New Attorney Client: Deep dive

Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. This week I'm going to get a little bit— we've started out with our client conversation a couple weeks ago, then last week we went into the overview screen and started to kind of get that high-level view of a client's file. And this week we're going to dive into some of the tools that I use personally in my firm to help guide me in making a really professional-looking presentation to the client. So you want to hand that proposal. And I like to use a tool called 17hats that will help me really create some nice templates and use a couple other tools as well. So you can just imagine that you've gone through that initial file review like we did last week. And now you might want to ask some more questions to the client. For example, you might want to say to the client, what kind of business entity do you have? I like to ask this question because sometimes a client could be an LLC that's acting as an S corp. Usually you can tell if they have payroll, that they're paying themselves, if that's what they are. But it's always good to ask what kind of entity. You work with attorneys, they usually know the answer, which is, which is really nice. Who's the principal partners in the firm? What is the tax structure? Those are just simple questions you can ask your client. I usually ask in the discovery process, as I start to really pull all the pieces together, I want the tax return from the last time the tax return was processed. That tends to be my starting point. I like to tie the books to the tax return, and it'll also give me some of the answers from the questions above just to kind of validate the answers. I also like to ask them if they're using an outside source or an outside program or application to do their trust accounting. It's always good to ask that question. If they're using Excel like George, we have the answer, but sometimes they might be using another program. The program might not be online; it could be a desktop program. So you want to ask that question to find out if they are tracking it. Some use it in a desktop program, and then they go in and do journal entries inside of QuickBooks. Kind of a clunky workflow. You want to get all cloud-based. You want to be all in, but you also want to know that. You want to validate the amount of trust accounts that the client has. This is important because a lot of times. The numbers— when, when you ask that, you want to know, like, if you're really looking at a set time period, say January to October, you want to know how many trust accounts were during that period in total, how many are active. If you're rebuilding a file, it's really important how many were active in the, in the last time the tax return. So that's usually your starting point. You want to know what that is. Sometimes on the books, don't forget, the books might not have the IOLTA account at all listed. Sometimes people do that second account. Method, and you might have a whole other program, like maybe a second QuickBooks Desktop program, that's holding the IOLTA. So it's important to know, or at least get to examine, that part of their records. You get into the chart of accounts, you might want to ask them if they are happy with their chart of accounts, or would they like you to make it more law-specific. Are they nearing the 250 mark? You want to know that because that's important. It's going to move them into QuickBooks Online Advanced. I just typically put everybody in Advanced. I like using the platform because of the extra tools, but sometimes you get the smaller firms, the solo, the micro firm, they might not need it or want it or have a purpose for it. Remember, if you're getting close to that and you're constantly having to take the time to make sure that they're not going over 250, you probably want to look into maybe moving to Advanced so that kind of takes a task off your list. It's a good use case for tasks as well. Maybe that every month, if you're keeping and monitoring and removing the zero balance ones, that's a good use case for tasks. Check out their bank accounts. How many bank accounts do they have? How many loan accounts do they have? Do they have multiple trust accounts? It's important, especially if they're going to use lien law. There's different price points for different, different use cases. If they have one, one price point, they want to go to the core program. If they want— if they have more than one, you want to be in the second one, and you get more reports there. Again, it's the same thing. The attorneys don't usually balk at the pricing of QuickBooks, and they really usually will be more happy in the up-level pricing of QuickBooks— of LeanLaw. If they have payroll, you want to find out what payroll platform they're on. If they're in QuickBooks, it's one thing. If you need to move them, if they're in something that you don't think is working for them or it's very expensive, you think you can get them a better platform, I generally recommend changing that at year-end, not going middle of the year and changing the payroll. And then you want to look at their balance sheet, fixed asset accounts, what's there. We've seen it where they have none listed. You can go back to that tax return if they have a tax return that's an S corp, you can see it. But if it's not, you want to say, do you have office furniture? How did you pay for the office furniture? Did it come with the office? It sometimes can be that way, and then maybe they don't have any assets, but you want to look, you want to see if the depreciation has been booked in. All of that will get reconciled when you book to tax. And then you want to get to the important point of giving the client a timeline. I really like this tool, Lucidchart. It's one of my favorites because it allows me to not only create a timeline or a workflow for a client or a potential client, but it allows me to really give them details in a visual way. So it's a great tool to have if you find that you have clients that just aren't getting the workflow. I use it all the time. Working with law firms, we end up working with either the attorneys or the admin or the bookkeeper. And this just gives us the steps and it looks pretty. There's tons of, as you can see over here, there's tons of different ways to use Lucidchart and to really get that to be— there's like different charts. I really love this. This is such a cool app. You can create them as pictures. There's different shapes. There's different templates that you can use. So, there's a lot of different ways that you can really create things here. You can see you can make diagrams. They've already got templates so it makes it simple. So, I really, really recommend Lucidchart if you're going to be creating it. It's pretty affordable. It's not that expensive. And I think it's a really great way to visually show your client exactly what they're needing to do or exactly the timeline. And last but not least, I'd like to show you 17hats. So 17hats is my CRM. I am able to take templates and use this product to— this starts right at the contact letter that comes up, the contact sheet that's on my website. You click the contact sheet. I've created a questionnaire. You fill it out. The client finds me on the internet, whether they find me by Google or Google YouTube or however they find me, they go to my website, they go to my contact sheet, I instantly get a message here, they get an instant response that I'll be back to them. And this is such a fabulous tool. It's not expensive at all. In fact, the pricing usually goes down the day after Thanksgiving, so you might want to consider that as well. It's just got so many features in it. It's got workflows. I'll show you a workflow that we put in here that we had a little fun with. Creating, recreating my workflow, like the kickoff email. And then we have, you know, you just can set up the client life cycle, which is really fabulous. You get to use the calendar, you get to put your leads in here whether you fill it out or not. You've got the ability to just have them go in and look at the lead and just fill out the report. I can keep notes and, and there's to-do things, there's time, phone log. I call the client back usually when I get this message So instantly I can go in and get the phone call and take notes while I'm on the phone. And I've had this actually work really well in my favor because I can contact the client, and then if the client says, oh, I'll get back to you, I'm not ready, and then they come back to you like right before the October deadline, I can pull up their information and take my notes and see what the conversation we had. So it looks like I'm brilliant, I remember every single thing that they said, but actually I read my notes. So it's pretty cool because It's hard to remember everybody's name. It's just a nice way to— it's an inexpensive program. It has eDoc signing, so I can send my NDA here. I can send my engagement letter contract. It's a contract. It's not a set-in-stone contract, but it is a contract itself as well. It's just a great way to really go through and take that client cycle. Once they sign the engagement letter, everything shifts to my program Lissio, but I really love 17hats. I've had it for a very long time. I even use it in my real estate business. So there's a lot of good reasons to use this program. So on that note, if you are an attorney and you need help with kind of messy books, please reach out. It's what we do. We specialize and we also specialize, specialize on migrations, getting you off an antiquated system and putting you in a more modern one, paperless one. We can help save some trees. If you are a bookkeeper or an accountant and you just got your first law firm client, you've been following along on my posts, please reach out. I've got an ebook. I can tag back the ebook. It's here. It's just to help you with the terminology and the different things that are pretty much things that you would find in a law firm file. And also, I'm going to be having a mastermind group, so you'll get a little information about that. So on that note, and you can always join our Facebook group, QB Community Live. So on that note, I hope you all have a wonderful, wonderful day. Bye now.