Setting up a new client in LeanLaw

Hi there, Linda Ardisani, Ardisani Bookkeeping. So I'm continuing with my blog posts on how to work with law firms and really starting from the very beginning. So the first post was for an attorney who is just starting out and needed a fresh chart of accounts. So I shared my chart of accounts with you for that purpose so that you could use it and start your own law firm practice with QuickBooks. The second post was where do you go from there as far as doing a Maybe you're from desktop and you've been working in desktop and you decided this is the time to come to the cloud. And so we converted the file from QuickBooks Desktop to QuickBooks Online. So this next post is going to be more geared towards the accountant. And I'm going to assume that you're niching out into working with law firms. And now you want to start to learn how to— you get your free account, you like LeanLaw, you've done all the investigatory work trying to find the correct exact app that you know will work with QuickBooks, because you know that QuickBooks is your software that you want to work for your accounting work. And you've discovered that LeanLaw is the best one. And I've done my homework. I've looked at a lot of them. And truly, LeanLaw is the best one to use for working with QuickBooks. It works the best. You know, Clio is great, but it doesn't really work with QuickBooks that well. It's more of a Xero thing. And there's PracticePanther, there's other ones, but really, it's a great one. It's affordable. And it makes attorneys work a lot easier. So if you're working with a client, you'll find that it's a lot easier to work with LeanLaw. They can work on the LeanLaw side doing their billing, and then you can work with QuickBooks side. So let's go to your free account because you get a free account as an accountant. So let's go to there to start. I'll share my screen here. And here's the firm we converted last week. So I'm going to come to LeanLaw and log into my free account. So I signed up for my free account, you just come here to accountants, And then if you want to become a LeanLaw accounting pro, you can sign up and get your free accountant's version. We've got a list of people here for accounting pros. And actually, to start your free trial, you would start here with start a free trial. So you come here to become a pro, and there's a little bit of a video here and where you can send you— they send you clients. And then you get your free LeanLaw account, which is, which is invaluable because it lets you be able to get into, into LeanLaw with on your own and have access to several. You can put all your customers in there, all your attorneys that you work for in there. So you can sign up to become a pro, get your free, free trial started. So I'm just going to sign in. So I'm going to take you through the steps to add a new client to LeanLaw and give them their own— give them their own account so they can start. So they're going to come to you asking you what software they want to use, or maybe they've already discovered they want to use QuickBooks. And then you guide them to go to LeanLaw as their software. Now I've set mine up to have it come up to the calendar to start and you You can do a lot of things under settings. And actually, this is where we're going to go to. So you can see here, you've got your settings, you can fill out your information, you can change your homepage to whatever you want to change it. But I want to go to my firms. And then you can see right here, it says new firms. This is what's so great about this software. It's very easy to work with and easy to truly to, to work in. It's very easy to even instruct your client on how to use it because the clients There's really little to teach them. And it's very simple and intuitive app. So I'm going to set up a new firm. The new firm, I'm just going to call it Law Firm because that's the name of the company. And I only need one seat. And I'm going to set the firm up. You start here. So the account successfully set up and I'm on a trial of 14 days to start. So you could use that as a demo to start to show the, the attorney that you may be working with. Here's this software if you want to see if they want to maybe check out a few. So we can log into this firm. This firm here is going to be— so we're now currently logged in here. So now I can start to set things up. Set up entries, billing, matters. Depends on your client, what kind of an attorney they are, whether they're going to have a lot of different matters, or if they're going to— if they're a trust account, they need trust accounts, you want to set those things up here as well. There's a lot of things in your settings. So really, our first step after we set up the account, obviously putting all the information into settings. The next step is to connect this to my QuickBooks account. So I'm going to connect to QuickBooks. And hopefully I don't have the pop-up problem. I'm going to select my firm here. And then I'm going to look for my law firm. It's an L. So we've got quite a few accounts here. So maybe it's further here. And here it is. So I'm going to select it. And now I'm going to confirm it. It's that simple. Hit Connect. So now this account is going to feed and connect to my actual desktop file that I converted last week from QuickBooks Desktop to QuickBooks Online. So it's going to need help with mapping the legal services, syncing the expenses, mapping expenses. So we'll hit Next. Which account do you want the services hours to go to in QuickBooks? So this is going to be where you're going to select your account on your chart of accounts. Obviously, you want an income account. And you want to pick an existing account. You should have that set up on your QuickBooks file, either from the first example where I imported the chart of accounts or from the converted file. And you also have the option here to create a new account. Hit Next. Product or services. So this is picking the first one, but you can pick whatever it is, whatever kind of law firm work you do. So you'll have to have set up some items, and I can get into items on the other side of— in QuickBooks in a subsequent blog post how to set up your items to make sure that they go to the right categories. Case management, it's certainly a good selection here. Enable QuickBooks sync. You definitely want to do that. You want them talking to each other. And then I'm going to call handle expenses. We recommend handling expenses created in QuickBooks to an asset account. Prepaid expenses, I would call them that. I actually like the client advanced costs. I don't know if I have that. Well, we have prepaids, so we'll use prepaids. But it's up to you. I actually like the name Client Cost Advanced, so you can put that in there and create one or just connect to the one you have already. And then the expense account is— let's see if we can grab— I don't have one. Okay, so we'll just take that. So obviously this file didn't have an expense account for that product or service, so we're just going to pick prepaids again, which we're going to create a new one. And we're going to sync all dates. Expenses that don't have a corresponding expense in QuickBooks are sometimes called soft expenses. Those are things like your kind of your overhead charges. So, um, because they are different, then hit next. We recommend picking an income account. So I'm going to pick that legal fee income again. Um, actually, I'm going to pick billable. Next, product or service expense created in LeanLaw. We're going to create billable expense because I don't have that in there. So it actually takes you through the steps here and helps you out, which makes it really simple. It's actually even a little simpler than QuickBooks is. We don't have that many expenses. Then you're done. So now you can start creating invoices and maybe tracking time with the clients that are in here and start to really work through— this is just the setup of QuickBooks, connecting the accounts, connecting the— you start to do the billing, it's going to start to connect billable expenses, it's going to connect straight up legal service income. And you'll have that all here. And then if you want to, I like to put a CC and maybe CC myself because I want to see You know, my name. I want to be able to get a copy of the invoice when it goes out, and maybe it's going to go to another partner in the firm. You can just pick that partner, whoever you want to pick it to, and then you just hit save the changes. You can import your clients from QuickBooks. I highly recommend that. So I'm going to import the clients and pull them all in, and there they are. And then use the checkboxes. You can select all, and I'm going to import all my matters and clients. that are currently in the books. So if you're brand new, you won't have to do that, but at least they're here. And now it's reading, it's connecting, it's seeing on the QuickBooks side what's, what's there, and it's pulling that into LeanLaw. So maybe you did it manually before and, you know, did it through QuickBooks, um, and you're good. It's all done. And please check your list for any errors. It's green, so I'm going to assume there's no errors. Let's see. I don't see any errors. So we're good. That's connected. And basically that's as simple as it is to set this up. And then we can start to have the attorney work on their side to start to make their matters, do their time entries, create their billable, or maybe the bookkeeper is actually doing the billable expenses, entering the bills. I like to use Hubdoc for having the documents, having the attorney extract the documents and give them to me because I want the copies. And also allows me to use Hubdoc to use the feature where I can set it up to code it to send it into QuickBooks. And then once it's in QuickBooks, I like to connect Billbees. Billbees is a bill payment, inexpensive source of bill payment in QuickBooks. It's just very basic, but it's a great price point for adding your app stack. So you've got QuickBooks now, you've got LeanLaw. possibly Hubdoc, possibly BillBees. You've got a nice little app stack here to be able to really take this automation to the cloud, right? So now you have this beautiful app stack that's going to help you to work efficiently, affordably for the attorney. And it's really going to be a beautiful thing because everything's going to be connected and synchronized. When it gets to the bill side, you're going to be able to have copies of all the bills here. And with LeanLaw, you're going to have a beautifully very attractive, very attractive and professional, which is the key, professional invoicing system here. So it's really a nice thing to have set up. And I also recommend maybe logging into ChronoBooks and getting a backup so you have a backup whenever you start to add all these apps. You want to have a backup of your file in case something goes awry. So ChronoBooks is definitely a suggestion there. And of course, like a ShareFile or something that's got secure document document transfers, document software that holds documents that's secure. It's secure on the way up and the way down. So that's another really great tip. So I think I'll stop it there. I want to keep this short, these, these videos shorter, on the shorter side, explaining how I work with attorneys and working with QuickBooks and LeanLaw and all the other apps, but they all kind of work together in harmony. Thanks for watching. Bye now.