The BEST Workflow When Working with Attorneys as an Accountant

Hi there. Linda Artesani, Artesani Accounting. And this week I'm going to dive into my workflow. And it's something I haven't done for maybe a couple of years now, and it has changed a little bit. We have taken out a piece and replaced it with a piece, but I wanted to dive in just to show you how all the parts work. A lot of times we'll run into working with the mid-market firms and they'll have a piece over here. This is time slips, but it doesn't talk to QuickBooks. And this is how we do our trust accounting, but it's in a spreadsheet and none of the parts work. So you want this to be like a cog in a wheel. To all turn together. That's where the automation is really successful. It'll help you save time and money. On that note, let's dive into my workflow. I'm going to take you into some of the pieces, not all of them, but some of the pieces just to show you exactly how much the, the best parts of all of these softwares. And the best part again is how they work together and make it a seamless workflow where everybody talks to each other and it's very much a very open working workflow that is not segmented and you're not having to do redundant work. First stop, I call this the jewel. So all the other pieces kind of work off of the crown jewel here, and this is QuickBooks Online Advanced. Why do I love Advanced? Well, there's a lot of reasons. So I'm going to dive into workflows. That's one of the places I like to stop first. And there's so many features inside of QuickBooks Online Advanced that I love. I love the users and permissions. I can streamline them down. I'll take you there next. I love workflows. The reason why I love the workflow section is because it allows me to make some of the processes that back in the old days, we'd have to run a report. Let's see how many people haven't paid their accounts receivable. What's an open AR? Make a list, make statements, send them out, send reminders. All those things used to be very manual. Used to print them, put them in envelopes. I mean, we want to get really back in the day. But now you can set this up so that you can automatically send any unsent invoices. Be careful with that one. That's the one that I really don't ever like to use because, like, my controls. But in some circumstances it actually works, especially like a solo practice. They may have worked really hard on an invoice and forgotten to send it. Bank deposit reminder I use a lot with a lot of the firms because we partner with the mid-market firms. So they may have a bookkeeper on staff. It's just to remind them as the software, the external software sends it in, It reminds them that it hasn't been grouped for deposit and brought to the bank. Maybe it brought to the bank but not put into QuickBooks. So those are the reasons why you want to use that one. Invoice approval. If you're not using a LeanLaw or a Clio, you can actually force this system as a workaround to do an approval system with the attorney. You can create the draft and then use manual time entries. Very clunky, not recommended. But if you're just starting out, at least get the accounting software in place so you're able to grow. And then you can use the invoice approval to create— if you have someone on staff helping create the invoices, create the invoice, create the approval, move it along. Payment due reminder is another one I like to remind the clients. So we send out the invoice, it's not paid on the date it's due, there's a reminder there. If it's overdue, another reminder. So it's another place that you'll be able to integrate into the system, and it takes the person out of it and makes it so that anything— nothing's missed. So there's not somebody going through a paper aging report and checking off where they've done the work. It's already put into the system. So that's just that one. And then I'll take you over to Users because Users are pretty cool in QuickBooks Online Advanced. I can manage my users here and I'll just show you, you can actually create users for your client. So you have the ability to— nice little video here. So I just have a couple here in the Billable. You can make it a Primary or an Admin. You can create roles. So there's custom roles already built in, but I can actually take any of these roles and on the fly maybe take and add and edit it. So that I can make it for my clients specifically, because every law firm's different. So once we get into this role setting, maybe I have in some of the firms, like in the immigration firms, they have a receptionist at the desk. People come in, they hand money over, they want to become a US citizen. They don't want to turn the money away. They want to keep the workflow going, but maybe the attorney's not available. The receptionist can take the money in, create a sales receipt, but I don't want them to see the bank. So that's just a piece that you can kind of streamline down. That's just an example of that. So I can give them banking rights or not, and banking deposit rights. Or not, so they can have the ability to create a bank deposit. Typically, that wouldn't be the receptionist. So that's one of the places that I really like to work within QuickBooks Online Advanced. And then you would just build this out as you go. Of course, I can't make a pit stop here without going into reporting. And there's multiple reports. Smart Reporting by Fathom should be its own video, but it's got so many things in there. You can do forecasting, budgeting. I love goal setting. So those are the big pieces of Fathom that I like. And it's— what is nice for us as accountants is it makes the pretty pictures. So a lot of times you present in reports to your client and you're like— they're like, oh, all the numbers. This is a way to present a nice package to them that really opens up the door to having them see exactly what's inside of the reports without having to go into the numbers. Attorneys love to talk and they're not really big on looking at a lot of numbers, at least some of them. And this is an option with Fathom Reporting. Of course, we've got management reports here, we've got custom reports where you can build it out. We have Report Builder, which is also in here, and we've got the Performance Center. Now, if your attorney is interested in diving in to see, you can create these custom cards where they can see a quick ratio, accounts receivable by aging period. These are just some of the cards that you can create yourself. You can put 25 of them here. Kind of overwhelmed, but depending on your clients, some of them want to watch a lot of metrics. Some of them are really just like, no, that's okay. There's even benchmarking here in QuickBooks Online Advanced. I didn't want to make this a really long video, but of course I cannot miss LeanLaw. We use Clio at our firm as well, but LeanLaw, of course, has my heart. It's my favorite. I love the way it integrates with QuickBooks. I love the fact that we've got this ready to bill, draft, review, and approved tab so I can create the draft bills, let the client know they can hop into the draft section and see what's in drafts, pull those up on the screen and see what it looks like. Maybe they wanna see if this is what they wanna see. We can edit them right here. If the client says, you know what, don't send that expense just yet, we didn't pay for it, you can take it off right here. Can save it for later. I can write this down to zero. As you can see, it's kind of gray and light, but you can see that we have that ability. You can make time non-billable. So if you're writing downtime, it's really flexible. Now I would like to get also into all of the distributions and expenses. You can see we have trust management here. It's just, it's so easy to see what's in trust. You can see what's in open accounts receivable. If your trust is not balanced, you're going to get these orange triangles, which means I've been messing around the file and it's not balanced. It's a way to visibly see it. I can click on anything that has a QB. I can click on any of these numbers. It's going to pull me back into QuickBooks. So I'm able to find out what's wrong. I'm going to run a balance sheet, see what's going on in the account balances. So it's an important feature right there that I'm able to jump into. Distributions is really wonderful. Plus we have receivables. I like the way we can customize this account so that I can have the attorney be invited in. They're never in QuickBooks. They do what they have to do. They do their time and billing. They can track their own receivables here. They can track their distributions here. So we've got Distribution tab. You have to set up, uh, origination and all that. I don't have that set up in this file, but you can see how many payments have been made out, and you can actually track origination and responsible attorney here. You have 3 custom fields that you're allowed to track. That's all in settings. So you're able to, from the QuickBooks screen, maybe track classes from here. We have Gravity Legal, which is so simple to ask for a deposit to trust. It's just a one-click, uh, process when you have a Gravity Legal payment account, which is merchant services. You have the ability to set up the class tracking here. You have the ability to add some extra custom fields. If you want to create something specific for the attorney, you do it there, connect it here inside of QuickBooks. Last stop, Dashboards and Reach. So if you have that client mid-market that's got a lot of metrics they have to track and they don't have a lot of a lot of ability to do what we needed to do inside of QuickBooks, Fathom, or inside of LeanLaw because there's reports in LeanLaw as well as reports in QuickBooks. But if we're not seeing that whole picture and we have some complex compensation that maybe doesn't fit any of these models because there's a what-if here and a what-if there, we have the ability to create these beautiful dashboards. And sometimes we make these dashboards just for the attorneys so that they can have the attorneys log in. Maybe they're tracking a metric where they're starting to track inside of, uh, maybe they're tracking a goal that the attorney wanted to make and meet for their, their amount of sales, amount of revenue brought into the firm, and how much has been billed. There's all sorts of goals we can create. And then with Reach, we're able to make a separate dashboard that the client, the client's attorney can log in, not see any of the financial data for the company. You only give them what they— you want them to see, which would be their own individual report card. And that can be used for tracking And so that you can decide if you've got a bigger firm, 50, 60 attorneys on staff, you probably want to have something like that so you can track the individual attorney, and maybe that'll be a basis for their raise or maybe a bonus of their base pay. Or even a bonus system. So this is one of the things we love. I mean, the sky is the limit within Reach. You can pull in Google Sheets. Just want to give you a little overview, a high-level overview of Reach. Again, this could be a whole nother topic. It's a fabulous program, very versatile. You can turn on and off accounts if an attorney wants to see a balance sheet but doesn't want to see the trust account and you have it, obviously, if you're using LeanLaw, it's inside all the trust accounts and liability accounts are inside of QuickBooks. You can easily shut that off and show the attorney exactly what's his money, his or her money, and how you can see exactly what's in the balance sheet for the business. So that is it on my grand tour of some of my apps. I didn't get to Licio private messaging software that we we insist on when we work with clients. Private messaging, private place to store the documents all in one place. The team can access it, but it's also very highly secure, especially when it comes to the messaging. And then of course, I didn't get into Dex, which automates the heck out of LeanLaw, imports the bills, pushes them in. We can have the attorneys all logged in there, put their receipts in there, push the bills into QuickBooks very automatically because you can preset everything. Just add the matter and poof, it goes. And that gets drawn up into LeanLaw because it's got a 2-way sync. These are all hands-off, light-touch parts of our job that makes the job much easier. And when you add automation, you are adding— and technology, you are adding efficiency and you are adding accuracy, and you can't beat that. So I hope you enjoyed this little tour. I've got videos inside my website on all of these individual products so you can see that. They're short videos, and hopefully that helps. If you are a law firm looking for someone to help you automate and become cloud-based, reach out to us. We do data migration. We help law firms move to the future. On that note, I hope you all have a wonderful, wonderful day, and make sure you hit the subscribe button for more. Bye now.