LeanLaw features billing tab

Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. So each week, I've been taking you through pieces of the app that is the biggest part of my workflow, and it's LeanLaw. It's the application I use when I work with attorneys for them to track their time and expenses so that we can do the billing for the firm. This week we've kind of gone through a couple of shortcuts. We've gone through different areas and we're kind of following along the top of the toolbar. This week I'm going to take you into the billing, right, the most integral part of the program, the billing section, and let you look at how it works. And it's really built around the ability— it's marketed primarily to work with the mid-market firms, but you can use it with all different sizes of law firms. In fact, In my business, I have all different sizes of law firms from the solopreneur through the solo plus one, or you get into the like less than 5 and you get into the mid-market, we get into 10, maybe 10 people or 10 or more people in the firm, maybe multiple partners. It really is a platform for all of those. It works the best with QuickBooks. It's the best law firm app. I've checked out so many of them. I've had so many meetings and so many demos of these different products. I've had the ability to go into a lot of these because we do migration, taking people off of some of the platforms that just don't work and getting them into a— my workflow, which is LeanLaw and QuickBooks Online Advanced. Now, why do I think this is the best workflow? A, because it works the best with QuickBooks. A lot of the programs connect to them, but none of them work like LeanLaw does. And B, QuickBooks is a platform for the accounting. So you're able to get the ability to customize QuickBooks in such a way that the law firm and the employees in the law firm, the staff, the partners all can work in LeanLaw. I can work in QuickBooks, and I'm able to get the data out so that the people can— the partners can really track their data and see how they're doing as a law firm. And a lot of law firms I run into, they don't even have the ability because of the platforms that they're using, because of the Other apps that they're using, they don't have the ability to extract the data that we can get out of LeanLaw. LeanLaw's got a ton of really great reports and it's growing. It's an app that's not sitting dormant. It's an app that's growing. They take feedback, they, they modify the platform to work for most law firms. Let me share my screen. I want to take you into the billing piece. We're just going to do the billing piece today so you can see how it works. And we'll get in a little bit later into the how the trust accounting part works. That's really one of the strong points. But today we'll just do the billing part and I'll show you all the different aspects of it. So let me share my screen. So we're in the ready to bill page, right? So like I said, this is an integral part of the way this software works. As you can see here on the left, I can filter it down to all time, which is something I don't typically use. I'm going to leave it there. But you do have the ability to filter. Most of the time when I do the billing with my clients, and like I said, I've got multiple kinds of clients, I've got single clients that sometimes the solopreneur or the single attorney will do this piece of it themselves. Or I'll get into multiple partnered firms where I end up doing this part of the workflow, which is what I really like because it's able to do the pre-bills. I'm able to do— they approve them and then I'm able to push them into invoicing and then send them out however they need to be sent out. Some law firms I work with, like personal injury attorneys or attorneys that work specifically at workers' comp law firm, they have to work with insurance companies. Some want fax, some want things emails, some want things put through a different way, some need leads billing. So there's multiple ways of doing the billing and lien law handles all of that. So you can do just this year, you can do last year. A lot of the personal injury attorneys, you might want to do all time, right? Because you might have to capture all that as the check comes in if you win the lawsuit. Also, and there's a case to be made if you don't need to have lien law with personal injury attorneys, I still think it's important. I think it's important to be able to track the expenses and to have this workflow really work for you, have the ability to take like a Hubdoc, or now QuickBooks actually imports bills. So you could use just QuickBooks itself to do that, import the receipts, tag them to bills, put them in, and then they'll be seen by LeanLaw with the 2-way sync. And they would put in to be marked as billable expenses if you tag it to the client advanced cost account. Really cool feature. And I will get into that a little bit more detail. So a lot of times when I work with firms, I will pick this you know, it's June, it's July. So we'll be billing June. And I'll do June 2020 or earlier because I want to capture anything that maybe got in past that June date. Maybe it was backdated to May and I want to make sure I capture it all. But you can also do June, this month, or custom period. I'm going to leave it on all time here. And I'm just going to go into ready to bill, the ready to bill. I'm just going to take my name off so that it will show everything. So here's all the open cases right now that I have in here for matters To be billed. I can see I've got William Aldridge divorce. I can just click that one. I can click all of them. I happen to have all the features on, so I've got the ready to bill, then it will go to a draft, the attorneys will approve the draft, and I have approved. This is very customizable. I can go into the settings and customize that to just show the— you know, I could have it if it's a single law firm, they might not need all these steps. You can also just select the, the one matter and come over here with the little lightning bolt and it's— you can skip, you know, you can do the step-by-step with the review of the time entries, or you can kind of skip through and go right ahead. So I'm just going to create the draft. We'll come into the drafts here and see what's in draft. So we've got a few matters in draft right now. And I maybe want to push these— it has evergreen billing as well. I'm just going to push William Aldridge over. So I'm going to put the attorney's hat on or attorney suit on and say that I'm reviewing this. So I would come in here. So I would let my attorney know, hey, I put the ready-to-bills into draft for you to approve, look at. And a lot of times there'll be a long list and it can be filtered down by attorney. So you can give the attorney the ability to come in here to track their time. I would put the expenses in and they can come over here and track by their users. They can pick the user that they want to pick. and show the ones for that user. You can pick a specific client. So you have the ability to even go right down to the granular level of a matter. So I'm just going to come in here and look at the divorce and see how it's going. I've divorced, met with the client, and there's $612 there. There's some copies and I have the administrative fee turned on. If that's a feature that your firm uses instead of tracking all the soft costs, that's another way that you can also do the billing. And that's also a setting in LeanLaw. So I'm going to say, yeah, this looks perfect. I'm going to obviously would have all the details. I'm going to hit Approve. I'm going to approve the invoice. And now the attorney would let me know, hey, Linda approved all the invoices. Can you go in and push them into QuickBooks and populate them and send them out? So here's— I've got 2 in here. And I can click to do all of them and I can submit them to QuickBooks. I also have the ability to send them back to draft. So if there was something wrong, I might look at them and say, hey, this looks okay, but maybe you don't want to send this one. I can send it all the way back to draft. Draft if I want. You can also see here, I should have showed you this matter balance. Here's the matter balance of $4,000. But the trust balance is only this. So that might be something you want to look at. And you can see in here, one, I love this feature, it's got the retainer information. So it's going to show the amount of the retainer balance, and it shows the charges. And you can modify this as well. I'm going to approve and submit the one for Seth. And now this is going to be in QuickBooks. So if we went over to QuickBooks, I can come in here. And here's my invoice. Should be the top one, is usually the first one if it's working. And here's Seth David. Here's his invoice, the one I just created. So you can see there. Now, as we come back to LeanLaw, if I come over to QuickBooks, if this is sorted by the number, I can see here that here's the last invoice that I just created. I just sorted it, sorted by number. You can see that this balance was $17,000. $7,447.50. And I have the ability here. Now I know this is in— is also in QuickBooks, but the attorney can also do this piece. So we have the ability to come down here and you can send it to deliver it, you can print it. A lot of attorneys and law firms still print. We can also deliver it by email. We can do a combined PDF print. Combined means if I wanted to do the combined one, let me pull that up so you can see it. It's going to have a cover sheet on it and it's going to have— if you had multiples. So a lot of times with the insurance companies, what we'll do is we'll have the insurance company will have multiple, like the workers' comp insurance company I work with, they'll have, you know, many matters happening and then we bill at the end of the month. This will list them all on one sheet, which I really like, especially if I have to fax them. Believe it or not, we still have to fax on some of these, these insurance companies, and I like to copy and paste that for the COVID page. And then here's the invoice. so you can see what it looks like. You also have the delivery method leads. And it's just a coded way that some of the insurance companies want to see the invoices. One of the other things here is you can pay the invoice. So if you're doing trust accounting, I can actually select and pay some of these with the trust right here on this page. So many times each month, especially if you deal with like an estate planning firm, you're going to have this, this grouping of You know, they're going to bill out what they've been working on for the prior month. And they're all— everything's going to be paid from trust because you've got that upfront deposit. I'm going to have the ability to come in here and pay from trust. And then I can just come in here and create a payment from trust. I really think it's better to do these one at a time. So like Seth did have some money there, so I could actually pay from his trust. And I'm going to pay this because he had enough to cover it, put the date, and I could pay from trust. So now his trust account will be reduced by that $747.50. So that's it in a nutshell. As I mentioned earlier, you can come into the billing workflow and you can create the steps. So if you don't want to have the draft, you want to do it direct because you're a single, single attorney and you don't need all those steps because you're going to look at it right at the billing stage. then you can just have that step. It's going to be ready to bill right to QuickBooks. If you're a firm that the draft step makes sense, but you know, you're creating the drafts, maybe they're creating the drafts themselves. And then they're just sending me a message saying they're ready to go. They don't want to do the approval. Perfect. You can do that. And then the, obviously the one I just demonstrated with the draft direct and the approval step. Here's where you can have your administration fee and you'd want to set that up to go to whatever makes this most sense. Maybe it's copies or whatever. And you can put interest on expense and all that. Available here too. We'll get into some of the setting features in the future. So that is it in a nutshell on the billing tab in LeanLaw. I really do— I can't say enough about this app because it's really a great app for most law firms. I haven't had a law firm yet that it didn't work for. Like I said, the team behind LeanLaw is wonderful. We, we are always reaching out with some ideas and they're very open to creating their product, making it better or making it adapt for a lot of the firms, which is one of the things I really love about working. When you, when you align yourself specifically with an app, it's good to be able to have that connection. We don't have that connection with any other app developer. If I want to go to Clio, I am nobody in Clio land, right? But I am somebody with LeanLaw and I'm able to get in and they're open for everybody. It's not just, just LeanLaw accounting pros, but we do have a little bit more play when we ask for some of the features. So on that note, I hope you all have a wonderful, wonderful week and we look forward to diving into another section of LeanLaw. And if you have any questions, comments, please feel free to ask. If you are interested, please join our Facebook group, QB Community Live. We would love to have you in there as well. We do weekly sessions where we do live Q&A. A lot of the questions sometimes are directed toward law firms as well. So if you're in our group, you can ask the question there. Somebody will It might answer the question or it might even get asked on the show. So we'll hope to see you next week and thank you for watching. Bye now. Bye.