In this tutorial Linda Artisani walks viewers through advanced LeanLaw configuration for law‑firm billing. She explains the three primary invoicing workflows—Direct, Draft, and Draft‑then‑Approve—showing when each is appropriate for solo practitioners versus larger firms. The video details how to enable and process leads billing, including setting firm IDs, tax IDs, and handling attorney codes for downstream systems like LegalTracker. Administrative fees and interest‑on‑expenses are covered, with guidance on state compliance and contract disclosure. Artisani demonstrates invoice presentation customizations (show/hide columns, sub‑headers, description formatting) and how to map QuickBooks Online Advanced custom fields (e.g., timekeeper initials) to LeanLaw, noting limitations on field types. Throughout, she offers practical tips to streamline data entry, reduce redundancy, and ensure smooth integration between LeanLaw and QuickBooks. The tutorial ends with a call to action for accountants, bookkeepers, and attorneys to seek further help or subscribe for more content.
Chapters
Hi there, Linda Artisani, Artisani Accounting. So this week we're going to continue on the path of setting up LeanLaw and some of the tricks of the trade, some of the settings that you might be looking at them and saying, I don't know how to answer this question. I'm not quite sure where to go. So I'm going to walk you through some more of the settings that I think are really critical that you pick what works best for your firm. And there's really— it's very customizable. Let me take you to LeanLaw and I'll show you what I'm talking about. So here we are in LeanLaw, and this is the workflow. This is the workflow that you would have either with your client or if you're a small firm, you would do direct. You know that you've added your hours and your times. If you're a solo practitioner and there's nobody else in the office, you know, you add your time, you're going to add your expenses. And when you go to ready to bill, there it will be. It'll just be direct. You're going to click, look at it, ready to bill. These are the clients I want to bill. Boom, they go over. Draft step is kind of nice. I really don't have anybody that does direct. Most, even the smaller firms, use the draft step. They kind of produce it, look at it. Maybe there's some things that they don't want to bill to the client. Maybe they— and there's the ability to do that in Limo. You can have some things on there and you're like, no, I really can't bill that back to the client. You can unselect. If it's hours even, you can unselect them, then write them down. This is the one that's the most common. I don't really have anybody that uses direct, but that is an option. The draft and approve step basically is the one I use a lot, where you make a draft for the client and then they approve it. And then once it's approved, it's going to go right into QuickBooks. So there's no extra layer of— the approval happens. So if you had a firm that has maybe— maybe there's one person in the office that works hand in hand with the attorney, some kind of an admin or paralegal or timekeeper of some sort, the attorney would do the ready to bill. The staff member would do the ready to bill, the attorney would look at it in the draft, say it's good, and then the person would just approve it and go. That's not the one I use. So when I work with law firms and I do the actual billing, I use the draft review and approve stage. So first comes of the month, I have specific instructions to bill specific clients. After that happens, I tell the attorney, okay, it's in review. You guys can look at the The drafts and let me know how they look, and then they're going to send it over to be approved. So they review it, I create the ready-to-bill, then it moves to draft. The attorneys look at the draft, they review it. Once it's reviewed, they send it to approved, and then they say, hey, Linda, they're ready to go. And then I send them out whatever way they have to go out, whether it's email, print, fax— some firms still fax. Those are still options. They could even be specialized billing. So that's what you have to do. Now, there's also fees here. So administrative fee is a fee that some firms can charge depending on your location and where you practice law, where you're able to charge a fee instead of doing soft costs and charging for copies and FedEx and, and all those extra things, mail, postage, those things. You could just charge a flat rate Percentage on top of the expenses that will go as an administrative fee. So that kind of covers you, you having to have to take care of getting the file out, who the admin person is doing the work. So that is available in lien law. You can put a percentage in. I've got a few clients that do that. It's nice. They don't have to deal with all the little pennies that come along with trying to capture all the soft costs. Interest on expenses. Again, you want to check your state that you're working in. Some states may allow that. If they allow it and it's in the contract, just like the admin fee, those should be in the contract with your with. The law firm's client should know that these are things that might happen when they get that— when they get their bill. If it's allowable by your state or entity, your, your local bar, then you can add that percentage as long as the client knows it's coming, and then that can get added to the bill. And this is where you would add that percentage in. And of course, when you're all done selecting the one you want, you want to click Save Changes so that it will save it. Of course, with leads billing, you would have a firm ID number sometimes. You would have the lead's tax ID, sometimes the law firm tax ID, maybe a default invoice description. Really, those are the rules around leads, and you'd have to really look at the engagement that you have with the firm that you're sending the leads bill to. There's code sets. These are already baked in, so you can select the ones that are applicable to you. And then if I was going to create a matter with leads billing or a client with leads billing, I can create the client Let's go over here and make a client. Let's add a client. And I can come in here and I can just pick a company name, say Acme Printing. And then John Smith. And then obviously put the rest of that information in. And then you could do your billing however you wanted to do it, whatever the rate, the way it's set up. And I can just say Roadrunner. Press. And if there's a responsible attorney, I can make the responsible attorney. Originating attorney, I can make the originating attorney. I can hit OK. Now I come over to Acme Printing. As you see, it brought me right in here and I can see the button for leads. So I'm just going to come into leads and I'm going to say enable it, enable the leads. So once you have this all in here, there's been times with Creating invoices in LeanLaw, as you process it as this, as you start to create ready to bill, gather the time and the expenses, push it to approved, push it into QuickBooks as a regular invoice. Now I can print it to lead. So you always have to follow that workflow and actually don't create it before it's been created as a regular invoice. Then when you get the printout, it's just a bunch of text and it's really, you can kind of tell what it is, but sometimes It just looks like a bunch of letters and it looks like a bunch of computer code. Once you open that up and you try to upload that to like LegalTracker, you might find that LegalTracker will throw an error and say, sorry, that attorney name isn't the correct name. We want the attorney code. For example, there's no way to put an attorney code inside of Lain Law. But if we have the attorney code that's been assigned through LegalTracker, we can go in and next to the name and add that into the text so that we'll be able to upload and read it. So there's— it's a little bit of fine-tuning, a little bit of playing around with it. It's a find. Sometimes we do Ctrl+Find. Control, you know, Replace. But at least that way, or Command Find, Command Replace, we'll do that to make sure that the document will be able to be uploaded. You can always check this multiple places that do leads billing. You can always check with the people that are on the receiving end of these leads bills. They're usually very nice people that will help you through getting the leads bill uploaded. This will get the majority of what you need in, but sometimes we've had to tweak them before we upload them. So just know that that actually is a thing. But that's how you would create a leads bill and be able to add it to the matter. So that way, the next time I invoice, the ability to print to leads is here. If you don't have this box checked, it's not going to print to leads. It just won't. I want to show you one other thing. So if I come over to billing again, let me come over to QuickBooks. There's also a toggle here that will show all bills for leads. Now I don't think I actually have any in this file, but you can see that I can do with leads or without leads. So with leads there's nothing, but without leads there's all of them. But you can, if you do a lot of leads billing, if you want to like kind of compress your list to only show the leads billing ones, you can. Now I can see which ones aren't paid, and leads billing usually gets them paid on a regular basis quite quickly. So if you start to see that this list is big and you can see that there's some due for a while, you probably want to check into that to see if it actually uploaded right, actually was received properly. So you can stay on top of that when you're tracking your accounts receivable. So that's pretty important when it comes to leads billing. So back to settings. Just wanted to go on a little bit about that because it is a little bit complex. Now, invoice presentation is kind of a fun one. So you can see, I love how they did this. This is a little bit reminiscent of QuickBooks Desktop and how you can customize desktop. You can do it online too. QuickBooks Desktop had the best when you were able to move things around and really customize. Hopefully someday QuickBooks Online line will catch up to that. But you can see here, if I uncheck, you can see how things change and how that if I want to include the username in the description, it's going to pick up the username, which is actually the initials here. If I want to use the leads codes in the billing, it's going to bring in the leads codes. You can just play around and see, include the hours in the description. So now you can see the hours column showed up, and I can undo it depending on what shows. Sort lines items in reverse, that's a new button, kind of cool. So we can do that. I guess people were asking for it backwards, like in opposite way that they came in, maybe the oldest to the newest or vice versa, I guess. So you can do that. You can put, instead of the time detail in the memo, you can actually put that on an attachment. So sometimes that kind of— you want a cleaner look to your invoice, that's here. I like to add the subheaders, but if you want to, in the structure of it, you don't want to have them. If you look over here, here's your subheaders, and I can take them out, and now they're gone. And then that just shows soft cost billed to clients. Make the date part of the description if you want it. If not, it doesn't put it as the description, it makes that column. I kind of like that. It's a little bit cleaner, but it really depends on the firm. And I can tell you, my— from my experience when I've worked with law firms, taking them off some kind of software, whether it's TimeSolve or Timeslips or Bill4Time, and we move them to this new software, they want it because they want better integration. They want something more modern and a really smooth workflow, which is what they get with LeanLaw. But then sometimes they're like, oh, I really liked how this was in the other file. You can somewhat customize it to keep them looking— the invoices looking alike. A lot of times if they're coming off of a desktop product, it does— their invoice doesn't look anything like what it did when you move it to online. I've found in my experience, I've spent tons of time trying to create a template in QuickBooks to make it look like some really old-fashioned invoice, only find that when I offer it to them and then I offer this more modern look, they're like, oh, I like that one better. And I just wasted my time making the other one. So if you're a bookkeeper or an accountant, try to show them that this is a great time to switch. It's going to remind people that there's a different system. Here's where you're going to map your custom fields. We talked a little bit about that last week where you can create fields inside of QuickBooks. And once you're in QuickBooks in the custom fields, this is in QuickBooks Online Advanced. I can map things to it. There is a way to just pull these up. I have a few of them in this file. So you can see I can do timekeeper initials. I have that as a custom field in QuickBooks, and now I can find it here and connect the dots. So I can connect it. So you can really— I've done filing fee, date of accident. So there's some things you can do here. As I mentioned last week, it has to be a text type of custom field. You can't get fancy with a dropdown list. You can't make it a date. Those things don't work. So if you try that in QuickBooks, you create these beautiful custom fields and then you try to connect them to LeanLaw, they're not going to work. So know that that is actually a thing that you really want to be careful of. So those are a little bit of around the block of how things are going to look in QuickBooks and LeanLaw and how the LeanLaw settings work. Hopefully that's helpful to you. Next week we'll get a little bit into invoice We'll get more into reporting and maybe some client IDs. I think that's about all I have left. And some of the settings that are team settings that we can use in LeanLaw to shorten the time of data entry. And who doesn't want to do that? We all want to make data entry a little bit less cumbersome and less redundant and typing the same things over and over again. If we can find ways to actually make that faster and better, I think that's the best of all worlds. And I hope this has been helpful in helping you set up lien law as we kind of go through the process. And if you have any questions, comments, please reach out. If you're an attorney or a law firm, work at a law firm and you want help, this is the work that we do. If you're a bookkeeper or an accountant and you want some extra help, we have the Accountant's Law Lab. We'd love to have you. If you're new to me and you wanna subscribe to keep learning more, check out the other videos, please hit the subscribe now. I'd love to have you follow me. And on that note, I hope you all have a wonderful, wonderful week. Bye now.
