Clio + QuickBooks Integration

Welcome to Accountants Law Pod, where accounting professionals and law firms converge, hosted by Linda Artesani, Sarah Prevost, and Steven Libhart.

Welcome back, everyone. How are you?

Good.

Good.

I can't stop laughing. Sorry, Steve.

We were picking on each other before we started the recording. I just have to have that Yeah. Say that.

Yeah.

Well, I know for— we talked like the weekend went pretty quick. I will say that I had my second shingles shot and I got through it okay. I did have some pretty—

Did you get like a fever?

Low grade. No, just some low grade, but it definitely impacted me.

I was like, oh my God. I had nothing from that. And I usually get everything no matter what shot they say, here's the symptoms I get. I didn't get anything from that.

I wasn't like— it wasn't very obvious. I mean, I just knew I wasn't— and my Oura Ring was like, ooh, you are—

Something's wrong. When you get the storm clouds, it's like, oh God.

I'm like, oh my God, this— don't look at this app right now.

But you're not sleeping well. You're not this, you're not that. Something's not right in your body. No kidding.

The resilience thing is like—

yeah, I have— I've had that for, for a month now.

I get my second one in a couple weeks, so some— I'll, I'll call you, Sarah.

Okay.

You're late on that, Steve. You're old. You should have had that 2 months ago.

Well, you're old too, okay?

I had mine already.

So I had the original shingles shot, but apparently it wears off. And so the doctor said, I want you to have the new series.

Seriously?

It wears off?

You should know this, Linda. You're old.

I just had it, though. I had it old. I didn't have it when I should have. I should have had it at Sarah's age, and I didn't. She told me not to. I kept asking because I heard about the benefits, like Alzheimer's and stuff. I was like, yeah, give me it. No, not yet.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll have to—

I'll get it in 5 more years.

I have no idea how I segue to this topic.

Go ahead, segue to Clio QuickBooks.

I'd rather just talk about the single shot. Let's just do that for 20 minutes.

Okay, so it is like a shot. Clio and QuickBooks integration, real tips to save you time. Boom, now we got it out.

No, I'm kidding.

There you got it.

I'm obviously— our firm and Linda and I are a big proponent of the integration. We often meet firm owners that are like, well, we were told not to, or we don't, and blah, blah, blah.

And I'm like, usually the firm owner is told not to by another guy or girl in the courtroom that says, oh, don't do that, it makes a mess. Which it can do. It can make a mess.

It can do. But what it just— you just really have to know what you're looking at. And to be fair, if you're a firm owner doing this by yourself, please don't do it by yourself.

Well, it's lack of knowledge, right? You just don't know how the integration works. So it's safer to leave it disconnected and you don't have to worry about it. 'Cause if you don't connect it right, which we know 'cause we've seen it, people turn it on, they don't put any boundaries in place, they connect it, it pushes everything. You could have used Clio for 20 years. It's gonna push 20 years worth of data in that you probably don't have to use for books. Yeah, you have to block it. You have to block it with a password.

Well, and you have to understand when you do that, what that does. has so many little nuances to it. It's not a bad thing. But here's— I'll speak to the benefit of it. There's a lot of benefit to it, one for which your revenue and so forth and all the data between the 2 programs is really key and integral. There's a lot of reasons why it's nice to have an app that doesn't hold all of your data in one place. There's beauty to this integration.

Oh, that's a good point.

Well, honestly, Steve, I feel like now, even now with the whole AI-forward focus of things, there are so many benefits to having a core product that you are attaching to, which is Clio has done really well over the years. And we see a lot of apps that way. We have it with QuickBooks, we have it with Xero, we have it with multiple ledgers. An all-in-one is great, and then it's restrictive, and there are component pieces to it that Depending on the type of firm you are and depending on the rules and the guidance you need, it makes sense. I've just found that there's so many more opportunities to slice and dice data and look at it. So one of the main benefits is the revenue recognition.

Well, I was going to say, if you keep it not integrated because you're pushing the invoices in, if you don't have that piece on, what we see people doing is they're putting the invoices or they're not putting the invoices in, they're just bypassing the whole accounts receivable piece and just putting it in as income.

Yep.

And you're missing out on a lot of—

A lot of key data. A lot of really— I mean, it's funny when we hear about why I don't want all the junk in. There's multiple reasons why people don't do it. And I'm like, well, okay, but then how do you know you're accurate? How do you know you're balanced? And to me, you don't unless you're doing it just so. And there could be multiple reasons why, but then you're missing out on so much stuff. And then you're—

So here's a Steve question.

Okay.

I have to jump in here.

Okay.

Because, you know, you know me, I'm Mr. Not Connect right now.

So, um, he's very—

when, when, when it's connected, when it integrates and there it's pulling in invoices into QuickBooks. Okay. Um, and that invoice is living there and you apply a payment against it, you know, via the integration and all of that. Then the client might go back into Clio and change something. Does that come over in the audit trail then in QuickBooks so you can identify that they changed something after the fact?

Yeah, you can see. Yeah, of course. QuickBooks has an audit trail for it.

But you want to lock it down too because of that. You want to pass—

You want to lock down your months when you close?

Yeah, because you're reconciling it, right? And if they change— we had someone change something in a prior year. And if you don't have that locked down, it's going to change it. And what you're going to find is you go to reconcile and like, why can't I get this to reconcile because somebody changed something in, you know, 2025. You can't, you can't let them do that. And they can change it, it'll still change in Clio, but it's going to not push over because QuickBooks is going to put the barrier up.

Well, here's the thing. Here's another reason is duplicate entries. You can have stuff come in, get posted incorrectly, but not post it in the practice management software correctly in Clio or vice versa, right? You could do it.

Sure.

And how do you know that? How do you follow that money if you have 2 non-integrated systems? It takes a lot more work to track that.

Well, the other thing too, Sarah, is Clio is the customer side. It's not the whole picture, right? So you're separating that customer side.

Exactly.

Taking it completely out of the accounting equation when you don't connect it. So you're— or you're replicating it and then you're doing redundant work. Why in 2026 do you want to do redundant work?

Exactly.

We're trying to go and do more automated things as we go forward. Like, we're all about let's do this or that because you don't have to do it. So why not connect it? But I know the reasons are duplicate entries. You change something in Clio after you've put an entry in, now you got a secondary— let's just say they did something to the payment, now it shoots another payment over because it's a one-way sync. And you have to know what you're doing and you have to stay on top of that because What happens is it sits in the black hole of the payments deposit or undeposited fund account if you're not paying attention. We've had plenty of files come by our way and like, oh my God, what is all this in the undeposited fund account?

It's— to be fair, it's because maybe it's a generalist accounting firm that you're working with. They don't have the specialty knowledge. It could be that you've never endeavored it, you don't understand it. There's a lot of reasons why there's so much fear around To me, the benefit of integrating an app is to integrate an app, right? Like, there's benefit to it. There's a fear around certain things. And when someone tells me it bloats the file, I understand that logic. But what is the— what are you gaining? What's the gain?

Plus, if you're in QuickBooks, that's what you're paying for. Bloat the file. I mean, come on. We're not in an age of working with some geriatric desktop product that's going to crash or something. You're working in 20— again, 2026. You should be able to bloat the file. That's what Advanced is for, allegedly. It's to be able to take in a lot of data. And we really haven't had a problem with big data inside of QuickBooks at all since they've changed, they've shifted and changed things. We've had other problems.

Well, you know what I like about, to your point, Linda, about the one-way sync? If they change something and an additional payment comes over, you can remove it then and not have it sync back, which is nice on the one-way sync, correct?

Yes, yes.

You know, you can fix some—

You know, with LeanLaw, if you do it, it's two-way. It's going to correct either side. It's not going to duplicate. With Clio, it's going to duplicate. But part of the job of manually taking care of the transactions and managing it is you're going to see that transaction like, oh, and I always look at them like, oh, if I'm doing the job, oh, I remember that payment. Why is that here again? And then you find out that they did something. You go into Clio, they have an audit log, which they don't have in LeanLaw.

Yeah.

They have an audit log where you can see something that happened that was changed. And then look at why they changed it, and then you can figure out which one to remove.

Well, there's the beauty of also when trust is moving, you have basically what I consider it as is a clearing account. There's a lot of stickiness around our profession about how that works and why it should work this way and why it should be better. And I don't personally— all that aside, it's an integration. It's the way it is. Find a way to do it. I consider it my clearing account, basically. It gives me the opportunity to control where ultimately the data is going to sit to align with what the intention was. And when you approach things in a certain way, I feel like if you have that level of understanding and you can give yourself that moment, I think it helps you in the end, ultimately.

Mhmm.

The benefit of not integrating— and I feel so passionate about this because I'm so amazed— the benefit of not integrating Does not give me an— there isn't enough there to help me given like you have Clio Payments timing of posting, you have payments that are posted in a certain way in one system or the other, or recognition of data. It's another way to add compliance and security to ultimately what you're trying to work to at the end of a month is, do I have everything reconciled the right way? Do I have the money in the right buckets?

Mm-hmm.

Is— and I understand Linda brought this up— are the funds in this trust account the right funds for that client? It could have been 2 years ago somebody put it in wrong, and you're just now, time of settlement, realizing.

Yeah.

And that might be why things have to change. Well, then you've got tips and tricks of like how to handle that, which is depending on putting on locks in the system, whether you put that in QuickBooks or whether you put that in Clio or combination of both. Or how you work with the file. So there's like a whole subset of things that you can do to help maybe reclass things, maybe adjust things, make sure the journal entries are sitting in the right place. There's like a whole building block of things, right? But I think the ultimate goal is asking yourself, okay, what is the gain by not integrating this system? And I cannot find the gains. There's none to me.

We've had this discussion over and over. There's some real diehard do not connect Clio people in our group, which is good. It opens up the conversation about it.

Yeah.

But yeah, for us, I think it's just, we just connect it. And we actually have a client now that we can't connect. He doesn't want it connected, wants to keep it separate. Fortunately, it's not big. So—

We'll connect a part of it. And that's the beauty of it too. So within the Clio QuickBooks integration and even on the Xero side too, there are sections You can turn on.

There's pieces.

Yeah, there's pieces. That's the beauty in that. And the whole point of that to me makes it so that there is some kind of control and understanding of what you're doing. But, you know, not everything integrated, Steve. I understand there might be some concerns or reasonings, or maybe the health of the ledger isn't there for you to support that change. You have to, in preparation for that, you need to prepare. Right now, working— Linda and I were working with a client that it's— it could depend. We want to turn the integration on. We will. But when I was looking at the health of the file, I'm like, no, no, no, hold on. We're going to stop for a minute. We're going to clean up the months that we need to get to. And then I'm going to show the team member who's working on it how we're going to turn it on and the deliberate intentions. And what does that mean? Because when you put a line in the sand, in the software and say, I don't want anything before this date, there is some impact that's going to happen because there might be some invoices that may not come over ever and the payment gets posted and you're only seeing one side of the equation.

Right.

If you have open invoices.

The open invoice, or there might be a failure sync and there might be a naming nomenclature. Oftentimes, just a pro tip here, there is a problem with— there's only so many character limits that QuickBooks will allow come over.

Correct.

13 or something, isn't it?

Like, I mean, I think it's Longer than that.

Longer than 13 pages.

But some case matters and some case names have to be the— so you can't just go back to the firm and say, I need you to shorten it. That's not— you have to know, as a pro, you need to know how to work around that and advance into that skill set and put the right things in place for that. You have to know how to map things accurately and make sure that they're going in the right areas, in the right places. So there are some ways to save you time in the integration and ways for you to see within the programs what's missing. And like Linda said, the audit log in both areas. Now, not every moment has a recordable piece, right? You, you have to know how to find the information in Clio 'cause sometimes it's at the matter level, sometimes it's at the firm level. So that's what I mean when I'm like, not every—

That always throws me off when, when there's a problem and I'll be like, what the heck is going on here, Sarah? And she goes, well, They booked it to the firm level instead of the matter level. She sees it right away because she works in it more than I do. And I'm like, I can't figure out why this is off. Yeah, she'll say that. Or they'll transfer a matter to matter and that throws a transaction that you have to zero out. That's another thing that's part of the integration.

Or you use it to your benefit. You— it— I mean, imagine I've seen this before. We have a client that has like a matter and then they have a submatter and then, you know, and it kind of continues. Well, you can't necessarily, you see associated matters in Clio, right? But you can't see it in the ledger way, the way that you would want to see it. But in QuickBooks you can if you build it just right. And then you take those entries that come over and you move them to your advantage because you would basically show, which just follows a bar compliance moment.

Yep.

You show how you moved money from one to the other. I had a client once years ago where totally they were related family members but totally different matters, completely not the same. And in writing it was stated like I could move funds from one matter to the other on the ledger only because it was an approval. And the email, all of the details went with it even though it was in the, the Clio side of it. I just copied it over and put it in the QuickBooks side so that I could, if at any moment, I could pull those records and be able to follow why it went from a complete, totally different name, totally different company to this other one. And it's because they granted those funds to be moved there. That happens. It happens with guardian-style stuff too. So yeah, there's— so I obviously, I'm in a strong opinionated space. When am I ever not passionate? Sorry, I'm very passionate on this thing about integrate it, integrate it if you're Xero integrated with your QuickBooks. Um, and if you want to talk about why you don't, I'll understand. I may not agree, but that's okay.

If you want to talk about why you don't, you can come on the podcast and have a discussion with Sarah about it, and we'll go back and forth on wins and odds of like what could—

what, you know, there, there are some wins. Yes, I agree.

Um, but there's more benefit to it, so Well, you know what's really cool about this whole conversation? We're working with a really powerful, wonderful software.

Yes.

You know, for sure.

That's underutilized sometimes in firms. I'm like, there's more you could do in Clio. Yeah.

Yeah.

So true. And there's more— we have a firm right now that we're working with. I'm so excited to, to see this, but we went through this efforts and there's some changes going on and we want to bring over How revenue is, um, it's in Clio one way. We want to bring it over to QuickBooks and have the revenue separated by the originating or responsible, whatever it is, whoever's earning. And we'll have the accordion style QuickBooks file where we have it by class, by the earned.

Mm-hmm.

And then we've come up with a metric on how we divvy up the underneath, the, the operating by percentage. And sure, you can see it one way in Clio. That's great. But when you bring it over, that's the benefit of bringing over the data. Now you have it in the system. You find out maybe, maybe a paralegal accidentally put time in on their name instead of the— so those things start to show up. There's ways that you can see this data and then help yourself operate your business completely differently on how you divvy up those operating funds. If you want to do it by percentage or whatever it is that you want to do, simplify the method. And then you can start with real numbers, understand where revenue generation is and what expenses are attributed to that. That's exciting for this firm.

Do you think too, Sarah, with the— when you're doing an integration, if you've been in another software and you're switching over to Clio, there's a lot that you want to— you need to know on how to do that next step. There's a lot of questions that need to be answered about how you want the data to be presented. Because if you were already, or if you're already in Clio, you never connected it and now you want to connect it, you really need to hire somebody who knows what they're doing and how the integration is going to play out. And if you don't want to pay somebody to do that, get a trial version of QuickBooks and connect it and see what happened before you go and do it in your own live file. Because you can't unring the bell and you want to make sure that you're— how the data comes across is the way you want it to be. You have to know how to put those settings in and connect them in Clio. You have to have a boatload of settings already in place in QuickBooks before you connect. Because unlike LeanLaw, where you can kind of set them up on the fly, Clio, you have to have the products, the services, all those things in place prior to connecting. And I think some of those things, it's really something you want someone who knows what they're— that knows Clio to connect it because—

Yeah.

Like I said, you can't undo it. And we've lived through that where somebody connected it and then it blew in a whole bunch of stuff. And now we're on the other side of it, removing it. And you don't want to have to do that either. I mean, there are tools for that too, but if you can do it right the first time, and if you're using classes, you want to make sure the classes are set up properly. If you're connecting it, you want to make sure the AR is presented the way it was.

Yeah.

You don't want it to be misrepresented, so you want to make sure they align. So once you've connected, make sure that everything's aligning. Make sure the trust balances align. There's a lot of steps. Don't listen just to the salespeople at Clio. You want to make sure that you have it set up properly with a good expert that knows what they're doing. So you have a great integration where it just runs beautifully in the background.

Well, there's a— it goes into your— to add to what you're saying, it— there's wonderful consultants and there's wonderful accounting firms that say, oh yeah, I understand, but they don't maybe have the depth.

They don't do the work.

The biggest thing is, is understanding how you work as a firm, how you work as an individual inside that firm. How do you record things? Because you might find some redundancies in the workflows. You might find some like reevaluation of stuff. And then how do you want it to come over? There's like a whole subsuite of conversations that happen. And a lot of times, I mean, it's no joke, you're modernizing even how you work in modern standards right now. Like you're working with modern equipment, right? And then how do you take it one step further? So To me, I'm a little bit passionate about it too, is this weekend as I was, you know, hanging out with some of my friends and so forth, I was having a conversation with someone and I was asking all these questions and they were like, oh, I don't— oh yeah, you can do that. I'm like, yes, but you're not integrated.

They don't know what they don't know.

They don't know what they don't know.

If you don't know all the things, because we see it a lot of times, people connect the software. Hey, we're guilty of it. We connect software and then we're not using it fully to the fullest extent.

Yeah.

If you don't— if you find out what it does, because it might do a lot of things that you're maybe doing manually that can be done, you know, automatically just because you connect to the software.

Yeah. There was something else I was going to say that I think is really important, and Linda and I run into this, but I— it's escaped me. So maybe it's for another call. But that's a good one.

Well, that was very interesting. Thank you for all of that.

Did I win you over?

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay.

He's gonna call you later to have him.

Yeah, she'll call me this afternoon.

I will.

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I remembered it. So I— Linda and I have a big strong feeling on this. Your Clio and your LeanLaw and your practice management software is practice management software. It is not your accounting question software. Quit asking them how to do accounting work because that's not how this works.

Good point.

That's what I remembered. I'm like, that's a really important one.

This is a good topic. It was a really good topic. So hopefully we help people.

Well, enjoy the rest of the week. Bye-bye.

Thanks, everybody.