In this tutorial, Linda Artesani of Artesani Accounting explains why law firms should integrate Clio, a legal practice management platform, with QuickBooks Online and walks viewers through the necessary configuration steps. She begins by describing common objections attorneys have—such as fear of synchronization, duplicate entries, and a desire to keep accounting separate—and explains how these concerns can lead to manual, error‑prone workflows that jeopardize compliance. Artesani then demonstrates navigating Clio’s Settings > System > Bill Syncing to map trust, operating, and bank accounts, select the synchronization start date, and configure how discounts, write‑offs, and hard costs are handled. She shifts to QuickBooks Online to show essential pre‑sync safeguards: creating a backup, enabling the “Close the Books” feature for prior periods, and setting a password‑protected barrier to prevent unwanted data import. Throughout, she emphasizes the importance of reconciling regularly to catch duplicate transactions that arise from Clio’s one‑way sync when invoices are edited after export. The video concludes with a promise to cover transaction types in the next episode and an invitation for questions, underscoring the power of a fully integrated, automated billing and accounting workflow for law firms.
Chapters
Hi there. Linda Artesani, Artesani Accounting and The Proper Trust. So this week we're continuing on our journey with Clio, the legal tech software, and we're gonna talk specifically about making that connection to QuickBooks and why you should do it. How do you connect Clio to QuickBooks? It's funny, we work with the Accountants Law Lab, our private group, and then we also work with attorneys who come to us directly already in using Clio. And we've heard many, many different reasons why it's not connected. And it's surprising to us because the power behind using the 2 platforms is that integration, is the connection to its— to the programs. So a lot of people keep it separate. They keep it on the side. They keep it over in this space because they don't want to— they want to keep it separate. They don't want to connect it. They feel that they're afraid to connect for whatever reason. We hear that from the attorneys. They're like, no, I keep this over here. I don't want to have it touch accounting. And then what they do is on this side, in the QuickBooks side, they just download anything that comes into the operating account as income. And it's not a proper workflow for sure. And that's one of the things that we really will talk to them about, maybe backing up the data and moving it into the system and connecting it and making the power behind it. So let's face it, one of the biggest issues we run into when working with law firms is that the attorneys will put whatever they want on this side of the legal tech software, they do their billing in Clio, for example, and then they record the money that they've earned and they'll pass the payment over from trust operating. And then they go to the bank and they make the transfer. And the transfer, maybe it should be 50 cents and they did it as 5 cents. And then we have an issue that we have to follow up with because for compliance purposes, if you only move 5 cents, it's 5 cents. It's not 50 cents. And you just can't adjust that away. Some of the other reasons when we ask, why aren't you connecting Clio to QuickBooks? And they'll say that they like keeping it separate because they don't understand how the settings work or they don't want to keep it. They don't want to connect it because the fact that they'd have to synchronize it terrifies them because maybe they kept it separate. Now the thought of bringing them together is not going to work. And then also they're afraid of duplicate entries. And there's been a lot of chatter about duplicate entries. Why is there duplicate entries? Had lawyers ask me that. Multiple times, like, what do you mean there's duplicate entries? Well, Clio has a one-way sync. So it's different than LeanLaw that has a two-way sync. It's got a one-way sync. So if you put an invoice over here for $123.17, and then you realize, oh, I should have billed $123.71, when you go over to the system and make the change, Clio sees the change and says, oh, that's a new transaction, and we'll throw the second transaction over. So it's really important. Regardless of that, because this can happen with duplication, can happen in any software. But regardless of that, you have to stay on top of any open hanging items, which is why you have to reconcile. Those are really key important reasons that you want to connect it, you want to reconcile it, keep it clean, remove any duplicates. And that's definitely one of the things that we see with Clio and other software. So I'm going to walk you through the settings in the next couple of steps. Why do you want to do this? No more manual entries. You should not be You should be doing it over here in Clio, doing the billing, receiving the payments, and then that pushes over into QuickBooks and will match your bank feed. Matching is perfect harmony, right? Now it matches the amounts put over. If there's an issue, now you make the correction, make sure there's no duplication when you make the correction, and then you move on. You know, the Synchronize button is kind of hidden, so let's go dive into the software and we'll take a look. So here we are in my demo file. And I have to tell you that one of the things I do love about this software is the way it's laid out. I love— first of all, blue is my favorite color, obviously, right? See behind me? I love blue. My yoga mat's blue and this is blue. It's such a pretty calming color, right? I know it's not that important, but when you work in software all day, it is kind of important. So this is the main screen and we're going to go into settings today and then I'll get into some other areas. But I just wanted you to see the settings and see See where we are. So you have a dashboard. Dashboards, you know what we're on right now. This is your personal dashboard, kind of gives you a high-level overview. I really like this, your billing metrics for the firm. It's just, it's nice. You can see you've got 49 draft bills, 125 unpaid bills. So remember, bills in this terminology, bills is your billing, your invoices, if you start to think of it that way. Total amount of money in draft, I've got $1 million in draft I haven't created bills for yet. Um, firm dashboard's pretty cool too, as I take you through this tour. So this is like one of my favorite features, right? You've got this beautiful— look at this utilization rate right there. Um, hands down, if you're into geeky numbers, this is, uh, super powerful. Non-billable— I've written so many articles, I could probably ping one back about the reasons why you want to track utilization rate. And this even gives you your realization rate, right? It gives you your real rate, what you've collected on, and it does the calculation on the hours, which is really cool. So as we start to go in to connect QuickBooks, clearly you go to Settings, right? Anytime you're making an app connection, you go to Settings. I click Settings and it brings me right over to the screen. So there's a lot here. So where do you go? You're probably wondering where to go. Well, under System, you want to go to Bill Syncing, and then you want to go to QuickBooks Online, and then you can go to Sync Status. And I want to mention this because anytime there's things that are not quite If it's got a big long name, it can't really connect. So those are the places where you'll see it not connect. Let me go back a screen now. We'll go to the settings. So as we come into configure the settings, you can connect to QuickBooks or Xero. And you can see that you can do all bills ever created. There's really great support help when you go into Clio. You could go into here, you could see you could put in however you wanted the time. Hours is what it's called in this one. Discounts go to sales. If you have a discount, different name for the account, you want to put it under the account that belongs. If you have a discount account or write-offs, write-downs or something like that, whatever it's called. And then you want to connect. So you want to connect to the bank account, you want to connect to the trust account, you want to connect to the operating account, and then you want to put a date in. That's the date that it's going to synchronize. So remember, on the date, you want to go into QuickBooks and you want to put that barrier up with the with the password to protect it, and I'll take you over there in a second. So that's where you want to go, and then you can import hard costs if you want. So let's go over to QuickBooks now and take a look at what we would need to do to put that barrier up to stop it. And you want to make sure you back up your file too. So let's go over to that right now. So in order to record the transactions properly, And to do that synchronization. Anytime you synchronize an app, it's important that you make sure that you back up your data with QuickBooks Online. And if you're using Advanced, it comes with the backup, making sure that that happens in the account so that you are covered if there's ever an issue. You can roll the data back to before you made the connection. The other important step that you want to do is you want to come over to the gear, you want to come over to Account and Settings. And this is all in the notes in the article. You want to come down to the Advanced tab. Whoops. You want to come down to the Advanced tab and then you see here that Close the Books is off. So I'm going to go over the pencil and I'm going to assume that I'm going to lock this prior period out. So you want to do it the prior period and you want to close the books. I'm just going to toggle this switch on. And then I'm going to put the date of 12/31/21, and then I'm just going to leave it with allows changes after viewing a warning. Still will protect your data. And I'm going to assume that everybody knows how to connect to the backup system inside of QuickBooks. If you come over to your— I think it's your dashboard— you'll be able to see where your app connections are. inside of your data file. It's not moving. Excuse me. I think it's on the dashboard where it shows your apps that you're using, or is it on the overview? I can never remember. Here's the apps that I'm using, and you can see that I am backing this up, but it doesn't seem to show that I'm backing it up here. But you will need to back it up in your settings for Advanced. So Advanced comes with a free backup. I probably didn't do that on this demo. Comes with backup system. You just have to log into apps.com and I'll show you where that is. And then you can get the app that goes with— the app that goes with the backing up of QuickBooks that's included in Advanced. So you could type in backup. And obviously it's called Backup Online Backup and Restore. And then you can just go to the app from here and then set up the settings. It does a continuous backup in the background. Always do these steps before you get to the point of doing any synchronization. It's really super important. You want to make sure that you back up the data, you password protect any data that you, you know, you don't want it to go and pull in, even though there's a date inside of Clio that says don't bring in data from before a certain date, just to make sure you put that barrier up. It can't enter any data without the password. So it will not allow any data to eke, kind of eke into the area that's not supposed to. You don't want that to happen. So I hope this is helpful. I'm going to do a little bit more on the types of transactions that are created when you do invoicing and billing in Clio next week. And I hope this helps you to See the power behind the software we use at our firm. It's pretty powerful stuff. It's got a lot of bells and whistles inside it. A lot of the attorneys really like it because it's a one-stop shop for all these bells and whistles. So I hope this is helpful. If you have any questions, reach out. Love to hear your feedback on this. And until next week, we'll see you then. Bye now.
