In this instructional video, Linda Artesani of Artesani Bookkeeping walks through the typical workflow of onboarding a law firm into QuickBooks Online Advanced, rebuilding their accounting file, and integrating LeanLaw for attorney‑specific billing. She highlights that 90% of her law‑firm clients struggle with accounts receivable (AR), often lacking visibility into who owes them and dealing with fragmented tracking methods such as Word documents or Excel sheets. Artesani demonstrates how QuickBooks’ built‑in AR reports (aging, collections, customer balance detail/summary, invoice lists, invoices & received payments) and LeanLaw’s attorney‑level reports provide comprehensive insight. She explains the use of tags, custom fields, and class‑based reporting to segment revenue by attorney. The core of the presentation focuses on automating the AR process through QuickBooks Advanced workflows and templates—automated invoice sending, payment‑due reminders, and overdue memos—showing how these can be customized by customer, amount, or other criteria. Finally, she discusses payment processing options: using LawPay or Gravity for trust‑account compliance versus QuickBooks Merchant Services for operating‑account firms, emphasizing fee handling and automation of deposits. Artesani closes by inviting viewers to connect via her website, Facebook group, or one‑on‑one sessions for further assistance.
Chapters
Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. This week I am staying with the topic of law firm profitability. And typically when we get a new client or we onboard a new client, many times we come from migrating them from another software. We get them inside of QuickBooks, which is our preferred platform, and then we start to rebuild the file. And then we get to the point where the law firms start to take on doing their own billing. and working with LeanLaw and getting their own processes in place. And then typically the law firm will come to us and ask us for assistance in kind of analyzing the records that now we have now rebuilt and recreated for them. One of the areas that 90% of the law firms I work with, it's a pain point, it's accounts receivable, or affectionately known in the accountant's world as AR. And their AR, generally they either don't know what— who owes them or what is outstanding. Or it's just so segmented they really don't have a clue. Like if they're using like time slips or something outside program, if they have been using that, not a program that was one whole place like a one-stop shop like a CosmoLex or something like that where everything was housed in one place. A lot of them have these separate, separate places that they'll do, maybe even do it in a Word document. And then try to track it maybe on an Excel spreadsheet. So all of those processes tend to be very manual, very time-consuming. They work initially when a person starts a law firm and they don't have really anything happening. And then once it starts to grow, it gets out of control. And then, then we have an issue where we don't know how much is owed to us. We don't— or we let it go and it gets very old and stale, and then we have to write it off. And that's not a good scenario. We don't want to be writing off, writing off our invoices. We worked hard for it and we want to get paid for it. And that's one of the biggest problems with cash flow with law firms. If they end up having a problem keeping on their receivables, knowing what's owed and staying on top of it, and it gets old. Once it gets old, past— I'm going to say past 90 days, it's harder to collect. Even for an attorney, it's harder to collect. So one of the things that I love about my workflow using QuickBooks Online Advanced is we have these extra tools inside the platform that help us track our accounts receivable. So I'm going to show you in my demo file how we get that going inside the law firm's books. We get the invoicing in, we get the payments in, so we know where they're at, and then we start to work on collections. So let me share my screen. So this is my file to play around in, and I actually have you on the reports page to show you some of the reports. This is one of the best reasons why working with QuickBooks is great because yes, you have LeanLaw, and yes, you can track your accounts receivable up in LeanLaw, which I will show you. But in QuickBooks alone, there's a lot of reports. So they, they have it named, um, Who Owes You, which is not the greatest topic, but you can see we've got an accounts receivable aging report, which will give you all the detail. We have a summary report, a collections report, so anything that's outstanding or overdue, customer balance detail if you just want a listing of all the customers' balances. with all the invoices involved. And then also a customer balance summary, which is just going to give you that list of who owes you. An invoice list. So you get that one. You can star them if you want to make them your favorite, so they'll populate at the top, so you don't have to go searching for the who owes you topic line. Invoices and received payments is a new report, and I really like it because it gives you just that. So when you work with attorneys, when we work a lot of times with them in mid-market firms, A lot of times a lawyer will want to know how many invoices that they— he or she has open and outstanding. This is a great report for that. Now you have to classify the law firm's books, and this is where it could get a little bit tricky, where it's more— this is more of an available read out of LeanLaw. We try not to let all the attorneys into the accounting, just the partners or the managing partner, the one that's really in charge of this. And then we do those other reports for these individual attorneys who want to track their, their accounts, their, their accounts, their client work inside of LeanLaw. Then open invoice report, a statement list report, and then we've got some unbilled time, unbilled charges, and a terms list. So it's just some of the things that all have to do with accounts receivable. Then we also have sales and customers and customers sales by class. So there I would be able to pull up all the sales and I can filter it down to paid or unpaid. So if an attorney wants to see, because if I classify the work, each class is each attorney, then I can actually run that sales by customer detail report and filter it down to just the unpaid or the paid. But we can really manipulate the reporting in QuickBooks. And as you can see, there's a lot more. We have tags. You could actually put tags in and run reports on the tags as well. It's a nice little feature, extra place you have to add the data point, but Once you get them put in, really, you can start to really track other things inside of sales that you might want that additional piece of information. Of course, with QuickBooks Online Advanced, we also have custom fields, which is a whole other topic, but things that we can also track on reports. But the biggest feature that I think which makes Advanced so powerful and so worthy for the attorneys to use is actually— it's over here and it's the workflows. And I love the tasks too, but the workflows itself— my workflows, templates, and history. So if you come into my workflows, you can see I've already set up to automatically send unsent invoices in case anything gets in and we don't send it, it gets sent. Bank deposit reminder. But also there's these templates in here, and I'll go in here and show you that we've got— now we've got an invoice approval one, which is really good for the mid-market firms if an attorney, maybe a new attorney just starting, and they want to have that workflow where it goes to a managing partner to oversee it before it actually gets sent out. Love that feature. And obviously a lot of other industries could use that. But we have the overdue invoice memo. I absolutely set this up for my clients. I have the payment due one set up. So this is another one that I like to set up, these 3 basically. The payment due reminder is if you send the invoice out the 1st, due the 15th. On the 15th, if it's not paid, it will remind the client because, you know, we're sending them out by an email. And if you've got— I mean, sometimes I see clients have 20,000 emails on their records, it could get missed. So it just reminds them a second time that, hey, this is due today. And then if they don't pay it, say a week later, you can send out the overdue invoice memo one, and that would be to remind them that it needs to be paid. So those are the ones that are really important. And when you go to create these, you have the ability and the flexibility to Make them be, you know, customer within. You can put some parameters in here. I don't have any. My clients are all just set as customers. But yeah, you could pick your customers if there's certain ones that are always, always late, or, you know, you always have to remind, or maybe the amount is over $100. You want to, want to really set that filter in place, send an email, send a copy to a certain person. If somebody's overseeing, they want to see who's not paid. see that individual amount, and that would work out so that they could have this in place for a bigger firm that maybe, you know, certain attorneys want to see the— if they're— if their clients are behind, because then they need to get to the point where they have to make that phone call. There's also one of the things I also like to bring up to clients when we start to get involved inside of working with law firms is the ability to pay— have a client pay you by credit card. Now, if you're a firm that's using trust accounting, you don't want to be just paying them with the QuickBooks system because the trust accounting, you have to be specific. You bill $10,000 and there's a fee, 2 or 3% fee on that. You can't be pulling that out of the client's money because you can't charge for that. So you have to set up something like a Gravity payment or a LawPay payment where they'll take the money and put it into trust, but they'll put the full amount in and then charge the operating account for the fee. That's super important. On the side of the— if it's a company that does a lot of accounts receivable and they're not doing the trust accounting, then absolutely use the QuickBooks Merchant Services feature. It captures the— It captures the date of the payment. So the client actually puts their information in, the check gets processed, or the credit card processes it, and then the fee obviously gets charged, but it all happens in the operating account and the system will actually make the deposit for you. So if 10 people pay you on— today's the 10th— if 10 people want to pay you on the 10th, that'll all be grouped together. It's a really wonderful feature. It's time-saving. You don't have to enter the payment. You don't have to enter the deposit. That all happens, as I like to say, automagically. So if these tips are helpful, let me know. I'd love to have you reach out to me maybe on Facebook and just let me know that, you know, these are helpful videos. If you are interested in learning more about this with me one-on-one, please Again, reach out. A lot of information is attached here. You can find me through my website. If you're an accountant or bookkeeper and you want to learn more, please join our Facebook group, QB Community Live. We'd love to have you. It's a place where— safe space, private group where you can ask questions. So I hope you all have a wonderful, wonderful week. Bye now. Bye.
