we are able to see all 3 balances right here, the bank, the liability, and the total client liabilities, which these numbers should all match, right? A couple things you should look for, make sure that when you pop in here that there's nothing listed on this left-hand side, because if I put an attorney name in here, it might change the balances. You want to make sure that this looks good. And you have these 3 balances. This is your part of your 3-way along with your bank statement. And then what I'll do is I will actually click on this QB. So if I click here, I can actually bring up the report, which is going to give me that listing right out of QuickBooks. It's going to pull right out of the— give you that transaction quick report. And I rename it and I shoot it over to Google, which I have the ability to do, export to Google. Once I have it inside of Google, I want to give the client a feeling of, here's my— here's your reconciliation. So I exported that to PDF, and then I just did a screenshot of it. One of the pretty cool things that we can do with Google Sheets is we can go and insert, and we can insert an image. And I inserted an image over the cells. So then once I've downloaded that PDF and taken a snippet of it, I also took a snippet here of LeanLaw to show them that the balances in this IOLTA account all match And then I also will take a snippet of the PDF from the bank statement and put this all on this Google Sheet, which I can share with the client, save them month over month, or I can just download it to Excel and give it to the client so that they have a good look at what happened in their file. So they can see that these things are here and everything is what they expect to see. So I have the IOLTA balances, which is that report I just clicked on the QB and shot out into Excel and then— and brought it up into an Excel spreadsheet. And then I did the funds in trust, which is just that little picture that I showed you on, on LeanLaw. I just took a snip— snippet of it. And then I also did a snippet of my PDF for my reconciliation report. So this gives them that— here's everything that matches. And obviously the IOLTA bank statement balance, if the balance at the end of the month is different than on the register, which typically is if you've got checks outstanding or deposits outstanding, I will give that at the bottom. I'll give them that little overview of why, what the difference is, so they can see that the numbers all tie together. So it's as simple as that, but it's an easy way to give them a very transparent view of the one thing that they really always worry about, which is that IOLTA. That gives them that, you know, that peace of compliance, but it lets them sleep at night to know that their IOLTA is balanced out. AR report, AP report, cash flow. If you are looking at cash flow, the one in QuickBooks will pull in the liability balances. So you really don't want to use that one. You might want to use an outside source to give them a little bit something more fine-tuned. We use Reach Reporting, and I will give you a little snippet of what you can get out of Reach. And maybe somewhere down the road, I can actually take you into Reach. If you're doing any attorney reports, so any report on your, your staff attorneys that you're trying to track how much revenue they've brought in, any compensation reporting, You want to get into that, and I'll get into more depth on that next week on what the various compensation models are that the attorneys use. There's always that hybrid method. 99% of them come to us with a plan in mind. Maybe they're doing a bonus or a commission-based, or they've got some other method, maybe where they do originating and responsible attorneys. But then they say there's always an exception to the rule, which then makes it kind of a hybrid. So Compensation reporting is always a time of the month that we have to like get all the numbers done from the prior month to get those compensation, get the money out to the partners and get the money out to any attorneys that are on like a bonus system. And that gets a little bit complex. And I'll get into that and how we handle that next week. If you are an accountant or bookkeeper and you want to brainstorm with us, you want to sit in a meeting with Sarah and I and really dive into IOLTA. This week we're going to be talking about payroll again and maybe 1099s. that'll probably come up. If you're interested in that, this is, you know, we're getting that final week where you can be still be a founding member and it's only $57 a month and be part of a private group where you can ask questions to us directly. We will answer them and also have that one-on-one feeling in the, in the private meeting where we let everybody have a chance to maybe bring even some client stuff in that we can look at it. It is totally private. It is not on Facebook, although we do have a Facebook group. It's called the Accountant's Law Lab. So if you're interested, please join us. Also have a Facebook group called QB Community Live, and that's kind of a— you probably should join both because that one's more talking broadly about business. So you can get the benefit from both. It's a bigger group, it's more robust, it's got a little bit different vibe in it, but it's still probably a great space for you to join. So on that note, I hope you all have a wonderful, wonderful week and we'll see you next week. Bye now.