Best attorney workflow for accountants

Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Accounting. This week I'm going to take you on a tour of my workflow, the workflow I think is the best for attorneys and law firms. And I'll take you into each individual app. So this video will be a little bit longer, but I think it'll be a powerful one because I think this is something that I get asked often. What do you use in your workflow? What is your favorite tools? What is— what pieces of the puzzle go together to make this a sweet automation? And I am always a big believer in sharing what I know. I've done a lot of research to find the right tools that work, and I think that if you are working with attorneys and law firms, you should definitely consider some of the apps that I use. Let me take you there and we'll show you a little bit around what I believe works the best. So here we are in my workflow, and it all starts with my firm. Right here at the top. And then this is my client, the law firm. So of course, the main piece of the puzzle is QuickBooks. Everything feeds into QuickBooks. Everything— QuickBooks is the main piece. So it's the place where the accounting transactions live, and it is definitely the most important piece of this puzzle. I always like to say that if you add LeanLaw to QuickBooks, it's like putting the attorney suit on top of QuickBooks. It makes QuickBooks law-specific and legal-specific. And it also gives you the way to really to track and make sure your trust accounts are proper, you don't overstate them or, you know, understate them. It keeps your accounts in compliance and balance, which is so important. But the beginning of my relationship with a client always starts in Liscio. Liscio is that secure platform for communication with my client where my NDA would be, where I would be, Communicating securely and then opening up that dialogue to exchange documents, but also doing that in a secure way. So it lets them know that, hey, I mean business. I don't want any of your documents floating out on the interweb. I want it being inside this invite-only platform. We also have our automation pieces. We have Dext. Dext is Receipt Bank, and Dext is where the receipts would go. Attorneys will be, you know, going to court. They'll maybe pick up filing fees or whatever they're spending the money on. I need to know because we're going to be paying these things. Maybe they came through a credit card or if it's paid by another means, we would have a way to capture all the receipts. They get uploaded into Dext. You can put the app on your phone, uploaded into Dext, coded, backcoded, coded to the matter, pushed into QuickBooks. QuickBooks sees them where they're ready to pay, or if they're a bill, they will be ready to pay. And then if it's coded to advanced client costs, it actually gets sucked up into LeanLaw. So it's ready to bill on the invoice to the client. So any of those advanced client costs are sitting there waiting to be billed back. We love using Intuit Payments for any accounts receivable payments. Intuit Payments is automated. So you would send out the invoice to the client, it would have a payment link, the payment link gets used, the client pays the bill, it gets coded in as a payment automatically, or I like to say automagically, and then it gets deposited automatically. So I don't have to touch any of that. It's all done for you. Really powerful tool if you are an immigration firm because this piece of automation is so important when you are processing a ton of transactions to straight up accounts receivable. Gravity Payments works with LeanLaw, and that's the beauty of that. So it's embedded into LeanLaw. So if you are working with a client and you're requesting trust funds, you can just go request trust. And if they have a Gravity account, it's going to make that be very automated. The client will pay it, it processes through Gravity, Gravity pushes it into QuickBooks. So the payment's recorded and everything's recorded in the proper way to the trust or trust ledger account. And then the fees, if they paid by credit card, come out of operating. So there's your another piece of compliance, so important. QuickBooks Payroll, I believe QuickBooks Payroll is a great payroll, especially because it's embedded inside QuickBooks. So it's not another outside app, it's part of it. And you can really see the check stubs, there's reports in there. You can go with the Elite level, which I recommend with law firms. So you get the HR component, you can do the 401s through that system. It's just a lot of pluses. If you haven't looked at QuickBooks Payroll, I definitely think that if you had looked at it in the past, it's time to look at it again because the new lineup, it's really grown and changed quite a bit recently. Reach Reporting is that crème de la crème reporting tool. So the smaller firms probably wouldn't need that because they do have Fathom and things inside of QuickBooks Online Advanced. But Reach Reporting is a higher tool that if you have a firm that does some of the crazy compensation programs that we see, a lot of these firms have some complex compensation formulas. You can actually use the data, live data extracted from QuickBooks and do quite a bit in Reach Reporting. You can do individual attorney report cards. It's just a really great tool for a lot of things. So I recommend looking at Reach if you need to have that, if you have that need where you need something a little more than what QuickBooks gives you. So let's move on to each tool and I'll take you into them so you can see exactly what is— what these pieces are and how they work. And I'll just take you on a brief tour of each piece so you can see why I really like all of these pieces working in synchrony. Here we are in Lissio, and Lissio again is that client communication space. It's also where I can request documents and all the documents get stored, all the files would get stored right here in the file section. So I'm actually in my demo, demo file, and you can see you have a lot of things. You can rate your client, you can go through and do all of these, all of this information. This is where I'd add my service team. So it's really easy to swap out service teams, and then they can see all the things they need to see to do the work in this company file, and you can change them very simply. And then it's, it just makes work, makes light work of this because you're able to change the service team if you have to, and then somebody else can take over the job and they'll see all the files involved. They'll see all the communication involved that you want them to see. As the account owner, I actually get to see all of the, um, all of the information, all of the communication. Maybe it's communication between my team and the client. I can see everything. So that is important to me as a business owner. This is contacts, is where you would put the people that are on this file specifically. Maybe the Owner of demo file, maybe the owner, or maybe the, you know, the admin, whoever I'm communicating with. That's where you'd see that. Task is where I would give out a task to that client. Maybe I need a document and I'm going to request it. If I put it in tasks, it will keep requesting until they give it to me. Then I just close down the task. And the messages would give me the messages back and forth with the client. Notes is an internal place where I would have notes for between us. Sometimes me and Sarah, we would do a we would do the notes section for— we meet, you know, we meet with the client, we engage with them, it becomes a job. I put all the notes in here so they're always here. So I have those details. Clients love when you give that personalized touch and you put details in the conversation right in here. And that way, if even if they don't become a client, if they're just a prospect, I have the notes ready so that if they come back to me 6 months from now and say, you know, I really wished I had done that migration 6 months ago, it's here and they'll be able to grab— I'm going to be able to go, oh yeah, I remember talking to you 6 months ago. Maybe I've talked to 50 people by that time and I would never remember them. But if I pull it up, I can read the notes and look like a superstar when they talk to me. And the littlest details matter, right? Payroll is a section to put in all the payroll details, payroll logins. Activity just kind of shows you the most recent activity in this file. There's lots of files is where they would be in there. And any files in here would be— you can tag. So we have tags and you can search and it's just really, really powerful and fast. And then logins, any logins, maybe log into I'm just saying, log into any outside apps that you need to get to. We have the ability to get there. Maybe it's to log into the bank. So those are in here where your team can go right out to get it. So if you have accountant logins, you can put all the details. What I like about logins is it gives me the ability to add the questions, security questions. It's nice if you're an accountant to get like a certain set of answers that aren't really information that you'd be giving out to anybody, but like you could say Answers are 1, 2, 3 all the time. It doesn't matter. And you can just put it out there that what the question is and the answer is 1, the second question, the answer is 2, the third question, the answer is 3, and so on. So that way you can kind of come up with an interesting way to remember the questions. So that's another tip for you if you're interested in— and as an accountant, it's good to have that. You don't want to have your personal, what's your first pet, out there in the— with your team and your staff even. So that in a nutshell is Licio. It's really powerful. I can add my team. I can toggle between one Licio account and another if I'm working on something with somebody else. Uh, you can add your team and your staff, make them employees so they can see everything and all the files. Um, notifications would pop up here. You can see I have something in my inbox right now with my other accounts. I pull up my accounts list, but you'd see all my clients, so I'm not going to do that because I want to keep everything secure. But I just wanted to go over that. There's Licio Dispatch. So Licio Dispatch is really cool. As a firm owner, I can print to the Lysio Vault. And so if I get a document that I— maybe a PDF and I want to add it to a client file, it's a matter of clicking it like you're printing it and you can tag it and it'll get fed right up into your account. So that's another really powerful tool. So here we are, QuickBooks. And I use QuickBooks Online Advanced for the majority of my clients. Why? Because there's so many tools inside. And I will take you on a few of the reasons why in a moment. But QuickBooks is a great platform and it's designed to work with all sorts of businesses. And that's when you start to layer those other applications on it to really automate a lot of the processes. QuickBooks is— it's got a lot of things in it. So we have month-end review, we have a dashboard where you can see very simply what you're looking at, money in, money out, cash balances for your client. Most of my clients really don't spend a lot of time inside of QuickBooks. They live inside of LeanLaw. So the fact that they have these graphs, it's helpful, but I don't tend to have them come in here. A lot of times this can be confusing for them. We have tasks. We've got a lot here. One of my favorite places is workflows. Attorneys, notorious for having a lot of open AR. You can start to use these workflows to clean up that problem using payment received. So if they're getting paid by check, heaven forbid, but a lot of the firms still get paid by check, then you can enter the payment and have payment received on— they'll automatically send an email out to your clients saying, hey, Got your check in, you know, it's been applied. And you get the invoice approval button. You've got payment due reminders. So there's where you have the invoice going out on the 1st, it's due on the 15th. And on the 15th, if they haven't been paid, because look, emails get stacked, right? They get missed, they get read, they get forgotten. It will remind you gently. You can formulate the words to say that these are the invoices that are out there that need to be paid. Invoice overdue. So now it's the 30th and you still haven't paid for that invoice that was due on the 15th. This is going to remind the client you're late now and you can tag it as past due. There's just a lot you can do here. And that's— this is only inside of QuickBooks Online Advanced. So this feature alone, because it's automated, you can just set it up and then don't even think about it again. It will do the process. It won't miss anything. I've had firms that I've worked with that they had someone that would run the report and manually do this process. And now it's completely automated where they can now do something more important than just managing accounts receivable. The other feature that I really like— so I can go on and on about QuickBooks, but the other feature I really like is custom fields. And I love custom fields because I'm able to take people off of a program. They could be in PC Law, Juris, one of those desktop programs that are specific to attorneys, but desktop, so they don't have the ability to be cloud and be able to log in from everywhere. We move them into QuickBooks, but maybe there's a feature or a box that they've had in the old program that they really like to have in QuickBooks, but it's not there. I can add a lot of these custom fields and put them inside the program for them. So they still get that look and feel of what they had before, but in the QuickBooks world. Also, because it works with LeanLaw, and the reason why LeanLaw is a premier app is because it's now— the API is opened up between the 2 programs. So now if I create a custom field for QuickBooks, I can now let LeanLaw see it and they can talk to each other and push the data in and out. So it's really Really helpful if you work with attorneys that use a lot of insurance. A lot of times the insurance companies want all these different boxes on the invoice or they won't pay you. They want the policy number, they want certain numbers on there. You can put those in and then have them be on site on the box. Once you make these custom fields, you can tag them into the client or the matter, so then they repopulate. You're not reinventing the wheel each time. So if I add them into the client, now when I open up a new invoice, those fields will already be preset, and that's where you save a lot of time. Like I said, lots of tools that I use inside of this program. You have We've got lots of things in here, but those are the two that I think are the most powerful when it comes to working with law firms and attorneys. So the next piece that's really truly powerful, and the powerful part is the automation, is Dext. Dext is Receipt Bank. It says it right here, prepare with Receipt Bank. Dext is a platform of document collection where the documents are going to get backcoded and pushed into QuickBooks. Then of course they'll get pulled up to LeanLaw. So there's a part of that workflow that if there's any documents that are created by— maybe the attorney goes to court and picks up something, a file form, file receipt, file, file, um, filing fee receipt, or anything that has to do with a client. They can snap a photo of it on the app and then they can pull it up. And when we pull it up, you'll see here, here's a copy. It's just a Home Depot slip, but you can use your imagination here because I just kind of threw this in here. And then maybe I can see that it needs to go into a trust account, but I don't know who it belongs to. So I might want to find that client and the client name's not in here. You can check all the details. And maybe I need to let Sarah know that she put this in here. And I said, you know, who, who is this for? What matter? And once you type this in, if they've got the app on their phone, they're going to see that this is, is there. So they're going to see a little notification on their phone that there was a question on one of the receipts. So we can do that as a note. We can do that as a message. So messaging will, will tag them that I have a question on something. I really do like that. I also like that you can add it to an expense report. So maybe this was something that an attorney paid for that had something to do with the office. They're fixing up the office and he ran out and got paint for the painters that were there. So I can put this in his expense report that they maybe use their personal credit card and then I can get reimbursement to them. So there's so many ways that you can automate the processes, especially if you have a lot of advanced client costs, personal injury attorney, you can have a way to collect all the documents and pull them in so that you can tag them and let them sit there until your case settles in court so you can recapture those expenses. from the client and you don't want to miss anything. And that's the beauty of putting them into Dex. Dex will attach it to the transaction in QuickBooks. And if you code it to advanced client costs, it will get pulled up into LeanLaw waiting to be billed out to the client. That's a powerful workflow with a lot of, a lot of things happening where everything's only entered one time. So now we're on LeanLaw. And LeanLaw, I don't know what I do without LeanLaw. It is My staff loves it. It's just such an important piece. It's probably the most important piece that is attached to QuickBooks, and it has a 2-way sync. It works really well with the attorneys. They pretty much live in the calendar tracking their time. We've got snippets so that we can make it so that it's easier for them not, not have to type so much when they're repeating tasks, right? You can have snippets. It's got places to do time entries. It's got expenses where you can add your soft costs. Your hard costs will pull through. So you can see here I did a check to Hessington Oil, and little QB means that it came from QuickBooks. So I entered the check in QuickBooks, tagged this matter, and did advanced client costs and pulled it up here. In the billing, you can see we've got ready to bill, we've got some things ready to bill where it's billable time or expenses, and then you can make drafts and then have approved. And if they're approved, that's when you can ship them off to QuickBooks. Leads billing, so important. Leads billing is one of the features that I don't think a lot of the platforms have. If you've ever had to do leads billing, that's a specific, uh, coding makes the invoice in this code that these programs read. And it's really important that we have leads billing because I do have some firms that are required billing is has to be done through leads. There's a ton of, uh, setting features that you can set up. Uh, you can run through all your matters. You can see that these are all connected to QuickBooks by that little QB. And you can do a lot of things right from the side, the radio buttons here on the right-hand side. There's a ton of reports in some of these. There's even more reports than I'm showing here because some of them have not been turned on yet. But as you can see here, you've got Time Tracker, Timekeeper Productivity. One of the ones we really live in is Revenue by Client and Matter. And if I take— put all time here and take off my name, you'll see that we have a way to show billed hours, billed expenses. Fixed fees, collected trust balance. So you've got your collected would be your cash basis records, receivables balance. So this is a lot of, a lot of information here, and a lot of this stuff is going to feed into, you know, this is going to be also be able to be seen in QuickBooks. So you'll have the ability to see the AR, really fine-tune your tracking. And they do have ways in here that if you turn on some of the feature sets that they have to track percentages, if you have some of the compensation programs that you need to track and pull, which is Which is nice because then the attorneys can see how much they're billing, how much they're billing along and how much the percentages are. If there's a percentage for the owners and then there's a fee structure set up that way. LeanLaw is just really a great tool. I love it for the trust pieces because for trust accounting, you cannot overstate your trust account. As you can see here, this has got a problem where there's something's not quite right and I need to come in and fix it. You've got some little arrows here to tell me that I can look at a high level and see what's in the trust accounts for all these people. What's going on with Mariette? She's got a negative balance. I can see the AR balances here. They have evergreen reporting. So really, LeanLaw is the tool for attorneys and law firms. It shouldn't be missed because of the way it works so beautifully with QuickBooks Online Advanced. So we've landed on Reach Reporting. And like I mentioned earlier, it is a tool that we use for the mid-market firms so that we can really dive in and create some really creative— we have the ability to create some really interesting reports for law firms that I think that— so you can do a lawyer comparison where you're comparing lawyer to lawyer. You can do a variance comparison from last month, maybe an NPS or a client satisfaction score. You can do a way to do AR against AP. There's so many dashboard things you can add to your dashboard. You can save them to be used repeatedly over and over again. With your, um, with your client. We have multiple ways to really dive in. You can see here you can do an annual report, you can do some pretty fancy reports as well with, with Reach. So it's got a lot of versatility to it, and I probably should do a video just on this because when it comes to client compensation reports, we can really, uh, dive in and get real fancy and make some pretty looking graphs and charts, which I think will speak more to your client where you can see, you can see that definitely with the line, like, oh, we're doing better over here. And, you know, this must be when Linda came on, she's fixed our accounts receivable or whatever. But you can see here that it's going to give you the percentage of sales. I can do net assets to equity. I mean, there's just so many things you can pull out that I think is better than just handing them balance sheet and profit and loss because it gives them a way to look at their accounting in a visual way, but it'll also help us with budgeting, forecasting for the future. I mean, it opens up the door to a big conversation. You can make individual dashboards for the attorneys. So if you have a bigger firm and the partners want to give a score to the attorneys, maybe score on how many hours they're billing, how many hours are they writing off, how many hours are they billing out. So these are the things that— the metrics that you want to capture. Are they billing out every billing cycle? Or is there a lot of time just sitting there and they haven't really stayed on top of billing it out? So these are things you want to really keep an eye on when that might come up to their performance so that they— if they're going to get a raise or not. So these are important things. And it's nice, I think, when you're working with a staff, it's nice for them to have a way to see how they're doing. Maybe they set personal goals, how many people they're going to bring into the firm, how much business they're going to bring in, and then you can see if they attain the goals. So I think that that makes this tool very powerful. It also works really well with compensation reporting. We have the way to pull the data out of QuickBooks, put it in here, and work the compensation numbers so that we can get the data that we need for the payouts to the attorneys, but also validate that with the data inside of QuickBooks, which has all been reconciled with the bank. That makes it very powerful. So I know that was a longer video. But I think maybe it will help you understand all the pieces and how they work together. If you are a law firm or an attorney that just needs help, maybe you're just in some kind of desktop world and you're using like TimeSolve and QuickBooks Desktop or any of the things that you— maybe you're working in a program that's just not working. Maybe it's time slips. I mean, there's so many desktop programs out there and you can't log on your phone in court and see how much somebody owes you because it's not there. It's at the office and you got to call office and say, hey, can you open up QuickBooks and see what I have? You won't have to do that anymore if you move into the cloud-based platforms and you come into a workflow like this where all the pieces kind of work together seamlessly and you're able to get very accurate data in a very timely way. So if you're interested in that, please reach out. If you're an accountant or bookkeeper and you're like, wow, this is really cool, I want to learn more, join our group, the Accountant's Law Lab. We specifically put together a group so that we are able to help you learn how to work with attorneys, law firms. We go into a lot of these apps in some of our meetings and much, much more. If you want to learn more and have questions on business-related things, join us on, on our group, QB Community Live. It's kind of a general business Facebook group, a pretty robust one, and kind of fun too. And on that note, I hope you all have a wonderful, wonderful week. Bye now. Bye.