In this instructional video, Linda Artesani of Artesani Bookkeeping explains the concept of Work in Process (WIP) for law firms and why tracking unbilled time and expenses is critical. She contrasts the cumbersome, error‑prone manual methods lawyers often use in QuickBooks Essentials—such as creating sub‑accounts for each matter and juggling external time‑tracking apps—with the streamlined workflow offered by the LeanLaw application. Through a live screen demo, she shows how to enter time, view ready‑to‑bill entries, generate the powerful WIP/Ready‑to‑Bill report, and move funds from trust to operating accounts. She also highlights how Hubdoc can automatically import bills and sync them to LeanLaw, eliminating spreadsheet workarounds. Throughout, she emphasizes the hidden costs of manual processes and makes a cost‑benefit case for adopting LeanLaw, noting that even a modest hourly rate can be eroded by the extra time spent on billing. The video concludes with a call to read a complementary blog post and encourages attorneys to adopt the automated solution.
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Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. I'm back. This is my first video for 2020. I did rehash some of my videos last year and there was a lot of travel involved on my part and now I'm back. Last week I did a post on budgeting and this week's post is on Work in process, affectionately known by the acronym WIP. So funny story, Sarah Prevost, my business partner, and I, we do a lot of work together with attorneys. We have even our own business called The Proper Trust. And we were going back and forth on an email chain and we kept calling it WIP like whipped cream. And then also made me think about Whip It, the song Whip It, whip it good. So it's kind of two-pronged, a little bit of a play on words here in the blog post. But what is WIP? So even if you work with a contractor, you will find that WIP is important— work in process. So if they do any work on a job, if a job is in process and they've collected a deposit, but they keep on working, and you start to track the time, the labor expenses. It's the same thing when you work with attorneys. It's the same exact thing. So the attorneys may start to spend money on expenses. They may start to spend time with their client that has not been billed. So it's really anything that's not been billed. Even fixed fees can be tracked. A lot of times attorneys will actually, especially like a solo practitioner, and I've had this happen, and I just had it happen the other day, where a solo practitioner, they're trying to save money, so they save money by not buying an app like LeanLaw, which I've got the LeanLaw shirt on today. I don't know if you can see. I heart lawyers. Mm-hmm. So it's— I'll get up there so you can see. So it's an important app. It's not even that expensive, but it will save you a ton of time. So a lot of times people try to save money. I did the same thing when I started my practice. I didn't really want to spend a lot of money. I tried to keep my costs contained, but you have to factor in how much it costs to do the job manually. So this attorney actually took advanced client costs and he used that in the asset account and he tracked as subaccounts all his matters. So all the matter names are on the chart of accounts, which you have to be careful with QuickBooks. He's using Essentials. And you have to be careful with QuickBooks because once you let your, your amount of accounts on the chart of accounts grow past that 250, that magic sweet spot, you have to move up in product anyway. So it might be more beneficial to pick up LeanLaw, which will save you from that as he starts to grow. I mean, he might grow out of the program anyway, but at least this way he could keep it on the reins because now what he's going to have to do Is keep an eye on that growing amount of costs that he's spending money on. And he tracks his time in an outside app. So tracking the time in an outside app, he has to actually bring that in to bill and then watch those expenses that he's now tracked in that sub-asset account. I know it's really complicated. With LeanLaw, it's so easy and so simple. So I'm going to take you to my screen and show you how easy it is to use LeanLaw to do the same process as this attorney was doing manually. In a very segmented way, which took a lot of time. And LeanLaw does it really sweetly. So let me take you to my screen and I'll show you. It's always amazing to me how people are very creative in the way they do their workflows and what they think is a great way to do something to kind of get a workaround. So he was actually in Essentials where there's no way to track expenses per customer, adding another layer to the problem that he was running into with his subcategories. So here's my law firm account. So law firm is the name of the company. I should probably give it a name. I'll have to think of some creative name. Maybe I'll make a contest out of that. But in LeanLaw, you can track the time. So as the attorneys work on the job, and in this scenario I'm the attorney, and I'm putting in the date that I did the work, just pick any day here. It's very simple. You can just come in here. I'm going to pick Jonathan Fishman as my— he's my client, and I'm doing estate planning for him. So I can just put anything I want here. You know, blah, blah, blah, it doesn't matter. And you could type in the words of whatever that the attorney did for the client here. I can select my rate and I can pick my standard rate. And then I can do a timer or I can just put the time in here. So this is the way the attorney would be able to track how much time they worked on this particular matter. And I create the entry. But as you can see here, this entry is just sitting here waiting. So if I was going to do the billing, I'll come over to the billing tab. You can see here on the billing tab that these are ready to be billed. So these things are here ready to be billed. You can see the, the billable time is here. And then I don't have any fixed fee items in his bill, but I also have some expenses that are there to be billed on his particular matter. And then I've got Mary Smith with some time as well. So what you want to do here is this is my WIP. This is all my WIP here. So if I wanted to go to reports. Come over to my WIP report or ready to bill. And I love this report. So this is one of the most powerful reports in, in my opinion. It's one of the most essential reports in lien law. It really gives the attorney to see what in one page, what was the receivables balance. If they have— if they're an attorney that doesn't use a lot of trust accounting and they have receivables, even if they, if they have a lot of— I've got attorneys that— immigration attorneys that work where they just invoice out, that's not anything to do with the trust. So it gives them their receivables balance, it's going to give them the hours that are ready to bill. So this is the money that they're going to be able to track as revenue. And it will also give them if they do have a trust scenario, like an estate planning attorney, they will have the ability to see how much is there, and how they can do the billing to get that and receive the payments through the trust, start to shift that money over to the law firm. So moving it from trust account to operating, which is done really nicely. And I can bring you back. I've got plenty of videos on how to do that using LeanLaw. But in one screen here, you can see how much money is just sitting there waiting to be billed. How can we get the cash flow going for the attorney? This report is the report to look at. And there's a lot of reports in LeanLaw, all about customer stuff. But this is one of the ones I think is the most important as far as tracking your— what's out there ready to be brought into your business and what you need to as an attorney, see what's there to be able to start to reflect it in your revenue. If you're trusting attorney, we can start to move the money out of trust to, you know, do the cycle of billing and receive the payment via the trust account. Or we can do this for any other attorney that's just tracking and needs to bill out. You'll see what time you've spent. And as I mentioned, the other attorney, he was tracking his time on this app with some kind of free app. He was tracking his advanced client costs. He was tracking them as sub-advanced client cost accounts for each person so he could track the money in and money out as he billed. It was just his way of tracking I've seen attorneys track it in an Excel spreadsheet. So they actually pull up a spreadsheet and start to manually put the bills and fees into QuickBooks, but then they also keep it on a spreadsheet and track it back when they go to billing. It's a pretty painful process doing it that way. So I hope that just this little short video will show you, if you're an attorney that you bill at $250 an hour and it takes you an extra hour every month to bill, you're losing $250. Or at least if you take the $250 and subtract the amount of the app for LeanLaw, You are losing money when you start to do the manual processes and all the workarounds to have it work for you to be able to get it in your system properly. The best part about automation, and you can layer Hubdoc in here too, where Hubdoc, you can feed all the bills in and then start to code them into the matters, drop them in Advanced Client Costs, and they get brought up with a 2-way sync into LeanLaw ready to go be billed back to your client. It's a beautiful workflow. So just think about the fact that there's more chance of error or something getting missed if you're doing it manually instead of using the app. The app will save you. You probably will find that you'll save money by using LeanLaw as your application if you're doing this kind of work. So I hope that's helpful. I know, short video, but hopefully that's helpful. I got the post to go along with it if you want to read a little bit about work in process, WIP as we call it. So WIP it good. And until next week, bye now. Bye.
