In this YouTube presentation, Linda Artesani of Artesani Bookkeeping addresses law‑firm owners and partners navigating the early COVID‑19 disruption. She opens with brief mindfulness and gratitude exercises to help attorneys lower stress and improve decision‑making. She then shifts to practical financial management using QuickBooks Online Advanced, walking through the Performance Center cash‑flow report to illustrate the sharp revenue decline many firms are seeing. Artesani demonstrates how to use the Manage Workflows feature (and comparable apps like Invoice Sherpa) to automate invoice reminders, collect stale accounts‑receivable, and monitor trust/IOLTA balances. She advises a systematic review of recurring expenses—software subscriptions, office supplies, business meals—and suggests negotiating or eliminating unnecessary costs. Staffing strategies are explored, including leveraging the Paycheck Protection Program, voluntary salary reductions for senior partners, and preserving lower‑paid staff. Throughout, she emphasizes gratitude practices and invites viewers to join a Facebook community (QB Community Live) for ongoing support on bookkeeping, loan programs, and wellness. The video blends mental‑health tips with concrete bookkeeping actions to help law firms survive the short‑term crisis and emerge leaner and more resilient.
Chapters
Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. So of course we've been working through the last several weeks of posts with how to manage stress, how to help get yourself physically feeling better, and then also shifting to being remote and working remotely. Last week we talked about how to set up your office and get the right tools and equipment. To portray that professionalism that you're all looking for. So let's face it, attorneys as a general rule live with a lot of stress naturally, and it's important to just take a few moments every day. Find a quiet space. It can even be at your desk. You can just maybe turn around, face a window, or just sit quietly for a minute. It's going to help you bring the blood pressure down and just connect to that Parasympathetic nervous system. It's going to calm your body. Once you've done that, you'll be able to make better decisions and make better choices going forward with how we can get through this short period of time. So at least we know that it's a short period of time. And then find a way to just find a piece of gratitude in life so that you know that there's a light at the end of the tunnel and that we're all in this together. And when you think of it from that perspective, I was talking to a friend the other day and I'm like, you know, I, every once in a while I go into that pity party mode and then have to stop and say to myself, stop it, because I've got a roof over my head. I've got food. I've got it a lot better. This is not a bad house to be stuck in. As much as I want to get out and be with people, that day will come. So just take a moment here. Just find a quiet space. Sit down, close your eyes. Just focus on your breath. We'll just do this for 1 minute. Focus on the inhale and focus on the exhale. Don't try to change it or force it. Just allow it to come in and out through the nose. You may even notice that there's a little bit of a pause between the breaths, that they're not fluid one to the other. The space between each breath. And then gently blink open your eyes. It's a simple, simple technique, and it doesn't take long, and it's going to help you make better decisions going forward. Because really the task at hand for today's video is all about how to trim the fat, how to find ways to get through this next month or 2 months. And have your business survive the times that we're in. So I'm going to take you to a file and we're gonna pretend it's my client. It is a demo file, so it's got some junk in it and we've, we've just played around in that one. So it's my playground. I'm gonna take you there. I'm gonna show you some ways to work to keep the business going, trim the fat. And it's actually not a bad thing to do and to stay doing even after this. Keep the business running lean and mean. Let me take you to my file and I'll show you what I'm talking about. So here we are in my demo law firm file. And what's really awesome is I'm in a QuickBooks Online Advanced file. So we have this report. We have this Performance Center where we have this report called Cash Flow. Now it's also a report that's also in the Plus file, but this is nice because we've got this beautiful graph that we can show how the cash flow is doing. And as you can see here, we had a, we had a pretty good beginning of March and then it just crashed right down. And that's what you're probably going to see in a lot of the files. So if you're an attorney and you're looking at your cash flow, you're going to see that everything is down. So, you know, your revenue is down. I don't have to tell you that. You know, by looking at your records and knowing that there's not a lot of billing, that maybe the clients used to come in the door and they're not coming in the door. And maybe you're still capturing leads. But right now, with the way the world is, you're probably finding that people just aren't spending money. They're not going out. So they're not, you know, depending on the type of firm, maybe they're not even thinking about their estate planning at the moment. There's just so much staying at home you can do. Although I did contact my estate planning lawyer and we're working through the files and we're going to be going in and meeting with the estate planner and signing everything wearing gloves and masks, but it can be done, right? So we are going to meet in their office just to sign the final documents, but everything else was done through Zoom. And ironically, it was done through my Zoom because they were not using that technology. So I got to share that with them, which was kind of cool. I think I planted a seed in that law firm, but Anyway, getting back to the test at hand. So you can see the cash flow has dropped significantly, the operating activities are down, the net cash flow is down. So that's, that's where your, your, your pain point is, right? So I got this report by going to Reports and then coming to the Performance Center. And you can build these reports. And I'll backlink to another article that kind of steps you through that. So another great thing about having another way to help get some money— so you got— you're not getting the influx of customers, you're not— the marketing's out there, it's not working right now because of the situation that we're in. And you know, that's going to be short term. So if you've got really no revenue, most of the law firms do have some cash, but how long is the cash going to last? So you probably have a little bit of money sitting in accounts receivable. And in that case, we've got another really cool thing in QuickBooks Online Advanced, which it kind of mimics Invoice Sherpa. So if you're in one of the lesser programs or lesser SKUs, you could put that app on top of those programs and get very similar results to what's been here under Manage workflows. And actually Invoice Sherpa has more tools and more bells and whistles. It's an expensive, more expensive app. But it's a way to start to get the receivables, get the money, the old stale money that's been sitting on the books for a while that no one's collected, to try to get that in and try to get the, get some of that money collected. So if these bills have been around for a while, and you just haven't had the time to make the phone call or write the letter saying, you know, this is outstanding, now's the time to do it. You've got the time, you've got less clients walking in the door. So one of the things I like about QuickBooks Online Advanced, and I'll take you to it, you come over to the gear. And you can come over to Manage Workflows. I think I already have this set up, but there's a few ways you can do this. There is also automatically send unsent invoices. Know that with this one, you have to be very careful because if you click it, it will send every invoice that you have that's unsent. So that's why I'm kind of a little leery. You might want to look through your list and see which things are there. Bank deposits reminder is another great one, but you also have this overdue invoice reminder and a payment due invoice reminder. I like both of these because the payment due, it just sends the invoice out. And if the invoice is due in 15 days, then it will send it out and remind them on the 15th day that this is due. The overdue one is if it's due in 15 days, it's not paid, you can set the parameters around it to have it send something out maybe in 15 more days. So in 30 days that, hey, this is now past due. So that's the automated feature that's actually baked into QuickBooks Online Advanced. It's not in the other products, but it is here. So some of these features are great. Most of the law firms I work with, their accounts receivable is either they don't really have a handle on, or it's way out of, out of control. They haven't had time and they just let it go. They write a lot down. And it's really not a great way to do business. That's one of the things that my business partner Sarah and I do a lot of times when we get the records cleaned up. We start to focus on that because you really want to— if your terms are net 30, I want to see that ratio to be zero, right? You don't want— you want to see all the invoices collected. And with the trust accounting, a lot of times when we start to dig into the trust accounting and looking at the balances to see what's happening in the balances, a lot of times the staff may have done the work to put the transactions in but not actually physically moved the money over from IOLTA to operating if the attorney has received the revenue. That's important. So you might find there's some money sitting in IOLTA that really should already be in operating, and that would be a nice find right about now with the things that are happening around the world. One of the other places that we go to, what I've been doing with my clients, if they, if they're open to it and they want to start to shrink the fat in the file, we just go through some of these expenses. So maybe there's some things in here that you're paying for that you want to either stop, maybe they're not necessary. Sometimes they're those shiny objects of apps that we bought that we thought were gonna be fabulous, and then maybe just never bought them, but you've got this recurring bill, and we could stop and shrink some of those. So you've got some here that you could go through. Obviously, business meals is most likely going to shrink because you're not out there taking clients to lunch or dinner. And there are other things in here that maybe you could, you could shrink down that are here. This is the biggest category, this office supplies and software. And you can just come up here. This is really a cool place. You come up here and I have the names here, you know, everything's listed under name. So I can group this by name. I love this feature in QuickBooks Online. It's really helpful. I can group this by name. And now when I run the report, it shows me the services that I'm paying for. I can see maybe Box is a little bit pricey. And maybe I want to switch to something not as expensive. Maybe I want to move it all to Google and have the Google Drive, which is fairly inexpensive, and start to share and keep my documents there. I like Licio. That's a great all-in-one app because it's got the security. But you know, now might not be the time to pick that up, but it might be. So you can see as we come through here, there might be some things that you could maybe even negotiate down. Maybe you're not using ShareFile. So there's a lot of things in here. Maybe you can go through the— if you have time and you can go to your office, maybe go through the office and see what office supplies you have. Maybe— and I worked with a company that I think they, they're still using— the bookkeeper has been gone for almost 20 years. And she had so much paper in there and envelopes and ink cartridges, which was amazing to me that she had so many ink cartridges for printers that weren't even there. So just kind of cleaning out that closet isn't a bad idea. Maybe you can donate it. There are ink places you can donate it to. But that's another tip that you could use. One of the places that I find that you can do this, and there's a lot of law firms now doing this, is they're sitting down with the managing partners and they're making the hard decision of maybe slimming down the staff, maybe laying people off. Hopefully not. We've got the Paycheck Protection Program in place and hoping that that doesn't have to happen because you want to keep your key personnel right down to the lowest paid one. But I've also seen some firms, and I think this is kind of What is so great about the human being and human nature that people are sitting down and they're saying, look, I had this great pay for a while, but I'm willing to take a 15% cut so that maybe the lowest paid staff does not have to lose their job. And maybe they're cutting all of the staff and like almost like they'll do the most at the highest level and they drop it down and maybe somebody who's making $75,000 or less isn't going to get the cut, but the upper level people are. Just so they can keep their staff and keep paying them in this time. And to me, that is the best thing that you can do as a business owner. You want to keep your staff. I'm sure your hearts are broken if you had to let anybody go at this time. So that's just a few of the tips, but that's absolutely one. And there are— I'll bring an article up to show you that that is happening now, that people are doing that. And it's, it's another way. So The key ways is make— bring in more revenue, slim down some of the expenses if you can. And then of course, if you have to start to reduce the staff or just reduce the salary. So I would put them in that order. Maybe you can keep the staff and maybe this won't last that long when we start to come back to our new normal. Maybe we'll bounce back even better because that's the way of the American people and the way of people in general, right? You don't have to say people in the US, people in general. Are kind. And I can honestly, honestly tell you, if you take every day when you put your feet on the floor and not when you stand up, when you come out of bed and you put your feet on the floor, take 1 minute to think of 3 things you're grateful for. Those 3 things will get you through the day with some positivity. It will help you feel better about everything that's happening. And this is just going to pass. It's not going to be on— we won't be living this forever. And then maybe on the other side of this, we're going to appreciate those times when we're together as human beings and people. And know that we're all doing— we're all in the same place. So I hope that's helpful. And I hope that some of these tips are helpful for you. If you need help from me in any way, please reach out. We've got an amazing Facebook group, QB Community Live, that we help answer questions, especially now. There's so much information coming out with all the different loans and programs with the government. We've been a pretty good resource for that. I'd love to have you join. If you need help with your books, please reach out as well. You need help with meditation tips, I'll help you there too. So on that note, I hope you all have a wonderful, wonderful week. Bye now.
