Law firm workflow for QuickBooks

Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. So today is St. Patrick's Day. So happy St. Patrick's Day. I wore my green and it's actually kind of relevant for my blog today. I love lawyers and this t-shirt came from LeanLaw, my app that I use for working with attorneys, which is going to segue me right into my workflow. So let me share my screen so you can see. My workflow and then I'll take you through the steps. So here's my workflow. It's pretty basic. It's actually slimmed down a bit. So in the past, I used to use— I used Asana, I used ActiveCollab, and I was using ShareFile and Slack. So those were all the apps that I have that I've now rolled into one app, which is Lissio. So Lissio is going to be my communication tool. It's going to be my task delegating tool for my staff. It's going to be really nice. It's a real quiet space for you to use communication with your client and store all the files together. So it's kind of an all-in-one. It's kind of like having your little file drawer, right, and put everything in one spot. So I love the term. And we just did a work— we just did a webinar with them Friday, and I'll put a link in my post for that as well, because the key with Lissio is it's a highly secure place to communicate with your clients. So you'll never have spam. And you'll also have a place where you can keep files safe, which is really important in this day and age. That's why I paid extra money for ShareFile was because I've always— and I've had it for years— because it, it was a way for me to keep my communication with my clients, have them secure documents, right? With being an accountant, you have a lot of secure documents that you exchange with your client, and this is going to be a place for that also. The other part of my workflow is here's my law firm. This is my client, and they're going to be putting their billing information. They're gonna be billing their clients. So their customers will live in LeanLaw, and they will keep track of their matters, keep track of any monies that, you know, anything they need to charge the client or billable expenses, their time when they're doing the billable time, if they have billable time in their firm. So that'll be done in that, in that app. Now upload those billable expenses to Hubdoc. So Hubdoc is my document exchange place. It also brings in my bank statements and credit card statements. So it's a great place. In Hubdoc, I'll code and then put the matter on the bills. And if they're billable, I put them in the advanced client cost asset account. And then, well, that will automatically push into QuickBooks. The best part about that is when it's in QuickBooks, we have a 2-way sync with LeanLaw. And then it will actually sync back up to LeanLaw. This bill that I've entered will sync back up to LeanLaw so that when the billing time comes once a month to bill the prior month to the client, it's going to see that bill and all the details on it. And it will be there for a draft bill, which I can produce for the client, or they can actually create themselves, see what the bill's gonna be like before they send it to their customer. The other piece in this toolbox is LawPay. So now LawPay works with QuickBooks. And yes, QuickBooks has its own merchant service. services section. I used to always use it. And LawPay is the replacement for that for your trust and IOLTA accounts because it's the only credit card processing company that accepts payments with— in compliance with the ABA and the IOLTA guidelines. And all the other ones don't do that, even Intuit. And the best part of this is you can set this program up to work very similarly with— as Intuit does with their automated invoicing. There's a little catch. You have one more step. But to stay compliant, it's worth the one more step. And also it saves you a ton of money because the rates are lower than what Intuit will give you for your credit card processing. So you can use both. You could use Intuit for charges that aren't matter— that aren't related to trust accounts or IOLTA accounts. You can use them for like straight up billing for legal services. But if it's something to do with the matter or anything to do with those 2 bank accounts, that are— you have to be very compliant and strict about making sure that the details are exact, then I would suggest using LawPay. And if LawPay's got a lesser fee attached to it, a lesser processing fee, then why not use LawPay for everything? I also recommend Intuit Full Service Payroll. The payroll is built into the system. Highly recommend it. It's very easy to use, easy to set up, especially if you work through my team. I have a— I have an amazing— I call it my superstar team that helped me set up my, my payroll. So that is my basic steps of my workflow. And now I'm going to take you over and show you and demonstrate to you what that's like. So here we are in Liscio. And Liscio is a beautiful, clean, simple app, which is— I really— which I really like about it. It's got places in here for your accounts. Those are your customers, right? For me, my customers. So any law firms that I work with will be housed in here in accounts. And I'm not going to show you because I've got my account set up in here. But you can see here that This is where your clients would be, would be stored. Contacts, all your email contacts would come in here. And I was real careful about pulling in just my contacts from my, my staff and with my actual business people that I work with. Tasks, we're going to be able to generate the tasks for your staff to work on the jobs for the clients. And then the home homepage, pretty simple. It'll show your tasks and things you need to do and your inbox is all on that as well. So very simple, clean page. Just want to give you a little short picture of it. I will give you a link to an eye-opening webinar we attended on Friday with Gina's SBAA. It was really informative about how— especially specifically talked about law firms and how even especially the smaller ones that I work— I tend to work with the, you know, solopreneur or maybe the solo plus one. Those clients end up having more chance of having themselves be exposed to maybe someone stealing identities and hacking. So this is really important because they deal with sensitive information, as do we as accountants, as do I as an accountant. We do work a lot with sensitive data. We have, you know, employees being onboarded and W-4s being emailed, and this is a better place, a safer place to exchange that data where you don't have to worry about it ever having it being exposed and having someone steal that information. So I'm going to take you over to QuickBooks now. So in QuickBooks, here's my law firm account, and I'm going to— I've got all my matters and things set up in here. You can see my matters and my customers. So I'm going to come over to Hubdoc, and I've connected my Hubdoc, which is my place to exchange documents. So if you work— I work with even larger firms than just the +2 ones. So this would be one where if I'm working hand in hand doing the accounting piece, working with the admin of the law firm. He or she would be uploading these documents to Hubdoc for me so that I can code them and bring them across. I'm going to take you to a document that I've uploaded to my desktop. So here's a document. This is a bill for courtroom services for a matter that we have already in the books in that law firm account, and it is Williamson versus Sanders. It's for Matter 18. So I'm going to upload this particular document. To Hubdoc. So I'm logged into the account for this law firm. I'm going to add the receipt. This is how simple Hubdoc is, and it's very easy for the companies to use. So you can do one big scan of all your bills if you went to open the mail and you just open a pile of mail and you just want to throw it in the scanner and pile it all in, and then you can do a multiple item pull in so that way you can set— it'll separate all the pages for you and pull it all in at once. You have to upload them as separate transactions, which I love. That's kind of a new feature. I'm at the single item, so I'm just going to grab that document. This is the invoice. I'm going to drag and drop. That's how easy it was to bring that file in. So now we're going to come over to the file. I'm going to click over here and see that it already picked up my vendor Courtroom Services. It already— as soon as I put it in, this is how fast Hubdoc works. Their coding works this quickly. It's an unpaid bill. Now I'm going to click Configure. So I never want to click Auto Sync with this. Auto Sync would be automatically when the bill gets gets put in, like, is you can actually have these bills emailed directly to Hubdoc with your special Hubdoc address. And then it will— you can avoid it even coming into your inbox at all. But in this case, you never want to do auto-sync because you always want to put the matter in there. And I like to control it in Hubdoc at the Hubdoc level. So I'm going to publish this as a bill. I'm going to pick my vendor, which is going to be Courtroom Services. And I'm going to pick the account and the account is going to be Advanced Advanced client costs. I don't need a class, and in the description I'm just going to write transcription for matter number 18, Williamson versus Sanders, and then Then I just stick that there. So now this is already put in. Now I need to pick the matter up, and the matter is going to be Matter 18, which I know because it says right on there, Matter 18. And I'm going to hit Publish. So now this is publishing this bill to Hubdoc automatically. It's in, it's published. And then what I like to do in Hubdoc— if you're listening, please start to make an entered stamp for us. So what I do is now that I put that in, I'm going to hit Paid, and that puts a ribbon on it so I know that that bill has been paid. So as I go through the list, I always put the Paid even after I've reconciled the bank account, I'll put Paid. So that way it's in there. So I'm going to come back over to Hubdoc, to QuickBooks. And you can see the last thing that was entered was this bill. And there it is, Courtroom Services, Williamson Matter, it's already in there. Now we're going to switch over to LeanLaw. And now I'm in LeanLaw, I'm in the law firm account. So let's go over to expenses and see if that expense has been pulled in out of QuickBooks. So there's a 2-way sync. So now it's going from Hubdoc to QuickBooks, QuickBooks to LeanLaw. So there's a nice little loop there. And here's my, my transaction, right? It came— it's in LeanLaw now. It's for Abram Williams, Matter 18, courtroom reporting for this matter. And there's my little $125.79. So there it is. It's in inside the program. So now if I wanted to bill Mr. Williams, I can create a draft invoice just for him. And I select both because you can see that the expenses are here. I create the draft invoice and this is going to create a draft. You can delete it if it doesn't work out for you. And now I have a draft of this invoice. Now if I come over to drafts, let's take a look at it. Now you can see here, here's my draft invoice. I had a phone call for him and I had a court reporter from the case that we have. So there's the 2 items here. I'm going to approve and submit this and it says submit invoice to QuickBooks. I say yes. This is how wonderfully smooth and automated this system is. Now I'm going to come back over to QuickBooks and check to see if that invoice is now in QuickBooks because now I've invoiced my client, right? So I'm going to invoice out of my QuickBooks. I'm going to receive my payment. Here it is. I've invoiced this client. You can see the billable expenses here. The total bill is $350.79. Everything worked beautifully. So how wonderful is that? Now if I want to receive my payment, that last piece would be LawPay. Now I don't actually have this trial company set up to LawPay, but I'm going to take you over to that window. So it's a pretty cool system, and I have links into, into my blog post about this. Looks like Simba is joining me now. So, um, It's got great features. You can accept the payments, you can integrate the payments. So it's very simple to have the custom pages. I really liked— we had a demo with this gentleman and I really liked how simple the product is to use. And the integration is pretty neat. You can put it right on your default template so that the client can— once you send the invoice, they can log right into this page and click the link and get to this page and pay their bill. So it's really simple. But the best part is the compliance piece, right? And you can do recurring billings with it. Client signatures. It's just got so much. The best other piece of this is the pricing. Pricing is way below what you would pay with Intuit. That part alone and the compliance piece is really important. Remembering that is key when you get to this. This is designed specifically for working with law firms and attorneys. That is it in a nutshell. That is my workflow. I hope that was really helpful. I know it was a really quick overview, but I try to keep the videos short. If you're interested in learning more about this or maybe hiring Artisani Bookkeeping to do your, your work with— if you're a law firm and you're looking for help with your accounting needs, please reach out. So thank you for watching. I'd love to hear any feedback and we'll see you next week. Bye now.