Law Firm TimeTracking 6mins

Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. So it's Sunday today, so dress down day. But I wanted to talk a little bit about working with attorneys and law firms and also working with tracking time. So most attorneys have to track their time in order to do their work. It's one of the things when I switched out of time tracking and moving— moved into a more fixed rate value priced billing, one of my favorite lines to convince the client to switch over is I want to be able to have a lot of interaction with the client and not feel like you're talking to your attorney on the phone. And ironically, now I work exclusively with attorneys. Time tracking can be difficult. It's one of those things where you have to be really diligent about turning the clock on when you start talking to someone. You have to be really able to get into that habit, right? So it's a personal piece of your job that you have to make sure you do when you're working with a client. And sometimes that works really easily. There's some free apps out there that you can use. There's a few of them out there. There is actually, if you're in QuickBooks Desktop, there is a time tracking feature built right into the product. If you're online, there's TSheets, but it's not free. There's a fee for it. It's not set up and designed specifically with— for attorneys, attorneys, but you can use it. There's a couple of other free ones. There's one called TimeCamp that's out there. Time&Eye is also another one that's— they're just free apps. Toggl, which is T-O-G-G-L. Actually, I think it's called, yeah, Toggl, T-O-G-G-L. You could use that. And those are all, you know, you can get those apps on Apple, on the Apple Store or Google Play, and you can download them. And there's the free version, which is like the light version. So it's basically just that one thing it does. It doesn't, it's not really robust. But the one thing that we're probably, most of us are always crying that we don't have enough of, it's time, right? So when you start to use free things, are you saving 10 cents? But it's costing you $1 to actually do the work to get yourself, get the time in and really make it an automated process. But what I wanted to talk mostly about is LeanLaw because this is the one I use. I use my firm, my practice is exclusively QuickBooks based, QuickBooks Online based, and we use LeanLaw, which is the number one app that Intuit likes to promote as well. It just became a preferred app to work For the law firm legal area with QuickBooks Online. It works seamlessly. There's— it's easy to set up the client and the matters. They're done literally in seconds. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to take you to my screen here and show you how simple it is to actually use the program itself to work in and work through. It's very simple. So here's my sample company file that I have for LeanLaw. It's called Law Firm. Really creative, right? And what's nice is you've got the tasks over here. So you can either start the timer and just flat out, if it's something that's just not on that list, you can just go right through and just grab the timer and go and just click start timer and then it will start. And you can just click the new timer and then just go in here and it will— you can just set up your items and go. You can pick your matters here. And these are all fake matters that I have. I can pick the Shane Hamby and I can just select any option. He's got a couple of matters. I can pick matter 14. And then I'd like to type in anything and then it's just already starting. The clock started, right? So that's one. Or if you wanted to go right over here to the side tab here and just grab some of the template ones that we have in here. So maybe today I'm drafting an order. And I can come right in here, I can grab it, already picked me up as the timekeeper. And I can grab, you know, any, any matter that I have here for— this is also another one that has matter and it already has the description here. And then I can add to it, you know, draft order for, and I can just start to type in those things and put the time in. I can start the time, I can save the time, I can make it billable. It's just simple. So that's why I really, really recommend LeanLaw because it's simple to use. And it works perfectly with QuickBooks Online. So, but like I said, there's other time tracking softwares out there, but I highly recommend LeanLaw for your using if you're working with QuickBooks Online, it's the best. So hopefully that kind of takes you in there. And I'll have a blog post attached here that will kind of talk you through time tracking and how it can be a little bit painful. And I'll link you back to a couple of Other articles. But just for the short— just short tip from today for me is time tracking doesn't have to be a dreaded task. It can be one that you can turn into a habit. Keep track of so you're not missing any billable time. Keep your calendar view. Use the apps to make them work best for you. And sometimes you might have to pay a little money per month for them. But in the long run, it's going to push— in LeanLaw, it's going to push right into your invoicing, and it's super slick and simple. So thank you for watching. I hope that was helpful. We'll see you in the next tip. Bye now.