In this video, Linda Artesani of Artesani Bookkeeping addresses the acute cash‑flow challenges law firms face amid the COVID‑19 economic slowdown. She explains why cash flow is often the first casualty for professional service firms and outlines a step‑by‑step playbook to stabilize finances. Key recommendations include disciplined expense control (identifying and canceling low‑value subscriptions and “shiny‑object” purchases), careful handling of SBA and PPP loans—especially setting aside funds in a dedicated account and fully understanding forgiveness terms—leveraging existing leads and offering lower‑cost services to generate immediate revenue, and tightening accounts‑receivable processes using QuickBooks Online Advanced automation. Artesani also stresses the importance of establishing clear key performance indicators (KPIs) and regular reporting to monitor financial health. Throughout, she encourages firms to use the downtime to reorganize their financial workflows and invites viewers to seek personalized help via her website or join the QB Community Live Facebook group for ongoing support.
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Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. I know the past few weeks the posts have been pretty relevant to the times. It's the topic at hand, right? We've been talking about the loans. We've been talking about how to work remotely. We, by the time this airs, will have done a Facebook Live on the challenges of working from home. And we're going to Today's post is about cash flow. So you might be sitting here going, great, she's talking about cash flow and there's no cash flowing into my business. I completely understand. Things have changed, things have slowed down. Maybe they've stopped completely depending on your industry. So if you've ever wondered what it's like to have— be in business during an economic downturn, if you have not been in business long enough, you're getting to see this pretty extreme in your face, right? This is where we're at right now. One of the things that's first to suffer is always cash flow. And it's, it's just part of— if you've been in business, I've been in business a very long time. And it's— I've seen a lot of businesses. It's the silent killer of businesses. Anytime that you misfinance or misstructure your debt, if you have inventory, any imbalances in inventory, and we'll get to that because law firms don't have inventory. Poor expense control. I had this conversation with my virtual assistant today about the shiny objects. I'm a big fan of AppSumo. And you tend to look at it and see if there's something I can use because it's a great deal. It's a lifetime deal. And sometimes they're great. Sometimes they're not. I'll put a link to the— in the post for that. But it's also like every day they're coming out with these things and it— do I need it? Right? I need to be careful with my expenses. You need to be careful all the time, not just when there's a downturn. So this is a good opportunity to educate yourself and learn the ways that you can watch where things are going. You get the time to look at the books and take the time to not work in your business, but on your business. So getting back to the loans, if you've applied for loans, you're going to need to take the steps to put the money in a special account and account for the money properly in order to get the forgiveness or abide by the rules of the loan. So that's when you really need to hold— have a handholding with your tax professional or accountant or bookkeeper. to make sure that you follow all the language in the documents. Read it, read it. You've got the time, read it. It's really important to know what you're signing for. These SBA loans are not requiring you to put any collateral up, but they're an SBA loan. So make sure that you take a— if you take a loan, that you really have a need to take the loan. Don't just take the loans because they're there. That loan does have a longer time period to pay it back. The PPP loan does not. So just know what you're signing, read the paperwork. I know it's a pain to read like tons of documents, but just make sure you know what you're signing. So we get into the inventory imbalances is when we speak about that with law firms, there's really no inventory in a law firm. But the place you can try to get some revenue captured is you can go to see where your leads are. So this is an opportunity to look at your marketing. See where the leads are, how they're coming in the door, maybe go back and reach out to people that had checked your business out and see if they still have a need for your services. Depending on the type of law firm, you can, you can try to go there. If you're an estate planning attorney, that's certainly an opportunity to go to someone who maybe had a couple of touchpoints with your staff, but it never turned into an actual job. So it's a chance to maybe offer something at a lesser cost and to get the work and get the revenue, get the, get the money flowing in the door, the cash flow. Another thing is to watch is poor expense control. Look through your books, see where you're spending the money on, and decide if you want to continue to keep an application that's costing you even $9.99 a month, right? When you start to think about if it's just $10 a month, but when you put that times 12, that's $120 or so. that you're spending. So those little pieces can add up to be a big amount that you can start to free up and start to get to really get to make your books so that you're showing a profit. And in the end of the day, we want to be able to free up the cash to be able to pay our staff, pay ourselves. So those are important things. And if there's some expenses that you have an app— I've every year looked through my apps because there's always something I'm like, wow, when did I sign up for that? And maybe I don't need it. I just had that happen with the Adobe Full Suite. I was paying $30 a month for something that I had never used. I had great intentions when I purchased it. It was a great deal and I decided to cancel it and I ended up changing to the one app that I was using. Poor accounts receivable— accounts receivable management is a big one. I know with the law firms that I work with, a lot of times there's not good workflows in place. So if you can find a way to maybe create a workflow that's going to work, and there's plenty of tools in QuickBooks Online Advanced to help you with that, to automate that process. If you can start to think of it in that, in those terms, you will be able to work with your staff and get some kind of a workflow in place that nothing falls through the cracks. And that you look at your open receivables or your AR report, And it looks really fine that there's nothing in the over 90, there's nothing in the over 60 column, that you're really on top of your receivables because that's the money that should be flowing in the door. You've already done the work for that. You don't want to write that down. That's something I see a lot of when I work with attorneys. And maybe do some brainstorming with other, other attorneys, even with your own staff, to see if there's anything you can come up with that might work. That's outside the box. Get creative. You've got the time to get creative. I know I keep saying you've got the time, but it's true that if you're home and the work has stopped, this is the opportunity. I had a conversation with a client this week that I've been trying to snag down to finish up her records for the year, and she said, this is all my fault because I just asked the universe to please stop so I had time to do the things I've been wanting to do. So we're here, we have the time to do things that we wanna do. So if you can think of it in that respect, it's the opportunity is here, it presents itself to make your business, when it gets back up and running, running like a fine-oiled machine. So on that note, I hope this was a helpful video. I hope this got the wheels turning and making you think about maybe what you'd like to do going forward, set some goals. Always important. You know, you can start to look at what— once you set the goals, what KPIs you want to follow and track, your key performance indicators. Start to track those. We've got an amazing reporting tool that we use in our firm that it's, it's been so beneficial to all of our clients that choose to take on that service. And we're here to help. If you need any help at all with any of this kind of work, please reach out. One of the easiest ways to reach out to me is right directly through this, through my website. If you're an accountant and bookkeeper and you just want more knowledge or more, more individualized help, please join our Facebook group, QB Community Live. We would love to have you. Matthew Fulton and I believe together we all succeed. And I really would love to have you in our group. If you can't, if you don't have any questions, you can certainly contribute. It's really fulfilling, fulfilling to help others. So I hope you all have a wonderful, wonderful day, and we'll see you on the next video. Bye now.
