In this fifth week of the QB Community Live mentorship series, Linda Artesani (co‑founder of Artesani Bookkeeping and QB Community Live) mentors Rosanna Live of Nextdoor Bookkeeping. The session walks through the legal‑industry bookkeeping stack, focusing on how to configure and use LawPay, LeanLaw, QuickBooks, and Hubdoc for law‑firm accounting. Key topics include: the advantage of LawPay for trust‑account (IOLTA) payments because it deposits the full amount and routes fees to the operating account; when to use Intuit Merchant Services for non‑trust transactions; the way LeanLaw handles a single income account while breaking out revenue by practice area, client, and fee type within its own interface; setting up fixed‑fee templates for package billing (e.g., immigration naturalization packages) and distinguishing them from trust‑account work; creating practice‑area structures; defining soft costs (copying, mileage, postage) and hard costs (court filing fees, court‑reporter bills) and how to capture them via expense templates, Hubdoc, or manual entry; using classes in QuickBooks to keep partner‑level tracking clean; and workflow tips for moving bills from Hubdoc into QuickBooks and then into LeanLaw for client billing. Linda also shares practical advice on obtaining partner discounts from LawPay and LeanLaw, scheduling demos, and using the sandbox demo file for hands‑on learning. The session ends with a preview of next week’s deep dive into LawPay.
Chapters
Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping and QB Community Live co-founder, and I am here for our— this is our 5th week of mentoring, Marisona?
I think that's the 4th.
No, I combined 2, so I think it's the 5th. But go ahead, tell us a little bit about you and your practice and what you're looking for today. You can kind of set the table for it.
Yes, hi, I'm Rosanna Live with Nextdoor Bookkeeping. And yes, Linda is mentoring me on— today would be the settings of Lindo to go through that. So I have questions on that regarding how you separate everything and how you— what you put in which categories from QuickBooks. And yeah.
Cool. So we actually started out with some questions on LawPay. So let me share my screen. I'm just gonna go over a little bit, give you a little Tip for next week because I do have a demo already being set up for me that'll be a demo file so we can actually dig into it and play around with it with my demo company file and my demo legal file. So we're going to add those snacks because they were really excited about that. I've been promoting them in my workflow and so they're going to let me have a demo file to play, my little playground, the sandbox. So yay, I know, I'm very happy. So here's LawPay's website, right? And I'm not going to go through all the steps about it, but what it is, is they actually have a link. So when you invoice out of LawPay, and you've probably seen this because you have a client that uses it exclusively, it puts a link on the page and the payments all process through LawPay. LawPay is specific to the legal industry, although they do have an accountant's version of it, which is pretty cool. And it also is a also is a place that you can— what's the really best part about LawPay is that if you work in trust accounting, as you know, if I charge you $3,000 and you pay me with a credit card for $3,000, that $3,000 has to hit my IOLTA or trust account. It can't be $3,000 minus the bank fee. So this is where LawPay is king of the hill here because most services like Intuit Merchant Services will pull out and give you the net, and they'll take the merchant fee out, which is a big no-no. So LawPay will cover that and take it and put the fee out of the operating account and actually make the deposit to the iOLTA, which is why I recommend LawPay for anybody doing trust accounting. It's the best. Now, I usually recommend Intuit Merchant Services for the other. We have it when we set up clients brand new with working with us. At my firm, I actually do that as a step of the process of getting them going in it and, and get them all set up into merchant services because that piece is super automated. Where with, as you know, with LeanLaw, we have work to do when people pay us. So let's go to LeanLaw now. So what I want to tell you for one quick tip for you, do this, schedule a demo with them.
Okay.
You can ask them any question. When I first started doing niching and started working in the law field, I did that. We had a nice meeting with a very nice man named David who was my rep, and he— you might even get David— and he was fantastic and walked me through it. Sometimes once you get connected to them, they will have specials where they'll have a special. So if you sign up an attorney through you, they'll give them like free 3 months. They even did a 6-month one once where they actually get the service for free.
Wow.
free for 6 months or 3 months or whatever the deal is going on. So, and you can be, you can become a partner with them. So it's pretty cool. Most of the apps let us do that, like LeanLaw does. So we're gonna go to LeanLaw now. You had a question about templates, right?
Yes. So yes, I just need to understand where goes what. Like hard costs, soft costs. The products and services and all this information.
Yeah, well, this is the thing with LeanLaw. LeanLaw lets us have one sales account, one income account, one. They don't let us break it down into a lot of them. It's just one, because what it does on their side is it will break it out. So if you have worked with an attorney that does maybe, you know, specifically does like immigration, but also does estate planning or combination of services they sell, and they want to break out the services, You do that in LeanLaw, not in QuickBooks, because QuickBooks will let us have as many accounts, but LeanLaw will only connect to one. So we have to make sure that we do that piece of it on the LeanLaw side, which is what can be confusing. So there's only one income account, but we can do the breakout of the income for the attorneys in LeanLaw and not in QuickBooks. That makes sense. So because it's the customer side, right? It's the customer, customer piece, it's the time and billing. So that's where that happens. And that's where all the good reports are for those For anything to do with sales or customers related, this is— we want to be in LeanLaw. We really don't need to be in QuickBooks because this is like putting— I say it's like putting the attorney's suit and tie on QuickBooks, right? It takes QuickBooks, which is a general program for everybody, and makes it specific to the law, the legal industry. So fixed templates, just—
That's smart.
Fixed fee templates are like— I work with an immigration attorney. She sells packages. And a lot of the attorneys are starting to move towards this, like the accounting industry's moved away from doing hourly. Some of the law firms are actually getting proactive with this too. And this is a place that they're able to put packages together. She has a package. So if somebody comes in and needs, you know, naturalization, there's a package and she has them pay in like progress billing. They pay a deposit, then they pay and they pay. And she has this package. It's nothing to do with the trust account at all. It's just accounts receivable. So she does that here in LeanLaw. And it works really well. And it just can really quickly create a fixed fee if it's a fixed fee thing. If this is not For the trust accounting, though, this is for fixed fee templates is generally for the accounts receivable. It's just to save time. Can you hear my dog snoring right now?
Mine are sleeping.
So practice areas is just where you, if depending on the firm, you know, I could do like estate planning. You can do immigration. I mean, whatever the law firm has for their type of legal services, that this is where you want to start to break it out for the client so they can start to see. Just had a client the other day that had all the people's names on the balance sheet. So it had law firm income Mary, law firm income Joe. It was like a parent account and all subaccounts with all the partners' names on it. And then they put an X in front of the people that were no longer there, but maybe were there during the year. And I'm like, oh my, you should have seen this chart of accounts.
Oh my gosh.
Goodness. That had to be fun. But that was the way they were tracking it. QuickBooks, they didn't know about classes. Would have been a little bit cleaner of a job because they did the same thing with the expenses. Some of the expenses, they broke it up by the partner or the attorney. And it was like, oh, this chart of accounts went on for days. And it's like, oh, feel bad for that bookkeeper. But yeah, scroll through page 3, page 4. I mean, some firms have that. I mean, the one I have with the estate planning ones, 2,000 trusts is a lot of pages. But that's where lien law comes in handy because you can go into LeanLaw and work in here on the trust stuff. And it's so simple and quick to go find, like if I want to find the trust, I can just come to the trust account and then type in the name. And then I'm there. But going back to the settings here, and then of course, you can click back to QuickBooks with just a couple of clicks. So I'm not searching through a major, you know, giant list, you can search in QuickBooks pretty quick too. So fixed fee, we're in, let's see, we went to practice areas, we did the fixed fee templates. So expense templates are just ways to save time. When you start to throw soft costs in. So soft costs, and you can use them for— you could use them for hard costs too, but it's just really for soft costs. So things like copying. How can I possibly put a number on what it takes to use the copy machine, the electricity, the— I mean, you pay for the copy machine, maybe you pay a lease, you're paying for somebody to go physically make the copy. So there's a There's an overhead cost to doing— there's cost to the— I shouldn't say overhead— there's cost to the law firm to actually make copies for a matter or a client. So they put a fee on a number and then just go forward. Mileage here, I see a lot of attorneys do mileage. So they'll do— normally it would say like they put a rate, whatever the rate is, and then they put the rate in there and then they calculate the miles and then they'll do that on, on an actual When you get into the expenses. So when you're typing in expenses, soft costs like mileage is a soft cost, right? You pay for the car, you pay for the gas. You pay for the upkeep of the vehicle, the insurance, all that is all a factor. So you have to put a number on it. So use the mileage number to charge back. So if the attorney has to drive to meet with— make it do a deposition somewhere, go to court or whatever, they can actually charge that back to the client. But there's no way to physically find that cost. It's a cost overall to the firm, but to pinpoint it for that one client, it's just one big cost like postage. I might buy a roll of stamps. I'm not going to go and divvy out every stamp I put on an envelope. I just charge postage. So that's where your soft costs come in.
Okay.
Hard costs are like I go to the courthouse and have to pay a filing fee for my case for Mary Smith because Mary Smith is specific to Mary Smith. I write a check, I pay for that one filing fee for Mary Smith. That's a hard cost and I have to You know, enter that into QuickBooks or even a bill. Say I get a bill for court reporting and the court reporting bill comes for Mary Smith's case. So I have a bill and that's a hard cost. It's just for her and it's just for the reporting that was done during her case. So that's a hard cost. If you put the bill in, it goes— all of this is part of your WIP, your work in process. So you're going to bill that back to the customer, whether it's part of a trust or whether it's not a part of a trust, but it's part of accounts receivable. But that's all part of billing the customer, which is why it would get entered. It's just the hard costs are more apt to get into either— if you don't use Hubdoc, you're entering it manually into QuickBooks and then you're tagging advanced client costs and then it's getting brought up here to be billed back. Or it's— you're putting it through Hubdoc, it's getting into QuickBooks and still making its way up. And you know, you're tagging the matter, which is my preferred way because it's a lot simpler. A lot of these attorneys use one company for all their court reporting. And so I can tell Hubdoc, it's, you know, XYZ company, XYZ court reporting, and it goes to advanced client costs, but then I don't have it automatically go in. I actually get the bill in my email, it sees it, codes it, then I go in and just do the last step of adding the matter and then boom, send it to QuickBooks. The picture is attached to the bill. And then it sends it to LeanLaw and it's ready to be billed back to the client. And it's a sweet flow.
That's so nice. I can't wait to be in this.
Oh, it's so— I love it. It's something that I can tell you when you take somebody from— which we were talking about on the Accounting Pro thing the other day— when you take somebody from desktop world where they're typing everything in and show them that, they're like, wow. So that's pretty cool.
Yeah.
Any other questions on this kind of stuff or?
No, that's pretty good. Hopefully it's very helpful.
So next week we'll dive into LawPay. But at least this way, we've got a little something here to understand soft costs, hard costs, which are— my Rhode Island accent just can't say hard. There's an R in there, I promise you, I'm working on it. Yeah, so we can dive into that next week. And did you have any other questions you wanted to—
No, this is great. This is something that will help me now to set it up for my lawyer and get it ready to go. So thank you.
So till next week, everybody have a wonderful, wonderful, successful week.
