Linda Artesani shows how to set up a new client and matter in LeanLaw, link them to QuickBooks Online, and configure trust accounting. She walks through creating a client (Suzanne Keir), assigning a matter (Estate Planning), syncing to QB, and building liability accounts with a parent account called Funds Held in Trust.
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Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. So for today's video, I'm going to do a short video, I'm going to take you through the steps of starting with LeanLaw, creating a client, creating a matter, creating a trust account. So it's that simple, that short. It's gonna be a short video, but it's going to be effective to show you the beginning steps and a little bit of information about surrounding those areas. So let me share my screen and show you. So here we are in LeanLaw. And this is your typical homepage that would populate when you click into LeanLaw. And it's really simple, you're going to come over to the plus sign. So it's just like QuickBooks, you're going to enter transactions, something transactional, it's the Quick Create button. So I'm going to click the plus sign. And all I'm going to do is add a client here. So I'm going to add a client. And I'm going to add someone named Suzanne Keir. So she's here. Obviously, I'd fill out all the other data that's in here. But I'm not going to do that for now for time's sake. But you could use a client ID now. Some clients have client IDs, matter IDs. I prefer putting the ID on the matter. And when I do that, it's a setting I can set up as a default setting in LeanLaw. However, some people like to have a matter number and client number. For me, adding all those numbers in front of the account names in QuickBooks makes it harder to see the actual name and the name of the account. So it's up to you, personal preference. For me, no number in front of the matter, the client name. a number for the matter. So I'm just going to hit Create the Client. So now I'm going to create the matter. So bring me right to creating the matter. And I have it set up in my settings that by default, I do matter billing. So it's going to give me the option to create this matter. And I'm— for this one, I'm going to call it Estate Planning. And it created a number because I had that set up in LeanLaw. So there's several ways of doing the billing. There's hourly, contingency, fixed fee, pro bono, and internal. I'm going to leave it as hourly. And then the responsible attorney is Linda Artesani. So now I've created this in LeanLaw. So as you can see over here, we have several tabs and it can bring you right to QuickBooks, the QuickBooks one. So I'm going to click QuickBooks. So it's in LeanLaw, not in QuickBooks. It's set to matter billing. I'm just going to click the QuickBooks connector. So it's the only piece that's missing. If the client name and matter name were already in QuickBooks, I could connect the two and connect it to LeanLaw, but they're not in there. So I'm just going to save the changes as new accounts. Now I know they're connected to QuickBooks. You see a little QB icon, that means it's connection to QuickBooks, and the matter is also connected to QuickBooks. If you're unsure, you want to see it, you can go view it in QuickBooks. And I love this feature in LeanLocks, bring me right to it. And you'll see Suzanne Keir and then her estate planning. Same thing for the matter, you can do the same thing to go jump right to it. And that's only in the sales section. So it's only in the customer section. And it's underneath Where her— it's listed for the accounts receivable. So there's no connection to a trust account just yet. That's the next step. So we're going to click Set Up Trust Accounting. Again, there's no accounts in there. If there were, we could connect them, but there's none. So I'm going to create new ones. It's going to create for me the client and the matter in the trust account. It's going to make a liability account in QuickBooks for me. Once that's done, you know it's there because there's a little QB. If you're not sure and you want to see it, we can come over here to Accounting. In the chart of accounts, I can just type in— I'll just type in Suzanne because I don't think there's too many Susannes here. And here she is. And here's the estate planning, which is a subcategory underneath the parent name. And you can see the number here. Now if you wanted to see it underneath like a list, you could come to the chart of accounts and scroll down. It's preset because you do those settings when you set up by default in LeanLaw. So you're going to see that you've got your hierarchy. So you've got the funds held in trust as the parent account. And then you can see under here, you can see where maybe the names and the matter names, you can see how with the names and the numbers, they're really long. I use this in another video to show the example. So you just— I just don't— I prefer not to have the number here. So it kind of keeps it a little bit cleaner. But if we go to come down to Suzanne Keir, Suzanne Keir, she's right here in the estate planning. So she's right here. There's no money in there at all. The steps again are creating the client, creating the matter. Connect it to QuickBooks, create the trust account, which you push into QuickBooks at the same time. That's all there— that's all the steps. So hopefully that makes sense, and I will see you in the next video.
