First Attorney Client Pricing Clean Up Work

Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. This week I'm going to talk about pricing a cleanup job and what things you need to look for and how you have to really start to think about pricing. So cleanup jobs are totally different than doing a typical— giving somebody a price on monthly. But we're all pretty familiar with the fact that if you do a cleanup job and you do a great job on it, you'll probably get your client monthly. So that is the game. We are coming quickly on to cleanup season when we get all the people who didn't do anything with their books all last year and they're realizing they have to file a tax return. So they reach out and maybe they've done nothing. So this is where we shine. This is where we pick up and get the work done and get it cleaned up. So you might either have books that haven't been completed or you'll have books that are completed but are in a bad order. So that's where we would come in and take a look, dissect the file, and then dive in. So let me share my screen. We'll go right into what things, places you need to look specifically to see what needs to be done in a file. Here we are in a QuickBooks cleanup file, and as you can see, I'm going to go right into Overview. We already kind of went through Overview before, but this is where I would land and start and take a look at how many unaccepted transactions, how many transactions Are sitting in unreconciled. Just kind of go through here. And then I love— we never had this, so this is steps that we used to have to do manually. You'd have a checklist or something like that. And it's typically if you don't take the time to go through the file. And I've got a couple of stories in the blog post of where I rushed through, because remember, these are the jobs that come through at you kind of rapid fire. You'll have a couple of weeks where you're like, God, there's nobody looking for accounting help. And the next thing you know, as soon as you spit those words out into the universe, they all start to come in. So it's either feast or famine. You'll have like 5 of them that you have to do at once, and that makes it a little harder to kind of navigate through. And if you rush through this part of pricing, I'm gonna tell you that that's the worst thing you can do, because if you rush through, you're gonna find that that's where your mistake happens. And then you usually have to eat the job and have to add extra to, you know, maybe if you get the ongoing, maybe add a little bit to recoup the money that you might have lost. I do have a friend, a colleague, that Does, uh, he'll do a cleanup and he will give the cleanup part for free as long as the person signs up for 2 years with them. So they kind of price it out over the 2-year period to get the money for it. That's been really effective for him. It's been a good way for him to get the clients. He's been very successful with it. I've not used that method. I thought about it, but I've not used it. I've price the cleanup. And I'm learning as I go along— I've been doing this for a very long time— that the cleanup jobs tend to take longer, they tend to be messy. And whatever price you're thinking in your head, one of the methods I do sometimes is I'll go by the monthly amount and then multiply it by however many months I'm cleaning up. In the beginning of January, you're typically cleaning up 12, and that's how I price it. I will look at the iOLTA now because that's a big part of the work that I do, and I will take a look and see how close it is. And I'm going to show you that in a second where you can start to see when was the last time it matched, and that's where your starting point is. Cleaning up messy iotas, although, you know, Sarah and I find that to be like a fun challenge, we work— we kind of work in tandem cleaning them up, we love doing it, but a lot of people have trouble with it. And if you don't know the little tricks of the trade and the kind of things that we have discovered along the way with the many iotas that we've fixed, you start to see patterns, you start to see things that people would typically do, just like if you see As you're doing a cleanup, as we go through this file, you see there's only one thing in the undeposited fund account. But if you miss this and there was a ton of them in there, that can require a lot of cleanup. So you want to make sure that you check in this, in this file, which— what's really nice of the overview screen is we have that. We have a big boatload of money in an opening balance equity account, and that's not supposed to ever have anything in it. If you've done the balance sheet entry for the opening balance, it should balance to zero and you should not have any transactions. So we'd like to see what's in here. That's my school of thought. Some people actually use this account. I don't. I think it should be a zero balance. AP aging, and you can take a look at the AR, right? Law firm, we see this a lot, that it's over 90 days. This is a place that you might be able to help your client recoup some of your fees in the cleanup process. So it's always a good thing. Another place we like to look at is these uncategorized accounts. A lot of times if a client's doing the work, they pop it in because they see when they go into the banking tab, if they have banking, they might see that some of them will go Like these, they just go to accounts payable and the person could go, well, I paid a lot of bills in my accounts payable, and can come right in here and go click, click, click, click, click, and they add it. Now this won't go in because there's no payee, and obviously it's going to flag that there's no payee, so you can't post to accounts payable or receivable without a name. But that can happen with any of these company files, whereas somebody's got something that will say a transfer to uncategorized asset, and you'll have to clean it up. It's Probably a transfer from one bank account to the other, or one bank account to a credit card to pay the credit card. We see that as a typical, a typical error in a client file. We've got— you can also take a look. I like to take a look right on the balances to see how far off we are. If I see a big gap like this, then I know that maybe there's a lot of things hanging, and hopefully they will equal that. But these are all spent amounts, so there's a lot of things missing in There's no deposits here, but this is here. So maybe if I go to the register, I'm going to find a lot of things in there, maybe duplicates. There can be plenty of things to look at there. If I was going to go through the IOLTA, and I'm not going to take a really long video here, this is kind of just going through in my mind what you would look at. If I was going to do the IOLTA, I would definitely come over to reports. I would check in their other software to find out what their software is that they use for tracking their trust accounting. And if it's LeanLaw, real simple, I'll show you how to do that. That's what I use. I am of the mindset is you need to come into my software, but if they're in something else, you're gonna have to learn that until you can convince them to move. And of course, the beginning of the year is always a great time to move. But I would do a balance sheet, and I would run the balance sheet as of— here's the calendar year-to-date. That's gonna work here because that's, you know, October, and I'm only doing 9 months of the year. So I might want to go to end of last month. I'm going to total it as by the months and run the report. And then we can come in here. So I'm going to look here and there's only one IOLTA and I can see it's $58,535. I'm just going to come down to this account, the trust account, and see that it's $58,535. So it was balanced in January and you're just going to go through and you might want to just check the last month first and see, okay, this says it's $38,801. And here, $38,801. So they're balanced, which is great, but I would still check lien law. So let's pop over to lien law. And I actually brought up the, you know, you click the ready to bill to expose the trust account. And I can see already that I've got that red triangle. So if the client's using lien law and there's a red triangle here, that means that these balances, which they almost look like they match, but this one's off by $5,000. So that could just be something in undeposited funds that hasn't been deposited. Let's just take a quick look. Okay. And see if there's just a hanging deposit that hasn't been booked to— it hasn't been there, it's not here. So if that's the case, there's nothing hanging, then possibly something in the operating should have been deposited to the IOLTA and it was not added in there. So I would also check to see under report options to see when was the last time everything was reconciled. So you know you have a problem here right off the bat. It hasn't been reconciled since 10/31 2019. Looks like the operating's never been reconciled, and the advanced client cost was, but it's not up till, you know, maybe 6/30. So it's not completed for 7/30. Those are places I'd look. Credit card as well. You can see there's a balance here, but there's no reconciliation. That's a factor because you're going to go in and reconcile everything. So that's just a few places that I will go and scope out. Now, you might want to really dig into the reclassify tool, go line item by line item by line item to see if everything's in the right accounts. Another trick that I kind of like to do is you can go into the expenses, pull up the vendor under the vendor tab, and just look in each vendor to see that the transactions are all in the same account. They're not, it could be a reason. Like you might have purchased something from maybe a marketing or advertising from a vendor that also can sometimes be a software. So you want to really look and see, most of the times it should stay Still see the same account. If you don't, you might want to check there too. It's an easy place to check to see if things are in the right places. So on that note, I hope you all have a wonderful day. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to reach out to me. I'm actually wearing my shirt today for, um, for QB Community Live. It's our Facebook group. If you'd like to join us in the Facebook group, we'd love to have you. If you're an attorney and you know your books are just not quite where they should be, especially if you're talking the trust accounting, please reach out. Like I say— I said earlier, Sarah and I love digging into a good IOLTA account and really figuring out how to clean it up for you. We're also experts in workflow. We actually have a couple of clients right now that we're putting our thinking caps on and giving them some good new workflows that are automated. Awesome. Automation is king or queen. If you look into the fact that anything automated tends to have less errors and it's faster, so you're going to save time. So I hope you all have a wonderful day and I'll see you on the next video. Bye now.