In this mentoring video, Linda Artisani (co‑founder of Artisani Bookkeeping and QB Community Live) guides her mentee Rossana Leib of Next Stop Bookkeeping through the practical setup of LeanLaw for law‑firm bookkeeping. The conversation begins with a brief introduction and a recap of Rossana’s recent LeanLaw demo. Linda then covers compliance‑related trust‑account handling—using Hubdoc to capture front‑and‑back check images for Florida Bar requirements and leveraging LawPay for electronic deposits. The bulk of the session walks through LeanLaw’s settings: customizing the default landing screen, entering attorney rates, and connecting QuickBooks. She explains how to sync client‑advanced costs, automatically create missing chart‑of‑accounts entries in QuickBooks, and enable sales‑tax handling. Billing preferences are explored, including matter‑based versus client‑based billing, invoice methods (CC/BCC), and importing existing clients from QuickBooks. A key feature highlighted is LeanLaw’s trust‑account display on invoices, which shows retainer balances and transaction history directly on the client invoice. Linda also reviews draft‑and‑approval versus direct invoicing workflows, and demonstrates how to customize invoice presentation—adding timekeeper names, matter descriptions, sub‑headers, dates, and billing addresses—to improve client clarity and reduce staff questions. The session ends with encouragement to explore these settings further and a preview of next week’s workflow deep‑dive.
Chapters
So hi everybody, we're back for week 2 of the mentoring and I have my beautiful mentee. You want to introduce yourself, Rossana, and tell everybody just a real short thing about yourself in case someone just hops in and sees video 2 and doesn't know video 1?
Yeah, hi, I'm Rossana Leib and my company is Next Stop Bookkeeping. And I'm here to have some mentoring help from Linda.
And we were chatting before we started to record, and you were mentioning how you had a demo with LeanLaw with Jonathan. And you can just tell us a little bit about the demo, because it was— you had like a whole hour with him, right?
Right. I had a whole hour with him. It was fantastic. How I can get into it, how I can put myself out there on the account as accountant. for the lawyers. And then he demonstrated me the whole Linlaw workflow, how it works. A lawyer, if it's just focusing on the billing part, which that's something they mostly do. It was just a great meeting. And yes, and I mean, Linlaw is fantastic.
Are your attorneys only in— are they all in Florida or are they— Okay, all right, that helps. We kind of have familiarity.
Yeah, that's the question I had because I know states have different rules. Yeah, one question I do have, like the Florida Bar Association, they're talking about checks. So I understand that in Florida they have to have the checks, right?
And they have to have the checks back. You have to have a copy of them. I use Hubdoc for that because I get the front and the back of the copy because you have to have front and back in Florida for all trust transactions, front and back. So I use Hubdoc for that and keep the— because I mean, I'm not in the law firm. The attorneys should keep it as well, keep the actual copies. But I attach the doc, I attach it right to the transaction. I use Hubdoc for that.
What about the attorney that don't write checks and they Deposit the money right to LawPay.
LawPay should have a record of that. So if they're doing LawPay, they're doing that. That's why I love LawPay, by the way. That's another app that I would like to—
I love LawPay.
They're really— they are the best. They are my number one best one for, for any merchant account things going through trust because they don't take the fee out. They charge the firm the fee and they don't take the fee out of it because you can't do that. You know, keep, keep compliant. You can't be taking it out of the trust. So yeah, it's— LawPay is great. You should have that. Those copies should be right in there. That, that whole LawPay is designed for attorneys. Hey, I'm Linda Artisani, Artisani Bookkeeping and QB Community Live co-founder, and I am here with Rosanna and we are doing the week 3 of the mentoring group here. And Rossana is also an expert in using QuickBooks and using— working with attorneys, which is why she's a perfect fit. And I will let you give you a little tiny summary of who you are because we've got that back in the first video. But then we're going to dive into some settings in LeanLaw.
Yes. Hi, I'm Rossana Leib. My company is Next Door Bookkeeping. And I'm— yes, my niche is And my target is lawyers.
We'll do the settings and just kind of walk through the settings. And then next week we'll do the workflow. How's that sound?
That sounds great.
And you're what? What are you, the whisperer?
The QuickBooks Online whisperer?
Love it. I love it. Okay, so I'm going to share my screen and then we'll go into LeanLaw. So we're here in LeanLaw. And we're going to just go through the settings in LeanLaw, how you would set that up. So obviously, just like QuickBooks, settings is your gear, right? My info, this is my info, what initials in here, what my role role is. And then this is one thing I really, really like to select an option for your opening screen. So if you're like an attorney, you could set it to time entries. If you do mostly time entries and you don't use the, you know, the— if you're entering your time, you can have the attorneys use this on there when they set up their info. And then it will, when they click on LeanLaw, instead of taking them to the calendar, it'll actually take you to the time entry window. There's the calendar view. For me, I usually either pick this one or matters. So which, depending on the firm that I'm working with, so I'll just pick billing. And then that will be my login screen. So as we start to come through here, obviously we'll get into like the rates. You can put the rates into the attorneys. And I just wanted to get into some of the QuickBooks stuff. So the QuickBooks section, the integration, this is where you would connect to QuickBooks. You can select how they do the billing. This is just a place you can come in here. And then when you see anywhere in LeanLaw, which you'll see all over the place, there's little, little green—
I like it.
QuickBooks. Yeah. So this is where you want to do like your client advanced costs, which are your things that get billed back. Anything that's got to do with the client, that's a fixed cost that you have that comes up that maybe you have with any fees like deposition or anything like that, that you actually write a check out to pay for on behalf of the client, and then you bill it back and then the client pays you. And then you can sync, you can pick the date. So if this is a current file, it's already got some data in it, you can pick the date to sync the client advanced costs and things like that back in here and pull the WIP, the work in process stuff. So that's something that's kind of cool. And then I'm just gonna hit Done because that's all done. And when you're in there, if you don't have those accounts, they say it's really a good practice to go through the chart of accounts and make sure you've got everything in order. But if you don't and you're in this button, you can actually click and LeanLaw will make that account in QuickBooks, which is really cool.
Nice.
Um, when we get in here, if there's sales tax, you can enable it. Type of billing, I like to pick matter billing. I think matter billing works really well with LeanLaw, but you can select client billing and then just save the changes. It's up to you how you want to work that. You can mark the matters, can be marked billed with a parent, or you can bill them by the matter. I usually leave it billing by the matter. I like to keep everything in a little tight little box. And the matters are all separated. And then if I'm working on a specific case, some, some clients can have more than one thing happening, like estate planning could have many, many transactions happening with different matters under their name. So you can separate them. And then as the matters Wind down and close out, you can close them out and then, you know, remove them and archive them from LeanLaw side. Um, I like this button. We had this— this is, I think this is kind of a new button. But when you create a client and you create the matter, it's going to automatically, or I like to call it automagically, put it into QuickBooks. If it's off, then you have to go through a few more clicks to put it in there. So I like it on. And then invoice method, you can click those here. If you'd like to make a CC or BCC, sometimes the attorneys want to have a copy go to them. And you can either put it as a CC or BCC, and then when you do the billing, they get a copy of it when you send it out to the client. Importing the clients from QuickBooks, if you're starting with a file that already has clients, but you're, you're not— you come in after the fact and talk them into using LeanLaw, you can actually pull them in. To LeanLaw, which is kind of cool. I like that. Any questions on any of that stuff?
No, this is fantastic.
It's pretty simple, right?
Yes.
The trust accounting piece, by far the best feature in LeanLaw, in my opinion, is this because it comes on their invoice, right? And I can show an invoice actually shows on their invoice, their retainer balance, any payments that have been made from the retainer. So any monies that the law firms earned and then billed and then And move now out of the retainer to pay themselves, and then the balance afterwards. And then this is, you know, based on the invoice that was $3,000.
That's awesome. This is a great selling point for— It is.
It is. Because it's right there. So instead of having to do like statements, it's giving them like their little ledger, right? It's showing the little ledger of what's in their account. Billing workflow. This is another piece that as part of setup of LeanLaw, it depends on the firm. Some of the firms that I do the invoicing for, they want to see the draft and approval pieces so that when you get into getting up into the billing, I create the draft. They'll say, Linda, create the draft. And then I'll create the draft. Then I'll say the drafts are in there. They'll approve them. So actually go in and look at them all and make sure that they're not missing anything. And once they're approved, then I do the billing and it sends it into QuickBooks. You can do direct and skip all that if it's a smaller firm and they're doing their own invoicing. They can just go and just create the invoice. You don't have to do any of the steps. You just pick the ones you want to have, right? And then, or you can do just the draft setup and skip the approval setup. So it's, you know, you could, I could say, they could say, Linda, make the draft, and then I put the draft in, then they just go and just, they just click the draft and it goes in. So there's several ways to do that. It's pretty cool how you can have that choice. And then the presentation. So this is kind of cool. There's different ways and When we work with a lot of the law firms, we'll actually kind of show them. A lot of the ones that we're working with are coming from other, other types of software. They might be working on desktop software. Now they're moving to the cloud and they're all excited about being in the cloud. And a lot of their invoices from the desktop software are really like— you've probably gotten an invoice from an attorney before. They're really boring, plain old paper. They're not like—
Yeah.
So these— this gives you the details. You can actually pick if you want to have the username. So maybe the timekeeper Or in there into the, into the actual invoice. You can choose to have the matter in the description. So especially if you have a firm that has multiple matters with, with the client, you can separate that on the bill. You can combine billable and non-billable if you want. You can do the trans— the timekeeper detail in here. And you can kind of play around and actually do a Zoom meeting with your client and let them see what it looks like. And then you can add subheaders if you like. I like the subheaders because it kind of separates everything. I really do like that one.
Yeah. It just kind of makes it easier.
Whatever you can do to make it easier for the end client. So the attorney's client to understand the billing, it's going to save the staff a lot of questions, right? So if you can make these, and this is, this is a perfect example of how much easier it is to see. And then you can make the invoice date part of the description if that's important to the firm. Some firms it is. Sometimes it's just a matter of what the firm's been used to with their other software. And then you can do the matter and the billing address if you want to have the matter, like regarding the matter.
So much time saving.
I mean, it does. And it does. It saves you a ton of time. And we'll do that. We'll go through the steps of how to put the stuff in. And then we'll go through steps on how to fix a mess.
I like that.
I love that you want to do that.
I like investigations.
Then you're in the right field. Well, on that note, until next week, thank you for coming and helping and helping everybody else too. Because I'm telling you, for every question that you may have, there's probably 5 other people afraid to ask the question. And that's been my experience with our group.
So Okay, great. I appreciate it. Thank you so much.
