Billing Workflow for Attorneys

Hi there, Linda Artisani, Artisani Bookkeeping. Happy Sunday. So for today's post, I'm going to take you through my workflow into part of the billing process with LeanLaw. So it's going to include adding billable expenses using Hubdoc to drop them into QuickBooks and then 2-way sync it up to LeanLaw. and have that available for billing, adding matter and matter and time billing. So for the attorney side of it, they would be adding, adding the time in that they had into processing any part of a matter that they're working with, and then combining those 2 and creating a draft invoice. And then from there, invoicing into QuickBooks. So let's get started. Share my screen here. So the first step is going to take you into Hubdoc. And I just wanted to show you how Hubdoc works. So Normally you can— there's a few steps you can do. You can either have it directly emailed. I love this feature. You can email directly any invoices that you get instead of having them come to you in your inbox and cluttering your inbox. You can email them directly to Hubdoc. We get a unique name to our account. It's a Hubdoc address, but it will directly go in there. So let me take you to— it's under the settings. So you'll see here under settings. I can pull it up here that you can invite users to use Hubdoc. And then you can also integrate it using your unique Hubdoc address. You can change this, I can have this say, just say Hubdoc law firm. And this is going to be its address. And then I can save it as that and add the— give them that unique email address, it will declutter your inbox. And bring them directly into here, avoiding a step of having to forward them because you can forward them if they get emailed directly to you personally. But why do that? Why not just have them come directly to Hubdoc? You can also add a receipt. So you can click over here. And if you get, you know, snail mail and you open it up, scan it, you can pop it right in here. And this is what I did with this particular bill. I popped it in here. So now I have it here, it would show up in the list. And then I would just click to open it to expand it. So I don't automatically sync these because the matters change. So I need to add the matter in and make sure that it gets pushed to the correct matter in the trust billing. So here you can see it recognized the vendor name Manhattan Court Reporting. I don't need to put the term or anything in here, but you can. The account is going to be Advanced Client Costs because this is billed back to the client. So I want to make sure that I tag it as that. So in here, you want to add in the description. So I want to put in here that this was a certified, certified transcript And it was for the Abram Williams, Abraham Williams matter number 18. So it's important to do this because it's going to come in with really nothing on it. So I'm going to hit publish. Once it's published, you'll see a little green checkmark. And then here I put the paid ribbon on it so that way I know I've entered it. So when you start to get a massive list of things you want to check off, you want to make sure you hit the paid ribbon so you know where you left off. And that's just kind of a tip that I use. I've been asking for an entered Banner, and hopefully that will come soon in Hubdoc. So let's manage our way over to QuickBooks, and let's take a peek at what got published. So here it is, and I wrote the words in here: Certified Transcript Abram Williams Matter Number 18. Now why is that important? It's important because once we push this into once this gets synchronized into Lean Law, it's going to show those words. When we get the invoice, because this is going to be sitting there as an expense, a billable expense, it's going to be added to the invoice in LeanLaw. So here we are in LeanLaw. And you can see, if I didn't put those words in, this is how it's going to show up in LeanLaw. This is— I actually pushed this bill in twice so you could see that I didn't put the words in and the description, and this is how it would come up. Now, I would not want this to show up in my, in my bill to my client. And a lot of these matters, it's really important, especially when you're dealing with insurance company, you want to make sure the words are exactly right, or they won't pay you back for it, right, if you're submitting this as a claim to an insurance company. So it's really important that you make sure that that part of it gets put in properly. So now we're going to go over and create a bill. So we're going to actually go in and use the steps in LeanLaw to create the bill. So now we're going to come over to the Ready to Bill tab, and we're going to bill Abram Williams' matter. So I'm just going to come over here, you have the option to click All. I'm just going to do Abrams. I'm just going to click Matter 18. That's what I'm billing for. And you can see the expenses are already here and just create the draft. So I love this with working with my customers because it's a great way that I can create the draft. The draft can go into the, into the drafted invoices. The attorneys can look at it, review it, and then they can come back to me and tell me that they're ready. I can push them into QuickBooks once they're there or make any changes that you need to make. And that's all set up in settings. So I'm just gonna take you to the settings. We're gonna come over to the billing workflow. So you have the ability to just do it directly and directly bill, put the bill right together and send it directly into QuickBooks without much clicking, which is great for like a solo attorney that's doing his own billing. You have the draft step that you can create drafts so that they're reviewed and approved. Once approved, they go directly into QuickBooks. This is the one I usually use. I want it to have the draft. And then I want to have the approval so that way I can do draft, draft invoice, send it to the attorney so that they can approve it, and then I Then I actually do the pushing it in or make any changes that are necessary. So that I do like that part of it, that whole step. So you can see right here, here's the workflow right here. So let's go back now and go into the matters. Let's go to actually, let's go to the invoice itself. So now I've created the draft invoice and come over to the draft and you'll see it here. You just select it to look at it. And this is what it looks like. It's going to show that Sarah had a nice little draft petition case conference and it took a while. And then we had a certified transcript and you can see there's the words in here. Now this came in with nothing on it. So you might want to come over and take a peek at it and put the description in because it came in without any description. So whatever the, whatever the actual description was, and you can take yourself right into QuickBooks to see the actual bill and you can remove it from here. So you can either clear it out, save it for later. There's a lot of steps here. So I might not want to build up because I want to go back in and take a look at that bill in QuickBooks and add the words. As you can see, the words are really important. It comes on the invoice when you have them pushed in from Hubdoc. So you want to make sure that you take that step to write those words, which is why we can't smoothly automate it. But if you start to create these steps, it definitely takes less time because the invoice can be populated right into Hubdoc. I can go in and just add the matter and the words. Push it into QuickBooks. And now it's here to be built. So here is my bill. And this looks beautiful. I'm going to, I'm going to approve this now as an attorney, this would be my job to approve it, or I can just save it, maybe they have somebody else review it. And I'm going to approve the invoice and say yes. So now it's been ready to bill, drafted, now it's approved. So now they'll let me know that I've approved all the invoices, Linda, go ahead in here, create them. So I'm going to come over here and select my one invoice. And normally there's a list of them, and then submit it to QuickBooks. You also have the ability to put it back to draft if I notice something's not quite right with it, I can put it back to draft. So I'm going to submit it to QuickBooks. This is just a beautiful flow. It just works so nicely. So now we're gonna come over into QuickBooks again. I'll come back to the dashboard. I'll come back over here. Here's my invoice. If you don't forget, this is a place you can grab your, your last transaction and pull it in. And now you've got this beautiful invoice. If you want to see what it looks like, it looks like an attorney's invoice, right? Doesn't look like a QuickBooks invoice. QuickBooks invoices aren't always the best looking and you still can have the ability to make it look like you want it to look. And here's the invoice itself. And this is all in settings in LeanLaw. And I'll probably do a video on just this piece. I pick my colors, you can pick whatever color tone you want. And here's your invoice. You can set it up to be emailed to the client. I don't have an email so it doesn't have that ability here. And that's as easy as it is to send the invoices and create that workflow and with using LeanLaw, Hubdoc, and QuickBooks. So I hope this is a helpful video. I know sometimes it can seem like the workflow is a little bit— once you get the hang of it, it's really not that hard to do. And it's pretty simple to just pull all those pieces together to create some beautiful invoices. And you can come in and customize, and maybe I'll even do a video on customizing the invoices to make them really look pretty special in QuickBooks. So I hope that was a helpful video. I hope that kind of explains some of the workflow and shows you how simple it is to just really make this process Fairly easy. And if you have any questions, comments, please feel free to post. I look forward to creating some more videos on how my workflow processes work with working with attorneys. Thanks for watching. Bye now.