QBO Billable Expenses & Time

Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Accounting. I'm going to continue this series that I've been doing on QuickBooks Online for attorneys. And this week we're going to talk about entering billable time and expenses. So if you've been following along, we've been talking about the setup. Remember, QuickBooks Online is a platform for— an accounting platform that's very robust, very powerful, but also a platform that is a one-size-fits-all. So it's good for law firms, but it's also good for contractors, nonprofits, marketing agencies. It's just got a lot of versatility to it. And it's why I recommend adding an additional piece, another piece of software to it. So that way you can, um, really work with adding that attorney suit to the platform because it's going to give you that extra layer of reporting and ways to really track and fine-tune what you need to know, the details out of your firm. I recommend LeanLaw. It is my favorite software. It's been changing a lot, which is great. It's been getting better and better. It's— if you haven't taken a look at it, I highly recommend it. They've added, um, it's got a new interface, so it looks really sharp. And we also use Clio at our firm, and both of those integrate really well with QuickBooks Online. Which is why we recommend them. So remember, if you add that software piece, you're going to add the ability to track time remotely, mobile. You're going to be able to do some of these things that I'm going to show you today that are more manual inside their app, and you'll be able to track it, get more finer details, and you'll probably be able to pull out of QuickBooks. Now, on that note, with QuickBooks, I wanted to mention that with QuickBooks Online, if you're going to track billable time, don't bother even looking at the pricing on Simple Start because Simple Start doesn't do those things. The only time I've ever recommended Simple Start to a client is if they wanted to do their personal checkbook inside QuickBooks. I never recommend that. In fact, the one I do recommend is QuickBooks Online Advanced because that one has all the bells and whistles. There's a lot of automation pieces in there. Anytime you automate any processes, you take care of having to— automation makes the workflow more perfect, right? You are able to perfect And there's less chance of error. And also it saves you time. And sometimes automation, like adding a lien law to your accounting platform, will give you the ability to save time in the entry. So you'll notice as you're going through this series, there's a lot of manual steps. If one gets missed, the trust can come unbalanced, or you could overstate your trust. You don't want to do that. And then those applications like lien law and Clio will in fact protect you from that. But if you're here and you're just starting out, I get it, you want to just do it with the software. So let me share my screen. I'm going to take you through the steps. And you want to get up— you want to make sure you get that account, maybe a Plus or maybe an Advanced. Grab it early, get the discounts. Reach out to me, I can get you even better discount. And then we can help you, help you set it up, or you can set it up yourself. But some of these steps you'll need to do as I show you in, in this video you'll need to take care of to make sure that you're able to do these track billable time because they're not turned on automatically. Let me share my screen. So let me dive into QuickBooks. The first place I'm going to take you— and this is a QuickBooks Online Advanced, so it's got all the bells and whistles, but like I said, you can definitely use Plus— as I dive in here, you're going to come over here to the gear on the right-hand side and then come over to Account Settings. Once you're in Account Settings, you want to turn on a way to track billable, right? Because it's not on automatically. And that would be under your Expenses tab over here on the, on the left. And you can see I have this, um, you just go over to the pencil on the right-hand side and then you turn on Track Expenses and Items by Customer. So you just hit the toggle switch, you turn it on right here, and then you have to hit Save. Don't forget to hit Save. I've, I've done it myself where you didn't track it. Now I can track items as billable. So if we were going to track expenses or even a bill for a client, that's why you don't want to use Simple Start, there's no bills. You're going to come over to the plus sign, you're going to click Bill, and I'm just going to pick FedEx, Federal Express, right? So FedEx. And it remembered my last choice. I prefer to use Advanced Client Costs as my place to move the costs in and out for for hard costs, direct costs for a client. I like to bring it up into that balance sheet account, that asset, and then pull it out when we bill. And that way it really has no effect at all on the attorney's books. But there's another method called direct, you could use it directly. So you could put it as a billable expense, and then when you bill it back to the client, it hits the billable income account. So it's the same thing, it negates to a zero, but it's really a preference. I think the advanced client cost way is a little bit better, but either way will work. So you have to set up your products and services ahead of time. In this case, we've got advanced client costs we're booking directly in here, but you want to either use that or use an item. So if you are using billing, you can, uh, just use an item on your, on your bill itself. So if I want this to be tagged to a client, I want to check billable here. So I want that to be ready so when I invoice, it's accessible right for the invoice. So I'm just going to pick a client. here off of my list, and I'll just pick Joe Evergreen. We had a funny conversation with an attorney this week on Joe Evergreen. And then I'm going to say this is also for Joe Evergreen, or I can pick a different one, but you want to tag it. We'll just hit Joe Evergreen again. And actually, I want to hit it at the matter level. So Joe Evergreen has a couple of matters, so I want to hit it at the irrevocable trust. So that way it's going to be tagged to the matter because he's got a couple of them. So if you're doing matter billing, you want to hit the matter line. So that everything will kind of flow through underneath the matter. And I'm just going to hit Save. So that's how you would track your billable expenses that you're going to bill back to your client or your, your customer when it comes time to bill them. Now, if you're going to track billable time, how do you do that in QuickBooks without the software? Well, you can track it on an app, you can track it on your phone. There's plenty of ways you can track the time. Then if you want to record it so that it's billable, What you're going to do is you're going to come over here to the plus sign again, and then you're going to hit a single-time activity. You can do a multiple as well. And I can say that I worked here and she worked on that Joe Evergreen again, and it was on that irrevocable trust. And then I want to say it's billable hour. I'm going to put that he makes $250 an hour, which today's world is a lot— that's very inexpensive. And then because it's billable, I want to also hit— I hit the line here with the client. And I want to put in, you know, whatever— research. You just put the words here because that's all going to transpose onto the invoice. Research, law, whatever. You could put whatever you want, blah blah blah. You can do a start and an end time here if you wanted to put that in, and it will calculate it for you. So you can put that in, it will do it, or you can actually just put in the hours to be billed, and I can put in that it was 2 hours of research and Now I can see that I'm going to be billing him $500. And then if you have location or clocks, you want to select that. I'm going to hit Save. Now it's time to bill Joe Evergreen. So I want to come in here and bill him. Now if I have it set up with items, I'm going to be able to use that same item and pull that off the bill. And if I'm using that category, I can do the same thing. So let's go over to create an item— an invoice for a client. So again, I'm going to go over to this left-hand toolbar and hit Invoice. And I'm just going to bill Joe Evergreen here. Grab Joe Evergreen. There he is. And I'm going to do irrevocable trust. This is going to open up a little door. As you can see, there's my billable time. And you know what I didn't do? I didn't click the billable box on, on there. So I just wanted to show you that. And let's— yes, I want to leave without saving. So let's go back. So if you didn't know this, up here on the spyglass, I call it, you'll see that there's a little box there that is a little way to get to your past transactions. So because I didn't hit Billable, it's not going to show up on the invoice. So I forgot to click the box. So you want to come over here and click the box. It's so easy to forget. And this is actually expenses on here for my office. So the $120, which could end up being soft costs if I was going to bill back to a client, but I didn't actually have a direct cost for it. So I'm going to hit Save. Now I'm going to go back to Joe Evergreen and do an invoice. So this is why I wanted to show you— show it to you this way so you could see that it wasn't there. Like, why isn't it there? Now you know why. So I'm going to come over here to the invoice and invoice Joe Evergreen again. Now we're going to have those expenses to bill back. So Evergreen Joe, I'm going to pick Irrevocable Trust. And now you see that they're here. So I'm going to bill him for the time. I'm going to bill him for the expenses on his account. So now you see there's $530 that I'm billing Joe Evergreen. We'll get into how to apply this trust, trust account. So if you have money in trust on Joe Evergreen, it was as simple as this. This is all you have to do. And now the billable has been used and the time's been used. So it's very, very easy. But if you wanted to, to do this kind of work and then apply a trust account balance to this invoice to clear it. So now you're recognizing your revenue and you are, um, you're billing your client and you want to show that money. That will come up in a future video, but I wanted to at least show you billable, what happens if you forget the billable box, and how to put it all on an invoice. It's very simple. It's a simple process, but you have to remember to put those settings on. So I hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, there'll be more to come. Hit subscribe and, and join me. I'm almost at 1,000 people, which has taken a long time to get to, so I'd love it if you, if you join me on, on my group and just hit subscribe. And if you are looking for help in your law firm, we are here to help you. Please feel free to reach out directly. I can help you set up your file if you're doing it alone, if you want proper setup, or if you need help for the accounting. We do, do that at our firm. Have a great day, and we'll see you on the next video. Bye now.