In this tutorial, Linda Artesani of Artesani Bookkeeping walks attorneys and bookkeeping professionals through the initial steps of setting up a QuickBooks Online (QBO) file for a law practice. She begins by explaining how to select the appropriate QBO subscription—Simple Start (generally unsuitable), Essentials (good for solo practitioners), and Plus (ideal for multi‑attorney firms with up to five users). After choosing a plan, she demonstrates how to import a pre‑built, law‑specific chart of accounts that includes trust, operating, and specialty expense accounts (e.g., legal services, client reimbursement, document reproduction). She covers the mechanics of importing via the Gear icon, handling account numbers, and the distinction between asset, liability, equity, and expense numbering conventions. The video also highlights QBO’s uncategorized accounts, the importance of setting up bank and credit‑card accounts, and practical tips such as using the free trial, avoiding desktop migration, and ensuring trust accounts are present. The overall goal is to give attorneys—especially those transitioning from a larger firm to solo practice—a clear, step‑by‑step pathway to a fully functional QBO environment tailored to legal accounting needs.
Chapters
Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. So my firm specializes in working with attorneys and law firms. So I thought it would be a good idea to start you at the very beginning of setting up a client file with QuickBooks Online. This would be a great video for maybe an attorney who's worked in a practice with other attorneys and is venturing off on their own and doesn't know where to start and wants to get their file started.
or for someone maybe that's new to working with a law firm and kind of the steps that will help you through it.
So where do we start? So let me share my screen. And we'll start right at the beginning.
So the beginning is— I'm gonna move this over here.
The very beginning for anybody is just, right, everything begins and ends in Google. So I'm just going to type in QuickBooks. QuickBooks.
And it looks like I didn't find it here.
I'm gonna go to the official site. So here we are, first page that pops up. We'll start right at the beginning. So we're gonna X, put a big X through desktop. No desktop. I don't think it's a good product at this point in starting it. I just don't feel like this is a good product in this day and age to move to. So we also have Simple Start, Essentials, and Plus. Those are your 3 in the product line.
There's also QuickBooks Advanced, but that's really not applicable to this particular version. So if we come here, you can see that Simple Start— I would put a big X through this one.
It's very basic, and I very rarely put a client in that.
So here's Essentials. So if you're an attorney working in a large practice that you're You're moving on to your own and you're starting out, this might be the best product for you. It's relatively affordable.
It's only $35 a month once you get past the 3-month trial period.
There's also Plus, which is $60 a month, $30 for the first 3 months, and you will be okay. And this is one of the best products. You have up to 5 users. It's great for a multi, multi, multi-attorney law firm, maybe 2 or 3. You can classify the income and the expenses. It's a really great product for that purpose. Then you scroll down here, you can see the differences in the products. As you can see, Simple Stock falls quite short.
You can't have any recurring invoices.
You can't even manage and pay bills. There's no bill payment module in this product. When you get into Essentials, you get a little bit more. The only thing that kind of falls short on is 1099s, and there's an app for that. Plus obviously has everything. So I'm going to do a trial. And if you wanted to try it for free, you are going to lose the 3 months and you just toggle the switch over. To save time, I've already tried to— I already got this process started. So I'm going to come in here. I'm just going to call it, uh, Artisani Law Firm. And how long have I been in business? Less than a year. I'm not using desktop data, but you could convert it over.
What would you like to do in QuickBooks?
Obviously, this is going to tell you what product to go into.
Um, You know, I'm just gonna hit all set.
I already know I'm in Plus and I wanted Plus. So here we are in the Artesani Law Firm. Now to start with, the first thing I want to do is review my chart of accounts.
This is when we get into the nitty-gritty, and there's a boilerplate chart of accounts right here, right? But I want to bring in law-specific accounts.
So accounts that may be not on this list, but that are really for attorneys.
It's important to have those specific accounts. Obviously, the trust account is one of the major players here that you don't have.
And you can see there's not even— if I do detail, if I do type, you can see that there's no, not even a bank account set up in here. There's no credit card accounts. These are things that are going to need to be set up as you go along in addition to the law-specific accounts.
So how would I do that?
We're going to go over to the gear. And I can also provide you a link in the blog on how to get to a set of videos to learn this program. Clearly, you'll keep seeing that you can get— you can see that they'll still give you the 50% off if you wanted to, probably just for today or the next few hours. So the gear is where all that stuff that you don't really touch very often is hidden. The plus sign is really where the transactional stuff is. So I want to—
I don't want to import my desktop data, but I want to import data. So here's my chart of accounts. It's, it's organized by the type. So this operating account and trust account wouldn't already be in the file. So this is what I'm going to be pulling in when I pull in the data. I tried to clean this list up so that there's no duplication. It's going to see exactly what's missing and add it in here. So all these accounts are going to get added in. And I believe there's like 62, so 61 actually, because we take the headers off. You'll see that they're all in here, things that you may not even think of. Legal services, client reimbursement, document reproduction. And when you ever see the colon, sales, and then a colon, that's going to be the parent account will be sales and the, the subcategories is what you're going to see there. So that's your chart of accounts. If you are an account number junkie and you like to have an account number, you can actually add the account numbers. This is set up by type here. So you can actually go in and put numbers in. Obviously, the bank accounts are asset, you're going to give them in the 1000 numbers and you get into the equity, there'd be 3000 numbers, credit cards, anything to do with liabilities would be in the 2000 Chart of account numbering is kind of a thing that doesn't happen very much anymore. It's it's kind of fallen by the wayside. What I would call quote unquote old school, but it's up to you if you have a client that really wants that. You can certainly add it into the spreadsheet and add any accounts that maybe I've missed. So we're going to import data. We're going to select the chart of accounts, and then we're just going to come through here and find that list that. Is for the law firm specific chart of accounts. I'm going to give you in the file. I'm going to hit Next. And as you're going to see, there's my file and I'm going to hit Next. And the following steps are going to be pretty easy. It's going to already be pre-formatted. So everything's here that matches. I did not put account numbers, so I skipped that step and then type all matching up. But if it didn't match up, you would come over here and pick your category. But this one matches up because it was preset for you. And so here's all the accounts that are going to get added to my file that aren't already in there— shredding and things that are really specific for a law firm, library expense. So those will all be added when I hit Import, and then you'll see on the file, it'll be perfectly done with all these new accounts added in to give you the detail that you're going to need. So I've already imported the file. So let's get out of there. I'll come to your accounting chart of accounts. So we're going to go in here and just take a look and see if there's anything in here that we really don't need. And with these uncategorized categories, that's specific to QuickBooks Online and you can't remove them. And they're really used for— some of them online banking specific.
They have to do with your online banking, so you can just leave them there. But here they all are.
