Rear View Mirror

Hi there, Linda Artisani, Artisani Bookkeeping. This is the time of the year when you start to look forward to the future. Last week we touched upon goal setting and ways that you can start to frame your personal goals and set them in stone so that we can start to work towards the future and work towards maybe getting some business goals in place. You have to start personally to develop the growth externally, right? So a lot of times there's places we can look at that probably need improvement. Take a look at your website. I always say a website is kind of like a will. You have to keep reexamining it year after year. If you don't, it gets stale and old. That's a place that you can look to start to build on your business, right? Your business, that's your bulletin board, right? That's your way to let people know who you are. And some of the websites I've seen, they've not been the greatest for some of the law firms that I've worked with. I've seen some pretty, very boring, very old-fashioned looking. Another way, if you're looking at your past records, a lot of the people, everybody was really focusing on looking at 2020. We got to get the records ready for tax purposes. But sometimes looking at that isn't really going to help you grow. So looking in that rearview mirror might not be the way to figure out how to grow the business. How can we get to the point of growth? Start to examine your leads. Look at your marketing efforts. You're spending money on marketing. A lot of law firms spend a lot of money on marketing. Where are the marketing dollars going and how many leads are converted into actual clients? Based on the marketing efforts. Are you spending a ton of money on Google Ads but not getting the value back? That's another way. I want to take you to, to looking at QuickBooks, looking at how I use custom fields. So custom fields feature is really powerful in QuickBooks Online Advanced, and I use it to add that little box lead gen on my invoice. So I can type in from a dropdown list Exactly where the lead came from. And that really is a powerful piece of data that can be added on to the invoice. And I'm tracking the lead. If it's a paid invoice, now I can figure out exactly how profitable each lead and where the source of the lead is coming from. So it's all about that kind of reporting and that kind of a data capture. I'm going to take you there. I'm going to show you one of those invoices with that lead on it with the lead gen box. And I'm going to take you to custom fields and show you how to add the Net Promoter Score, which I think is another powerful way to track your marketing efforts and to see if you can capture that referral and keep it so that that client will refer you to other clients. That's one of the major ways law firms actually grow their, their customer base. Let me share my screen. Here we are inside of QuickBooks Online Advanced, and you can see that I've created in this, this little tiny lead gen box, this Google Ads. So it's a dropdown list, and these are the ways and places that this particular firm spends money on client growth. They have referral, Google Ads, and I put them in order. You've got to be really careful when you set these up because if you want them in alphabetical order, Especially for longer lists, I highly recommend alphabetical, but write it on a Word doc and then start to add them because they go in as they go in and you don't really get to move them around. In this case, I put them in place of how I could see the firm was getting their clients. So I put them in the most logical order, which is referral to start with, print ad and such. So you can see that I can pick how this particular client, Joe Evergreen, came to me. Now I can add another one for Net Promoter Score, because a Net Promoter Score is a way to track how happy the client was once the engagement is over. You could call mid, mid-case to see how they're doing. Have somebody in the office make that phone call and give them a little script and what they can ask for questions to find out exactly how well the attorney of record is doing on the matter or the case. And how the client feels back. And maybe halfway through, you can maybe fix a problem and have a happy client at the end of the day. Or you can do it at the end if you want to do it after the engagement's over. There's some ways to automate that if you're a single or sole attorney. You can automate some of that with a form, maybe a Mailchimp form, but the personalized phone call is probably the best. And you could probably hire somebody to do just that piece that you just give them, who's, you know, give them a report of who's been paid and the accounts are closed, and then you could have them do that. So I'm going to come over here to Custom Fields. We're going to add one for Net Promoter Score. So I'm going to add a custom field, and you're only really allowed to have so many that show on the screen. So I'm going to make Net Promoter Score, and that's going to be a score of 1 to 10. So it's going to be a score of 1 to 10. It is going to be number only. Um, maybe I'll use a dropdown because that's probably better, because that way I can track it It's going to be a customer field. It's going to be on the sales receipt and the invoice only. Actually, I'm going to put it on all of them because if I'm going to track how the promoter score is on all the sales receipts, I really want to track that going through per— maybe by cash basis. So I'm just going to come in here and just do— I'm hoping for 10, but I'm just going to do 1, 2. You get the idea, right? 3. I'm just going to create this for I'll do 5 for now, so you get the idea of where I'm coming from here. So score to 1 to 5, and this is really not supposed to be printed on the form. This is just for internal use. And now we have a dropdown list. So now when the person calling up, they can just pull the invoice up. If you've got them in the sales manager role, they can actually pull up the invoice for Joe Evergreen. And now after the matter's closed, put that Net Promoter Score on. And it's really going to be a very highly effective way to track your clients. So that's pretty much the gist of how you can make your accounting platform more powerful. Remember, you can use a program like HubSpot to track the lead coming in. HubSpot integrates with QuickBooks Online. There's also Salesforce is also another one, though most of my clients don't use that because it's really more for the really large firms. But those are typical ones that you'd see with a mid-market firm, although the smaller firm can use it as well. So I hope that's helpful in helping you decide if you want to work with QuickBooks Online Advanced, if you want to help your clients grow and not look behind them to see their future. It's not a great way to go forward. It's a little bit more information inside the, the post itself, more detail. So you can take a look at the article and maybe read it. If you're an accountant or bookkeeper and you want to join our mastermind group, it's called the Accountants Law Lab. We just launched it last week. It's a 2021 thing and we'd love to have you. I will put a link in the blog so you can go to that if you'd like to join us. We have meetings every Wednesday, so it's a lot of fun. We just gather up and we take a topic and Sarah and I go over it specific to law firms, and then we will even go into some of your books or whatever, whatever you feel comfortable with. If you are an attorney or work at a law firm and you're looking for someone to help you with your accounting, we also do that. So please reach out. And on that note, here's wishing you all a wonderful, wonderful week. Bye now.