In this tutorial, Linda Artesani (Artesani Accounting & The Proper Trust) demonstrates how to navigate and use the various reporting features in Clio Manage. Working from a demo Clio file (with limited transaction data) and a QuickBooks Online Advanced demo, she walks through the Reports tab, explaining each report category—billing, accounts receivable, billing history, client activity/WIP, client and trust ledgers, matter productivity, and revenue reports. She shows how to set date ranges, filter by client, matter, practice area, or responsible attorney, and export reports to Excel or PDF. Throughout, she emphasizes the importance of aligning Clio reports with QuickBooks data, checking date ranges, and reconciling accounts receivable, invoice payments, and interest charges. Artesani critiques the lack of certain baked‑in reports (e.g., 3‑way bank reconciliation) and suggests using custom fields or classes to better categorize practice areas. The video concludes with a high‑level overview of the available reports, practical advice for attorneys and accountants, and an invitation for viewers to ask questions.
Chapters
Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Accounting and The Proper Trust. So this is the last week of our journey through this month on Clio. We're gonna talk about reports and I'll take you through. I only have a demo file with Clio. I don't have a full working file like I do with LeanLaw where I can play around with transactions. I have it hooked up. My LeanLaw file is actually hooked up to my QuickBooks Online Advanced file so I can demonstrate and show different scenarios. I do have a QuickBooks other demo file that I would love to hook up an actual working Clio file to so that we could do it better because we're really restricted in the demo file. So hopefully if Clio, if you're watching, I would love to talk to you about getting a full file that I can attach to Sarah and my empty QuickBooks Plus file that's got a bunch of transactions and then we could show more. So I'm going to work with what I have and show you Clio reporting. So as we pop here into the QuickBooks file, like I said, reporting. And there's a really good— I'm going to share a link. There's a really good— Clio has like probably one of the better blog sections with help sections, and I will take you into that and then show you exactly. It kind of demonstrates every single report and how to get to it. If you can't find a report, I found there's been some that I wanted to see They weren't canned and, you know, default reports inside of Clio. So they give you instructions how to make it in Excel, which, come on, Clio, you've been around the longest. We really feel like you should— well, I really feel like you should be able to have some of these reports baked into your product because you've been around a long time and we shouldn't have to go manipulate data and make our own in Excel. But that being said, there's quite a few reports. So I'm going to take you to the Reports tab. Obviously, you go to the left-hand toolbar. And they're pretty good. So they put them in sections. So billing reports is obviously your invoicing. Accounts receivable, you really want to always look at. Make sure you're connected to QuickBooks, that the accounts receivable aligns. Make sure you get the same, you know, you've got the same date ranges, but make sure it aligns. If it doesn't align, there's something wrong, right? So you want to take a look at that. And I'm going to go into— let's just go into the accounts receivable report for a second. And all the reports are like this. You have to kind of go through a bunch of steps to figure it out. I usually just keep it on the web. You could do the date ranges this month. You can obviously change the date range, put a custom date range in, which is nice. Maybe you want to do all dates. Um, actually, let me try all dates. I don't know how long this is going to— because this is their file with their data, so I really don't know. You can do it filtered down by specific client and matter, specific practice area if you've separated the practice areas. That's here. Specific, specific responsible, so you can go right into that detail. I'm just going to generate the report. I don't know how long this is going to take. This is a demo file. If it's like my demo file, it's pretty big, lots of data in there. And then I bring it up on web, but also you can push it out to Excel or PDF. That's the other choices that are under here. Maybe I shouldn't have picked that because it might be a big file. Let's see how long it takes. Okay, here we go. So you can see here that, you know, you can see that it's past due, the amount that's due, there's been a $400 payment. And $351.64 is due. So you can come down and look. You can see that there were some interest charges here. So you can charge interest on invoices if it's allowable in your state. And then you can go all the way to the bottom. So the bottom line is where you want to go, that you want to track and look at that inside of QuickBooks and make sure that the back— this is a gigantic file. I'm not going to take you all the way to the bottom, but make sure the numbers align in QuickBooks. You want the same date range and take a look at it that way. So let's go back. And then obviously you can see all the different interest charges that have been booked into the client here as well. Let's go back. So you got billing history report. Obviously aging is going to show you like an aging report would in QuickBooks. Again, make sure it aligns. Matter balance summary. Invoice payments, that's kind of a nice one. So billing history, let's just keep this month so it'd be faster to create the report. You can fill— do all the filters. You can take a look at the billing history report. to see what was billed. You can see that some of these are just interest charges because it was set up to charge interest. And you can see basically the billing history. Let's go back here. So you can go into the client reports. I want to kind of go through this at a very high level. Client Activity Report. It says right there, view of billed and unbilled time activities. So you can go into the client activity to see on the whole, because unbilled and billed. So you want to see your WIP. And there is a WIP report in here as well. You see that the only thing is in here for this month is this one person, George, and looks like he had a discount. So that's something that I know we should probably do a whole, a whole show on discounts and how those work, because that seems to be something that trips up even our members in the Law Lab. So we have the client ledger, the trust ledger. So client ledger could be— is your receivables, right? And it could be partly trust as well. Trust ledger. Remember I mentioned that trust ledger is a detailed format in the trust listing? We've had a problem with this, making sure it aligns. So we never use this one. You think of it like trial balance, general ledger. Trial balance is the summary view of what's in the general ledger, the detailed view, and they should match up, but the numbers don't match up. So we always use the trust ledger one. Work in progress is a nice one to have for the attorneys. You want to see— I don't know. This is a demo file, so it all depends on what was put in here. Maybe somebody put it in as their training. This is a fake file, so there's no work in process. So, you know, this is where you want to see— let me just go back to that one because that's an important report— what's not been billed and what's out there. So if we do— let's just do this year and see if we can pull up something. I don't want to go too wide, and I don't know who's been in this file or what they use this for. Okay, so there's some here. Kelly Simpson, and, you know, this is someone documents produced. This is things that they've put in that they're going to bill at a later time. But it's a good report because this is going to see some— in some firms you want to send this out before the billing time so they can get a look at it to see what they've been billing next and what they're, um, what they're not billing. Uh, maybe they're holding on to for whatever reason down the road that they will bill. So we have that. Those are your client reports. Bank account activity, you're going to see what's going on in the bank accounts. Um, matter reports, you're going to see the detail on the matter. Matter Matters by responsible attorney, productivity by client. And don't forget, I'm not going into Clio Grow, which is a whole separate product, costs a little bit more. You can bundle it with Clio Manage. There's so much in that other product. Don't have a lot of clients on it, but there is a lot there. Matter productivity by user, and then some revenue reports. And this revenue report is pretty much like by practice area. So you can create a report. Let's just do this year. Let's just do this here so you can see, because a lot of times what happens with Clio or any of the other software is they connect to one legal income account. So to find out where your matters are by practice area, you want to run this report. And I don't see— I don't see— it's uncategorized and it's showing— this is an interesting report. It's really not a helpful one, I have to say. Okay, so divorce, business. So there you go. There's a total there. I don't really like the way this is laid out, but, um, I'd rather see it more matters across. You should really be using classes if you're doing matter, uh, practice area. You should really kind of— you could use classes, but you could also use a custom field. Actually use the custom field, but do the attorneys by the class. So that's more important to do that way. So as you can see, there's a lot of reports in here. Um, important ones— invoice payments is another one. A lot of times attorneys will ask you, can I see the invoice payments? So it's going to give you a listing of all the payments, whether they're Clio Pay, LawPay, Gravity Legal, or if they're paid by check, however you've entered them. So it's another one that you might want to run just for your own purposes to make sure everything aligns. Obviously you're reconciling, so that's— but it's good to have that report if the attorneys want to see it. I want to see how's my client paid. You have that ability to run that report. So that is about it. Very, very high-level view of reports in Clio. You know, there are some that you'll come up— I want to see the 3-way bank reconciliation one built in. There is, I think, CosmoLex is one of the products that has it, but a lot of them don't have it. It'd be really nice to have. Obviously, if you have that kind of report, you have to have QuickBooks connected. You've got to show the ways, right? If I'm reconciling off of the bank statement, that's one of the ways of the 3 ways. And then my accounts inside of my accounting software have to match those account balances inside of in this case, Clio. So I hope that's helpful. I'm not really sure where I'm taking you all next week, so I can't even give you a heads up, but I will come up with some topics. And I hope this was helpful to you. If you have any questions or comments, please reach out. We'd love to hear from you. On that note, have a wonderful, wonderful week. Bye. Thank you.
