LeanLaw & QBO Advanced User Roles

Hi there. Linda Artesani, Artesani Accounting. So for the next several weeks, I'm going to be talking about QuickBooks Online Advanced and LeanLaw, my preferred legal accounting software. And we partner these 2 together because I like Advanced because of all the bells and whistles. There's lots of functions inside of QuickBooks Online Advanced that work great for attorneys, lots of workflows and automation that really will save you time. Also, with adding LeanLaw, I always say it's putting that business suit on top of QuickBooks. It makes the QuickBooks program law-specific, and we want that law-specific look to it. We want to be able to get all the things we need to track as working with law firms. You might want to track time, you might want to track with fixed fees. There's just a lot of metrics we're able to pull out in LeanLaw because it's made by an attorney. It is designed with that in mind. They know exactly what law firms want. They actually work hand in hand with the accountants to help develop their product and make it better which is something I love about that firm, is that they, besides all the people and they're wonderful that we work with, but the fact that they take the time to partner with the accountants to see what we need and we tell them what our clients need. So it works as a beautiful relationship. I'm gonna share my screen. I'm gonna take you into QuickBooks first and show you the users and roles that you get with Advanced. So now don't forget, Advanced is the expensive product. It's $180 a month, really not expensive when you're looking at law firms. And it's a product that has a lot to it. The user roles is one of the most powerful parts of it because now I'm able to streamline a user permission level inside of QuickBooks. And then I'll take you into LeanLaw and show you that as well to see that there's also in conjunction with that, you can have users inside of LeanLaw that never touch QuickBooks. Let me share my screen and I will take you there. So here we are in QuickBooks Online Advanced. This is my demo law firm. And I'm just going to take you over here on the Right-hand side to the gear, we're going to come over to Manage Users. And so you can see here, I've only got a couple of roles. Primary User obviously is the one that used to be called Master Admin. So your Primary Admin is the person that holds all the power, all the keys to the kingdom. Typically, this should be the partner and not the accountant. But if you're doing wholesale billing, you probably want to be that Primary Admin. In fact, I would really recommend that. But if you are not that, we don't do that as a general rule. We have the account— the law firm pay for their software directly. Intuit. So any increases they handle, in that case, they would be the primary admin after we set FileUp. I also have in here, I'm testing something out and I use my husband's name to create time tracking user. So the user for time tracking is just that, they're able to track time. This could even be someone as a subcontractor. You allow them to track time and submit expenses. So they're really not somebody that can do or see anything. It's a very limited user and it's used with the with the ability to upload receipts inside of QuickBooks in that realm. Now let's go over to the one I want to really dig in with here with you is— let me just stop— 2 accounting firms. So you're allowed 3 seats. It's really powerful because a lot of times Sarah's working the files. She wants all the tools that she has. She doesn't want to be part of my team. I want all the tools. We're able to bring our 2 accounting firms in even though we partner together. And then we can also add our staff. But also there's a spot here for the tax professional. So it's great having the 3 seats. That's one of the other reasons why I love QuickBooks Online Advanced. And then we have here, we have the roles. So Expense Manager would be your accounts payable person. And I'll just click in here to show you what it looks like. You can edit this and create your own. So if you have an expense person that does sales as well, you can change it and give it a new name, say Expense and Sales, and then change it. But this is the default one. This is like kind of like starting. You could start with one of these default ones. And you can see they just have limited access. They have Access to— full access to bills and checks. That's it. They don't even have access to the banking unless you give it to them. So it really depends on the firm and what they— what their needs are, where you're going to go with this. But this is one of the things I really like, is that it can limit them down. They can't see payroll, they can't see workers. Workers could be handled by the payroll clerk and not the accounts payable, depending on the firm. You might have a larger firm and that person really shouldn't have any access to payroll. So you want to keep it slimmed down to that. Now you can have them inside of Reports, Expense, and Vendor. As you can see, it's not clicked here, but we could click it, and then you have to have full access to— only full access is available, so they're working on those permissions. So it's going to give them access to see all reports. By default, this is not checked off, but if you want that person to be able to maybe run an open bill report, AR, AP, aging, you want them to be able to have that. So right now they have to have full access to reports on expenses and vendors. I guess eventually they're going to streamline it down. Pretty much QuickBooks Online Advanced is slowly inching its way over to being that robust program that Enterprise Solutions is. So we're getting there inch by inch as they do these things. You don't want the accounts payable clerk having access to change any company information or any access to the subscription. You can click Next and you can give it a different name because now I've modified Expense Manager. I could say with with reports, with report access, just to give it a name. Because maybe I have more, more than one person. Maybe the heavy in the expense section, maybe there's multiple people doing this. Maybe it's a big PI firm, personal injury, tons of expenses that have to be tracked. So it would be good to have that there, that maybe that one lead person in that department has that access. And then you can preview the role. And this is what's really cool. So now you're going to see the exact look of what is in— what that person would log in and see, which this was something that I had to actually do myself and make a fake user and show it to the client. So you can see right away it comes up, you're previewing it. So they would pop into the dashboard, but they would only be able to get into— see, there's no— not even a Sales tab here. If they come into Payroll, they can't do it. That's what you want, right? Maybe Budgeting, sorry, can't do it. So you can see here, but this— I gave them reporting access, so now they can see that they can go into the Custom Report Builder and Looks like they can do the reports that I want them to see. So that's part of what I created in this modified expense person. So it's pretty neat. Just so you can see what they're going to see when they log in. So they're going to get an email inviting them into QuickBooks, and then they're going to have this view only. They're not going to be able to go in and see management reports. Actually, they can see management reports. That's interesting. I want to see if I can see the financials. So this might be a reason why you don't let somebody see this. So they're able to see nothing. Okay, so there's no content. So if even though it says they can see it, they can't. So this is a good use case that you're trying to see what's in here and what they can see. I don't really want them to see those things, so that's really nice. So let's go back now and let's go back to the users. Let's get out of here. Let's go back to the users and see, uh, what we can— um, let me get out of here. And I can edit the permissions right here, which is nice. I can modify them, maybe take the reports off. Maybe I don't want them to have that access. So I'm going to get out of that view, go back to users. Just wanted to run through some of the other users that are here so that you can see. I'm just going to save this one, and now I've got that saved to be used over and over again. So now let's go back to the roles. I've got a payroll manager. That's a great one if you have someone on your staff that just handles the payroll, payroll department. That's a good one. Inventory, we don't usually use. Sales manager is one we do use. And one of the things I like about sales manager— you see, these are the ones you can edit. The other ones are basically set in stone. But if you wanted to edit sales manager, this is one that I have edited in the past. I have firms that have a lot of people touching the accounts receivable. And there might be the girl at the front desk that maybe the immigration firm, they come in, they want to become a US citizen, and they just give that person money without even an invoice. She has to record the sales receipt, but they don't want that person touching— that receptionist touching anything else. So we streamline that role just for that. We don't have her really get involved in a lot of the other parts that she doesn't need to. Obviously, it wouldn't be estimates, but you can come in here and just let her see. I don't want that person seeing banking or what the bank account balances in the firm, and you can streamline land it down to be the receptionist role. And basically it would be just this— estimate invoices only— and they would be able to create those. So they wouldn't be able to do anything else but receive the money in and record it. Maybe that salesperson needs to see all the reports and wears multiple hats, or maybe they're the person that oversees all the people in the firm. Then you can really modify this. Maybe that person can see banking because they want to validate as the bank transactions clear, as the deposits clear. They want to be able to see that they hit the bank account. They need to see the banking. So there might be that one person that's above all the rest that has that power, so to speak. So you create the roles for that particular purpose. And as we go back here to the other roles that are here, Reports Only, I mentioned earlier, you can have that for partners of the firm. Maybe they want to see the data, but they don't really want to touch anything. They'll be able to access reports. A workaround for that is to also— maybe you don't even want to give them a user role, but you can have the reports go to them. You can set that up in QuickBooks to have them email the custom report, which would avoid even have them having access at all. But Reports Only is a great view. A user, also Time Tracking, great one for if people are tracking time in QuickBooks. We don't need any of that because we're going to use LeanLaw, which is where we're going next. And a Standard User, you can really customize just specifically for what your purposes are. You might have that oddball user that need to like really click and tick the sections, that's what it's for. So let's move on to LeanLaw and take a look at how we can make users there so that maybe people that are working for the firm can bring that in. You really work to track the time and do the invoicing, like staff account— staff attorneys, but they don't have to ever touch QuickBooks. In the perfect world, we want less people touching our accounting platform. So let me share my screen and move over to— actually, let me just move over one tab and show you. So here we are in my demo law firm file. This is connected to that QuickBooks file you just saw. And again, same thing, so you're going to come over to the gear, and then we're in that actual window, and then we're going to come over to Users. So as you can see, I've got multiple users set up in this fake file. Uh, exempt users are your accounting firms. So one of the beauties of having LeanLaw as opposed to other software is they have a user set up for us. The client doesn't have to pay extra for us to access the data and us to access the file and us to access LeanLaw in its entirety. And we have a pretty broad spectrum of ways that we can touch the data here. If I was going to add a new accounting partner, I have to accept permissions. Let me just move my picture out of the way slightly so you can read the whole thing. Adding an accounting partner, you're validating that this partner is not somebody inside the firm. So if you have a controller, that would not be a use case for this. This is for that outside firm that you're outsourcing to, and you would click this box and then email, first name, last name. Has access to firm setup is by default, but sometimes they uncheck this and sometimes I need that access because I need to add my business partner, I need to add my accounting team, I need to add my staff. And it just makes life easier if you tell them, please just keep that box checked. The other important one is to include on all matters. I want to be able to have visibility of all matters so that if they ask me a question or if the trust accounting goes awry, I want to be able to see that. And if they don't click this box, it will not be— I won't be able to see them. I will try to go looking for them and they won't show up. CC on responsible invoices is if I want to have a copy come into my inbox. You could do that if you wanted to. I mean, I don't see why you would need that, but it's there. And then you could add that user and invite them. Let me go to the next one. So let's go to just the attorney view. So you can see here on the attorney view, I have the name and the address, email address. Initials, which you want because they're going to show up on your leads billing. They're going to show up on, you know, on your bill itself, you know, the, the attorney of the— that of record. It'll just show the initials, and you can have that little box that's like a key code that will show who worked on the file. So that's here. You can update your rates. And I can come in here and just change the rates for this person. Right now they're $350 for the standard. I can create a special rate. Maybe they work with school departments and I want to put XYZ School Department at a different rate. Maybe they negotiated a different rate. then you can have it there for access, which is really a wonderful thing. And then the role itself is attorney. So this is an attorney who works in the file and they have— maybe I don't want them to have access to firm setup at all, but maybe I want to include them on all matters or maybe just their own matters. So you want to say CC on responsible invoices. Maybe they're always on the invoices that they're responsible for. They may be the responsible attorney, but maybe another attorney is working on it. They might be the original attorney and the attorney of record is responsible. You want to have a copy of So that'll give them the ability to get a copy in when the invoice is created. So I can have all of that here, which is great. Obviously, this is fake and I made it myself, Ali McBeal. But, um, so you have attorney. Now, that attorney view may not be the view that you want for your firm. Maybe that you want to modify that and, and slim that down. We have that ability in this platform to do that. Um, and maybe that doesn't always fit. So you may have principal operator is one that's more Someone that's a bookkeeper on staff would have the Operator role. Principal is partner. But like I said, it doesn't always have to fit the name. Like paralegal might not work for you. If that paralegal role doesn't work, we can fine-tune it and refine it. So let me take you to that so I can show you how to do that part of it. So here we are in User Permissions, and I wanted just to show you that you can really refine these down. So by default, you can see— I'm going to show you paralegal here. I'm just going to open up all of these sections and you can see who can have access to what. So as we come up here, the paralegal actually has time entry access and time for— can enter time for others, view and adjust rates. And this is kind of the boilerplate one that works with paralegals. So you can come down here, but you see that she cannot— he or she cannot edit a user rates and— or edit rates or users, but maybe I want her to. So I'm going to click here so that all the paralegals have that ability. So I can come down here and really work through adding subsections of what they need in the firm. Maybe the timekeeper on this particular firm needs to be able to add time for others, that this person kind of is that person that can enter time for maybe an attorney. So you're able to add that to the timekeeper role so that when you give that role to someone, they actually have access to do those things. So we're able to really fine-tune here. Maybe on a staff attorney, I don't want them to see— I don't want them to see fixed fees, or I don't want them to see— they don't— I don't want them to create clients and edit matters. Maybe somebody else does that in the beginning as the workflow comes in, and I don't want the attorneys doing it because maybe they don't look and they don't see that it's already in there. So it depends on the workflow that you have for the firm, and it's Really critical that you can create these particular rules. It's really nice that LeanLaw did this, that they're able to refine them to the firm. So many times we can come in here and say, well, maybe we don't want someone to see something, access to something, or maybe we do want them to have access to billing or trust accounting. Maybe there's a reason that the timekeeper should never see trust accounting, whatever those reasons, or maybe just reports. We don't want them to see reports, but we want them to have access. to be able to do the work. So those are the things that are really important and crucial, that we're able to refine the role and make it work for the firm. So in the blog post that accompanies this video, I go into a lot of detail of all the roles and what each one means and what sections and best practices and maybe on things that you would not think about. One thing to note with LeanLaw, which we discovered kind of accidentally, In the firm, sometimes a partner or someone will leave the firm and we'll have to take a user off and add a user. One of the things you really need to watch for is if you do that, make sure you lock the period down inside of QuickBooks, password protect it. You should be doing that anyway, but password protect the periods. And then when you remove a user and then add a new attorney that comes in place, that the old attorney stuff still stays attached to that, that name, those initials, that class if you're using classes. If you don't, it will actually change everything back to the new attorney's name, all the way back to everyone that was attached to the old attorney. So make sure that you are really careful with that. I'm trying to think of other things that we've run across with users that are best practices, but that's definitely one. Setting that password is critical. You set the password in QuickBooks and lock it down so that LeanLaw can't change back past historical data. So I hope this is helpful, giving you the bird's-eye view of user roles and permissions and why LeanLaw is such a powerful tool to use for law firms and attorneys, as well as QuickBooks Online Advanced. If you have any questions or want to reach out and ask me, please do. You can find me a lot of places on social media— LinkedIn, Facebook, I'm there. If you are interested in learning more and deep diving into this, let me know. We have the Accountants Law Lab, which we help accountants and bookkeepers Learn how to do this kind of work. If you are a law firm or a partner in a law firm and you're like, I need this girl to help me with my accounting, reach out. We're here to help. On that note, I hope you all have a wonderful, wonderful week, and don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss any of the future videos. Bye now.