Simplify Law Firm Finances with Filevine + QuickBooks (Full Transcript)

[00:00:05] Speaker 1: All right. I see the attendees are pretty much leveling. I'm sure folks will join in the next few minutes as well, but we're going to get started. So welcome. So I'm Marshall. I work at Filevine. I'm a solutions engineer here, and I'm so excited to be the host for this webinar on simplifying your finances with Filevine and with our friends over at Finance Skills. So a couple housekeeping items at the beginning. One, we have a Q&A option, so if you have any questions, please post them in the chat. We'll be happy to answer them, as well as this recording will be available and sent out tomorrow morning. As well as, just making sure I have all the housekeeping, the stuff that I'm always like, we're recorded, we have a Q&A, awesome. So the whole point of this webinar is to show efficiencies that our friends at Finance Skills have built for time and billing law firms, for billing administrators, the attorneys and the paralegals working these cases, and just making sure that you're easily getting paid and tracking all that information, because there's so many manual things that can happen for a billing admin or for an attorney going, hey, what happened to this payment? Why isn't it showing up? I should have allocation for this. And so I am so, so, so excited to present this to everyone, and our agenda today is going to look like, so Zach and Zoe from Finance Skills are going to go over the first two items, syncing billable expenses and payments to QuickBooks Online, and automating batch transfers and managing those transactions across bank accounts. And the last part, I will jump into Filevine Payments and just some efficiencies there, and show you also how those efficiencies could add to what Zach and Zoe will be showing. As well, and then after we'll have a Q&A, any questions, if you've ever, I haven't looked at the attendee list, but if anyone has ever worked with me before, I love questions. I love doing things live. So please, please, please ask questions, and we're happy to answer anything you may have. And then just briefly about myself, I've worked at Filevine for some time now. In the last two and a half years, I have been deeply working on our time and billing and payments product with customers, with our product team, with engineering, and being able to even have this webinar today is just really exciting, just with how much progress we've made with the tool and how, and just seeing it every day, how we're helping law firms just better manage their business so you can focus more on the legal work and not as much on like collecting payments and all those things. But enough about myself, I will hand it over to Zach and Zoe to introduce themselves, and then they will go over those first two items.

[00:03:29] Speaker 2: Awesome. Thank you, Marshall. I've definitely worked with Marshall on a handful of clients. So we've done this kind of stuff together for a bit now. So it's fun to record it, make it public, and share what we've come up with everybody. But yeah, I'm Zach. I'm the CFO over at VineSkills. VineSkills is a certified implementation partner of Filevine. It's maybe a name or brand that you all recognize a little more than FinanceSkills. FinanceSkills kind of came about because, well, VineSkills originally built the QuickBooks integration called QuickBooks Connect. It's one of the preferred integrations that Filevine sells directly to the customers. But over at VineSkills, we have the development team that designed it, built it, it continuously improves it, supports it, and onboards it. And so we kind of had this a year and a half of a lot of volume, a lot of interest in our integration. And Zoe and I have talked to like hundreds, probably thousands of firms at this point. And we kind of just were starting to realize there's this need for like some extra help on the QuickBooks side. And so we decided to kind of go all in and we hired a number of QuickBooks Pro advisors under kind of the brand FinanceSkills. And so we now have a whole kind of service operation with QuickBooks Pro advisors doing kind of finance operations, bank recs. We can jump into your finance workflows and do some of that monthly process for you. We can also just kind of consult a few months at a time and kind of help streamline things with Filevine and QuickBooks Online. So that's a little bit about me, FinanceSkills, VineSkills, QuickBooks Connect, a lot of brands floating around there. And I'll go ahead and introduce Zoe as well. Zoe is our product lead for QuickBooks Connect. And so she's been doing this alongside me for a couple of years now and has a lot of experience with it. If you do purchase QuickBooks Connect or you already have, likely you've already met Zoe and she'd be your main point of contact for kind of onboarding the integration. Zoe, I don't know, did you have anything to add to that? I maybe stole your thunder there.

[00:05:35] Speaker 3: Oh, all good. Thank you so much.

[00:05:39] Speaker 2: Yeah, so Zoe is going to be in the comments or in the Q&A section looking for good questions. So as we kind of go through our demo, she's got full permission to interrupt me and kind of stop and throw some questions in there. So definitely please be active and definitely ask your questions. With that, I'll probably share my screen and jump into kind of a demo of some of these features we're excited to share. The QuickBooks Connect integration is really designed to kind of effortlessly and elegantly sync all of your various financial transactions that might happen at a case level in Filevine. We want to easily push them over to QuickBooks so you can easily do things like reconcile your bank, record a billable expense, of course, recognize income for your billing, maintain your trust balances, and kind of make that sync as simple and elegant as possible so the legal team can really just focus in Filevine, work in Filevine where they have all kind of the case data and the billing data they need. So it's kind of the idea we're trying to solve for here. I wanted to start with a quick demonstration of our billable expense type feature. This is going to be based in an expense collection section in Filevine. And so this might be where a member of your legal team first enters a billable expense. So maybe you have like a court fee you've got to pay or a check you got to send out to some vendor, an expert, or something like that. You can go ahead and enter that expense in Filevine first, and our integration can do two things. We can create that transaction in QuickBooks so your accountants aren't, you know, double entry or recreating it, and we can also create a billing item in Filevine's billing section so you can easily put this on your client's next invoice. So this is what our section looks like. If you've already been using an expense section for some time, we can add our integration to it so you don't need to lose all that history and start over with a new section. This is kind of our best practice section that we like to give folks out of the gates. It's worth noting there's a few different transactions here. There's a few different transaction types that we can sync to QuickBooks, that being checks, credit cards, and bills. I'm going to do a bill as an example today. Bills are getting a lot more popular because it kind of gives the accountants a little bit more freedom in QuickBooks on how and when they want to make the payment so they can print a check. They can also use QuickBooks bill pay and have QuickBooks send an ACH or QuickBooks send a check. And so you get a lot of those kind of gain deficiencies when you select a bill. But there is the three options, check, bill, and credit card, all pushed to QuickBooks successfully. So we'll just do an example here. With the bill, we want to give it a date and a due date to make sure accountants can, of course, pay it on time. We'll have a bill number there. We might have a description. So I'll just do court filing fee and a memo, kind of the same. You can also add a supporting document here. And so the neat thing is if you add a receipt or a copy of the invoice, that's going to also attach to the transaction in QuickBooks. So your accounting team, if they're working through your accounts payable or your check printing process, they can see that underlying support and make sure the dollar amount's right, you're paying the right person, do they have a W-9 on file, all that kind of stuff. So it's nice to have that attachment there as well. And then just two questions for the legal team. Do we want to create this transaction in QuickBooks? And do we want to create a billing item? So 99% of the time, these are going to both be yes. This is going to create our bill in QuickBooks and create our billing item for the next invoice.

[00:09:28] Speaker 3: So yeah, and raised.

[00:09:31] Speaker 2: Yeah. Thanks.

[00:09:34] Speaker 3: Did you have a question? Someone from Orange Law, do you want to put that in the Q&A for us to answer? We'll see if we get that. Yeah. Keep going.

[00:09:46] Speaker 2: Sure. Yeah, so we recorded this $13 bill, and this is going to go in two places. So if I go to my FileVine time and billing section and my billing entries area, which is kind of like my whip in FileVine, my expense section, I can see that today's dated court filing fee, $13, that's teed up as a billing item to go on my next invoice. So a little bit of an efficiency gain there. If I go over to QuickBooks, sorry about this. QuickBooks is really quick to log you out. We'll be able to see this expense come over here. It's going to sync over in real time, a matter of a few seconds. Let's see. I'll actually just go to my expenses feed. And here's our $13 bill as presented in QuickBooks. You can see the vendor comes over, the bill date, the due date. It's going to default to some sort of billable expense account of your choice. We also always associate the QuickBooks customer list with the FileVine project that that came from. So it kind of allows the accounting team to kind of keep tabs on bills. So you can see from here, I could certainly print a check to pay this bill, or I could schedule online payment and maybe kind of avoid the paper checks, get a little more efficient with electronic payment options. Yeah. Did anything come through, Zoe, on that?

[00:11:11] Speaker 3: We do have a handful of questions coming through. First one I answered, checks, credit cards, and bill payments entered into the expense request will all allow for a supporting document to push over to QuickBooks, not just bills. Second question here, what if you generate an invoice in FileVine and not QuickBooks? Do you want to answer that one, Lyle?

[00:11:35] Speaker 2: If you generate an invoice in FileVine and not QuickBooks? Yeah. So we're going to get to that shortly. So our integration is actually going to allow for your complete billing cycle to exist in FileVine. That's actually a really good segue. So you will be drafting under kind of this integration, you'll be drafting invoices as far as invoices going to your client within FileVine. You'll be collecting time, flash bills, and other things that you're going to be collecting time, flat fees, drafting invoices in bulk. You can do an approval workflow in FileVine and you can finalize those invoices and send them to your client all within FileVine. So hopefully that's like kind of a relief of that's really intuitive. I don't have to manage, you know, where do transactions start in two different places. Your billing cycle and your billable expenses are all starting in the FileVine side. And so kind of how we design that to make that as elegant as possible as far as like what do we push to QuickBooks to make sure we're caught up on our billing activity. And we kind of came to the elegant solution of like, well, let's just push our cash transactions to QuickBooks because that simplifies it down to really just three things in the billing cycle. So you can imagine there's a cash transaction when you deposit money into your retainer account or FileVine calls it project funds. There's a cash transaction when you use project funds to pay an invoice. And there might be a cash transaction if you don't use trust accounting and project funds and you just simply have a traditional payment on the invoice. And so each of those three transactions, we're going to sync over to QuickBooks in the background pretty elegantly. And so I can demonstrate that here. So we've got an integration project opened up here. In this example, we're not using project funds. We're just going to kind of demonstrate an operating payment. And you can see we do already have a nice finalized invoice. So we've got $800 outstanding. This invoice was sent to the client. Great. And then now we've got to record a payment. So maybe they sent us a check or an ACH or however they might have paid us. We would come in here and record that payment with this little green button. So I'll just do checking as an example because Marshall will have kind of the flashy electronic payment options coming a little bit later. So we'll do a check, a check number and it was $800 and I'm going to apply that payment to this invoice. So most of the folks in this call are probably already familiar with, you know, nothing here is the integration yet, but our systems are able to see this payment and we're able to push it over to QuickBooks as a bank deposit to recognize kind of that cash activity and also record your revenue. So if I go over to my QuickBooks, I'm going to go to my chart of accounts and my operating account and I can see an $800 deposit was recorded kind of, you know, within a couple of seconds there. So here's a bank deposit debiting our bank account. So increasing our cash balance. And then the credit side of that is recognizing some sort of income account. And these are all configurable. We'll get into that in a minute. So that comes over just like the billable expense. We're also associating that transaction with the exact Filevine project that it came from. So if you're trying to keep tabs in QuickBooks, you have that information. And in the memo field, we also bring over any information that we can. That is an operating payment. And we can kind of move on. I guess we could, I could jump to the project fund payment, you know, a couple extra steps if you are using project funds. So I'm going to switch to a family law example where we are going to be billing against a project fund balance. And so in a very similar way to how we just recorded that operating payment, we in Filevine, we might be recording a deposit to our project funds to establish that project fund balance. So I'm going to record that again with kind of, you know, an archaic check method. So we've got a check in the mail, maybe it's $5,000. Or kind of that fee agreement. We, you know, agreed with the client that that retainer is going to be 5,000. So we recorded that they paid. Awesome. It's here. It's ready to bill against in Filevine. On the QuickBooks side, we want to make sure that we're also keeping track of the trust deposit so you can easily reconcile the trust account and not break that balance between your bank and your trust liability. So I'm going to go to my trust register and we'll see this deposit is showing up here pretty simultaneously as well. So this time we're debiting our trust account. And rather than hitting an income account, we're hitting that offsetting liability account. So otherwise, the same kind of other features apply. All our information comes over the memo field. We've got that customer tagged. And so you can kind of see how your legal team can just work in Filevine, kind of keep up with these payments on the projects. And the QuickBooks stuff is going to kind of fall in place. Hey Zach? Yes.

[00:16:37] Speaker 3: Will you show once a payment has been received by the client, how you're reconciling those expenses against your advanced case costs?

[00:16:48] Speaker 2: Yeah, we could get into that. Yeah, so payment is received and applied to an invoice with costs on it. And you probably noticed that my operating payment just hit one account. It's kind of a simple that way. It debited my operating account and it credited an income account. So what we've been doing with our clients is periodically running a report in Filevine where we identify payments received against expense items specifically. So we build out a report for that. And then we periodically just journal the kind of expenses out of income that way. So currently our systems aren't able to read the individual items on the invoice when the payment is applied. And so we just hit one income account and then expenses can be journaled out with a report. I think that's what the question was.

[00:17:41] Speaker 3: I think so too. Thank you.

[00:17:43] Speaker 2: Yep. And then, yeah. And so kind of back to the retainer example here with project funds. So we've got a $5,000 retainer balance and we've got an $800 invoice outstanding. And so now we want to apply payment to this invoice, but we want to use project funds balances, right? So the same kind of action happens in Filevine. This time we're making sure this checkbox is checked to use project funds. And so rather than this being a new payment, so we'll go ahead and record an $8 payment against that invoice and marking that as fully paid. These transactions are actually going to be, I'll get into this in a minute, but our systems are going to batch for you on either a daily or weekly basis. How many of these payments from project funds to invoices were made in that period? And we'll draft that transaction in QuickBooks for you. That makes it really easy for you to log into the bank, move a bulk amount of money, and it instantly matches in the bank feed to that transaction that our systems posted. So that doesn't have an individual transaction. You can imagine a lot of firms, billing can be a really high volume thing. So if we have 800 individual payments, we don't want 800 individual trust transactions hitting our bank register and matching to one bank line item in the bank statement. And so our systems are able to batch that for us, which we will get into shortly. Any other questions in there Zoe before I move on to the dashboard?

[00:19:24] Speaker 3: We're getting tons of good questions and I'm just responding to them. If a client has a second case, will it have a new customer number, a new customer in QuickBooks?

[00:19:38] Speaker 2: Yes, it will. Yeah. So you want to create a project for each matter or case, and it will have a respective customer specific to that matter in QuickBooks.

[00:19:50] Speaker 3: Let's see what else. Filevine wants an invoice has been sent out. If our client only pays half and still has a remaining balance, how do we transfer that remaining balance to the next invoice?

[00:20:03] Speaker 2: That's a good question. So in the Filevine settings, you'll have kind of an invoice template that you can customize. And in that, you can add a rolling balance. So the next invoice can include like a summarized overdue balance, like a cumulative overdue balance in it. And so that's how most of our clients are kind of, you know, communicating that total overdue balance to the clients each month or each billing period. I would love to get into how to customize the invoice template and probably can't on this call. But if you wanted to, you know, book a meeting with us, we'd be happy to talk through kind of that invoice template and how to work that.

[00:20:47] Speaker 3: Thanks, Zach. I'll keep answering.

[00:20:50] Speaker 2: Cool, cool. All right. So we kind of, we talked about those three different cash transactions in the billing cycle, right? A deposit to our project funds, the use of project funds to pay an invoice and just a simple like operating your general account payment. All of those transactions that are posted in QuickBooks are going to flow through a time and billing dashboard that our QuickBooks Connect users get. This is what that dashboard looks like. It's not, the access is kind of privileged to hover you at your firm you want access to. So definitely the billing admin and QuickBooks person does not need to be, everyone in the firm does not need to be in here. But you'll notice I've got these kind of rectangle tiles up. It's kind of designed to look like the QuickBooks bank feed, if you're familiar. And each tile representing a bank account. So I happen to have kind of two, I have a savings account, an operating account and two different trust account. Maybe I'm operating in a couple of different states or something like that. But there's a couple, there's a few reasons why we built this dashboard. It's primarily for the accounting team to monitor these transactions and make sure the integration, what the integration is pushing into QuickBooks is also clearing the bank, getting reconciled. We're not accumulating a buildup of duplicate entries or anything goofy that some of us might have nightmares from other integrations about. And so this is really kind of like a monitoring dashboard. If I, for example, go to my operating account, I can click on my all posted and resolve transactions. And I can see that $800 operating payment that we posted earlier in QuickBooks. So it's going to flow through the dashboard in a reportable list. Okay, this came from Filevine, it's now in QuickBooks. And one of the neat things here is this status here. So this is a live status from QuickBooks. Right now, the status is simply posted. But if you're working through that live bank feed in QuickBooks, this will update to cleared and update to reconciled based on your activity in QuickBooks. So you can easily come in here and you can filter on kind of posted, cleared, reconciled to make sure all those transactions are making into QuickBooks and ultimately clearing the bank. Similarly, if I go to my trust account, we will also see our $10,000 deposit here, or actually we did 5,000 here. So there's our family law case. So $5,000 and same kind of, you know, the QuickBooks status is the same. We're just confirming this was posted successfully. One of the other neat things here is the orange is a hyperlink. So the accounting team can always jump right into Filevine wherever this transaction was recorded in case they want to kind of figure out, you know, get some context, investigate something, they can jump right in. The other thing on the dashboard I wanted to highlight here, there's a couple of exciting things here. One, you'll notice there's kind of these zeros and these ones. These are sort of like alerts for the accounting users and they're transactions that are flagged for review. So there's really only the only transaction I can think of that our systems aren't going to automatically post to QuickBooks that we're flagging for you all in this dashboard is going to be if you have a closed period in QuickBooks. So one of the main concerns we've had or seen from our clients is like, you know, in Filevine, you could post a payment to any historical date, right? I could go back four years and post a payment to 2020, but oftentimes accountants don't do that. They'll post a payment to 2020, but oftentimes accountants, they want to keep those prior years tight, locked, you paid taxes, you don't want to change them. And so if, for example, if somebody did post a 2020 payment, it would flag as a for review item in the dashboard and not hit QuickBooks. So we're not going to override a locked period in QuickBooks. Your kind of integrity of those little periods is safe and you'll be able to review any items in kind of this listing here. So you get a little system message. So this is a nice little feature that we have in QuickBooks that allows us to be, you know, transaction was dated in a closed period. And so you can take a look at that hyperlink to it. Do I need to open up 2022 and post it or 2020 and post it? Maybe, maybe not. When I'm good with it, comfortable, I can mark it as reviewed. And that takes it off my list. So this goes to zero and it moves it into our posted and resolved. So it's kind of a neat feature. It gives a lot of our, you know, that they can keep tabs on what the integration is doing. And they can get exceptions, make sure things are clearing the bank. So that's one of the main reasons behind the dashboard. Another big reason here is we wanted to, you know, unlike our other features in the past, we want to move more towards our clients having access to their own configuration settings. So you'll notice on each of these bank tiles, there is a little edit. And so you control kind of the mapping to QuickBooks. So if I click on this savings account, for example, the first thing I'm choosing is I'm defining what kind of account is this? Because, you know, very different treatment if it's a trust account versus a general account. So in this case, it's a general account. This is the name of my bank account in QuickBooks. So that's not something I can change. That's the account I'm kind of mapping everything to. So there's the name of my account. And then I'm selecting a Filevine equivalent account. This list comes from all the accounts I have in my Filevine payments setup in Filevine. And we'll kind of get into that more in a minute. But I'm simply lining up, okay, this QuickBooks account is the same as this Filevine payment account. And that's what kind of helps map everything. And then lastly, there's a little bit of account preference. And so on your general account, you'll hit select some sort of default income account where when you receive operating payments or these transfers from trust go into this account, what income account do you want to hit? So you have control over that as well. Trust is going to be very similar. We're going to select, you know, account type trust, QuickBooks account, Filevine equivalent account. Rather than having an income account on your trust account, we're choosing what's that offsetting liability to that trust account rather than the income account. Because imagine our trust, everything in and out of trust is always hitting the liability of the bank, the liability of the bank, no other accounts really get hit. And so you're able to select that and make sure every transaction hitting that trust account goes to the proper liability. And then more excitingly, probably, is here's your batch frequency setting. So I mentioned kind of earlier how our systems will batch project funds paid against invoices. You have kind of the choice here of do you want that to batch weekly? Do you want it to batch daily and move cash as quick as you can? Or would you rather our systems don't do that and you manually calculate it? So in this case, I've got weekly selected there, which brings me to a good point. I should show an example of that batch transfer. So let's see. So in this account, for example, I've got the batch frequency settings as daily. And so that way I can kind of like have a good, you know, a recent batch to demo. But we had an automatic transfer on December, Tuesday, December 3rd. 2,800 reduced out of that trust account and moved into a general account. And so this is posted to QuickBooks. We can see it in here. We can go to the dashboard to see how much the transfers are. We can also see them in our bank register. So I'm going to switch to the other account. And December 3rd, payment out. Here's that journal entry documenting the transfer. So this is going to be kind of a summarized batch based on all the payment activity going from project funds to invoices on projects that are configured to these accounts. So you can see we are, you know, moving the money, debiting it into that savings account. We're recognizing an income account. We're also reducing our trust account, reducing our trust liability. And in this case, we're hitting a couple different accounts. So you'll see kind of how we manage multiple trust accounts, multiple income accounts. So that's how that'll post. So the nice thing is you can kind of review these. You can pull from our systems. We'll attach a, essentially what's a Filevine report, which is documenting the various payment transactions in Filevine that make up that transfer. So we're trying to make this as, yeah.

[00:29:45] Speaker 3: When you're doing these batch checks, batch transactions, are you able to merge them if the payee is the same person? So you're only printing one check instead of multiple?

[00:30:00] Speaker 2: Let's, let me think the batch trans, so.

[00:30:04] Speaker 3: Or if you have multiple invoices, I guess, and checks to print is a better question rather than a batch transaction. I probably worded that wrong.

[00:30:12] Speaker 2: So in this case, we're really building this workflow where you're not, so this is money that you are paying out of your trust account to yourself based on work that you invoiced for. And we're not designing it so that you have to write yourself checks. It's more of we're batching it so you can log into your bank and make one transfer on either a weekly or a daily basis, if that makes sense. I guess that question makes me wonder if we're talking about maybe a contingency project type or case where we're sending, issuing checks out of trust to a bunch of third parties, including the client. But in this workflow, it's really just, we're paying ourselves for invoiced activity. That make sense? Or did I miss the, I might've missed the meaning of the question there.

[00:31:06] Speaker 3: I think it's, so the verbiage is, are you able to merge multiple invoices and QuickBooks for different clients into one check if the payee is the same person or entity after the payment requests have been submitted into Filevine so that you have one print to check instead of multiple?

[00:31:21] Speaker 2: Oh, I'm sorry. I think we're going back to the expense request thing. So that is actually, that's a really good question. So I think what they're asking is, like I might have all these small individual amounts that are billable expenses on each case, but like maybe like a good example is FedEx where I'm charging, you know, $10 a shippy documents all of these cases, but FedEx is going to charge me one lump sum invoice. So the nice thing about using that bill transaction versus a check or a credit card, it wouldn't necessarily make sense there. I'm using the bill is yes. So you can essentially move from Filevine push in, you know, 10 different bills all to FedEx and you can choose to pay with one check. Yeah. So that's kind of our best practice for handling that situation.

[00:32:13] Speaker 3: Thank you.

[00:32:14] Speaker 2: Yeah. All right. So that is batch transfers. The kind of the only other thing I wanted to touch on here before I hand it over to Marshall for the exciting electronic payment collection option is just kind of how we manage multiple bank accounts. So you'll notice I have four accounts in here. Should I create a brand new account in QuickBooks, another tile will automatically populate in my dashboard and I can go ahead and on my own DIY map it to Filevine, no problem. Kind of the way that mapping works from the Filevine side is when you have Filevine payments enabled and you have a variety of accounts set up within Filevine payments in your... Well, we can start with the bulk settings actually. In your billing setup under payments, you'll have this default deposit destination settings. So this is going to be a default deposit destination settings. So this is going to be an org-wide setting. So for example, invoices, this is going to typically be my general account and my operating account. And it's going to be the link that goes on outstanding invoices. And so I'm selecting from all my Filevine accounts here. Similarly, project funds, I'm selecting which trust account do I want project funds to hit. And so that's kind of a Filevine payment setting. If I go back to my individual project, I can override that org setting with these same options. So I can change this to trust two, for example. And so that's kind of how our systems are mapping. So each project can have its own bank account configuration. And through the mapping here, we can make sure everything goes in the QuickBooks appropriately. Yeah, so I did want to point that out. And then one last little exciting plug that this is kind of our big project for 2025 is this for reconciliation tab. You'll notice it's just a coming soon advertisement for something coming. But the idea here is this is just going to be for our trust accounts. But the idea is like in a trust account, all of our trust activity should be kind of initiated through Filevine. So our Filevine project fund ledgers should equal our QuickBooks ledgers. But we want to definitely reconcile that every month. And our idea here is we're able to, since our systems posted all these trust transactions, we know exactly what's sitting in QuickBooks that came from Filevine and where. And so you can kind of imagine two columns here. One is trust activity in QuickBooks. The other is trust activity in Filevine. And we auto match everything that like we created. And it leaves you with just a couple of transactions at the end where these are reconciling items to investigate. Maybe it was a trust transaction that didn't hit, didn't go through Filevine for whatever reason. It's all good. You can clear it. But that way it kind of really speeds up that reconciliation. It takes it out of pulling XLs and doing VLOOKUPs and that kind of thing. So I did want to share that as well. Is there any questions there, Zoe, on the dashboard or transfers, multiple accounts or anything like that?

[00:35:40] Speaker 3: Uh, nothing on those topics. Okay. Still a ton of, um, will reconciliation also reconcile VS Bank? I'm not sure what VS Bank means or in the bank. So here it will push over to the bank feed or as you're, as you're reviewing them, I guess.

[00:36:00] Speaker 2: It's really, it's really just for like this, really like the second and third part of your three-way trust rack, right? Which is, which is you want that, the liability equal your bank balance and you want every dollar within it to be associated with a, with a client. There's, there's really not a reason for us to build, um, a bank rec solution in here, just because QuickBooks already has it and does it so well. And you've already got your live bank feed in there. So the process would be, you still reconcile the bank accounts all in QuickBooks. So you reconcile your operating, um, your trust. And then you come to the dashboard to make sure the trust and Filevine reconcile. Um, it's kind of that kind of third part of the three-way rack. That makes sense. Any other questions there, Zoe?

[00:36:55] Speaker 3: All good.

[00:36:56] Speaker 2: Let's hand it over to Marshall to kind of show us more about Filevine payments and how we can record these, these things much more efficiently.

[00:37:05] Speaker 1: All right. Thank you, Zach and Zoe. All right. So I'm just going to show you Filevine core features as well as some Filevine payments tools that, that can make the Filevine payment collection side just a little bit more effortless. So as Zach's example, so I want to, so there's really two ways that time and billing firms bill, like two major buckets. There's deviation for both, but one is just from, uh, just from operating. I do work. I bill you. You pay me for work that I have done. It goes into my operating bank account. So in that scenario, and it's very common with, uh, immigration practices. Um, there are a few others. Immigration always comes to mind, uh, but where they might not hold a trust account for the client. It might just be, Hey, we're going to send you a flat fee for us doing some documents or for time or whatever it may be. And so for that.

[00:38:16] Speaker 2: Sorry to interrupt you there. I think you, uh, might be on the wrong browser there.

[00:38:21] Speaker 1: Oh, let me see sharing Google.

[00:38:28] Speaker 2: There we go. That looks great.

[00:38:29] Speaker 1: Okay. Just the webinar. Um, so everyone saw our agenda. Um, okay. So what I'm going to show is an immigration example. Um, as I described, you're just doing a flat fee or time and you're billing straight to operating. So you can use, I'm doing this per project. If any billing admins are on the call, you're very familiar with doing, uh, bulk invoicing for your clients from the advanced billing page. But what you'll do, I'm just going to do one invoice here though. So we have a finalized invoice, same, same project that Zach was showing. And we have that same $800. So what you would do is just send by email, and this can all be done in bulk for 100, 200, 1000 invoices. And you would send this to your client. It will send it to the client on file. This is pretty common. If you aren't using Filevine payments and you do time and billing, uh, in Filevine, you're used to this part. The added part is that it includes a payment link that they can click on the invoice email that is sent to the client. So that I don't have it up, but I do have the link. Let me just show you real quick. All right. So here is that email. This is what your client receives and they have a click to pay now. And so when they open that, it's going to open up Filevine payments and they will put in their information and they will see that it's for $800. They'll have read their invoice. And so if they pay, we're going to do it live. All right. And you can all have my company email. All right. So they'll submit that payment. Now, what is really cool about this is that I have some auto features on and I turn them on after Zach showed his last demo in Filevine. And so Filevine payments, you're receiving the payment to the bank account that you have on file. And as Zach showed you at the project level, invoices are going to be under operating because you're getting paid for work you did. And so what's going to happen, I'm going to refresh the page and we should see this update. We should see a Filevine payment and then it's going to flow over, pay that invoice as well. And after I show you the trust scenario, I'll have Zach briefly reshare his screen just to show you that linkage into QuickBooks, into the QuickBooks portal. So you're having, I just want to take a step back because it's a lot of order of operations and I'll kind of tell you a brief little story. So a lot of times I talk to billing admins at firms and they go, well, we send out, we collect payment digitally, however they do it and we go through all of them and then we enter it in QuickBooks and we enter it in Filevine. And with this, for this type of firm, they're sending out the invoice, the client pays it, it's flowing automatically to Filevine, to the invoice paying it and to QuickBooks, which is really, really seamless. Now that, now I understand a lot of time in billing firms don't work from operating in this way. They work from trust and we have agreements and you need to keep your trust balance at a certain amount of money. And so for those folks, we're going to talk about that scenario as well. So a similar scenario, I have a, I'm doing some family law work and I have an $800 balance, outstanding. A lot of firms will have reporting or use their BI tools and have the full replenishment amount plus outstanding balance. So how they can capture it is, you owe us, they'll only work from trust. So it's like, okay, you owe us $800 and your trust balance is outstanding. Your trust balance is at 4,200. So we need 1,600 more because we need to gather that. So, and this is, there's more flavors of this scenario, but essentially, instead of sending that invoice, you would still send the invoice and you could tell the client, the client would have a payment link there and they could pay it. But some firms, what they will do is they will send the invoice. And so two scenarios, one is that a firm will send that invoice and they'll just expect the client to pay it. And then they send a separate email for replenishment to trust. It's one option. Some will draw down trust with what they already have. And so let me just show you that. And voiding and redoing. So we're just skipping it back up. All right, beautiful. I'm going to finalize it. It's going to draw down that balance. And so let's just say we finalized and we have that agreement with all of our clients that we will draw down their trust when we invoice them. You could still send that invoice.

[00:44:39] Speaker 2: Yeah, and what's nice that happened there, what Marshall did there, what Marshall did there versus what I did was, you'll notice as soon as he finalized that invoice, the project fund payment was automatically recorded. So when I did it, I had to click the green button, say I want to record a payment for project funds, put in the amount, apply to an invoice. But when Marshall did it, it's just a setting in Filevine where it's just, boom, it automatically hits every time there's a finalized invoice and project fund.

[00:45:07] Speaker 1: Yeah, so exactly. And thank you, Zach. So we'll just go with this scenario because the most common I see is that we draw down, we always draw down on their balances and then I run a report or however my billing admins are looking at it or my attorneys are looking at it. See, okay, they are supposed to be at 5K, that's their agreement. They have to replenish for 1600. And so you can click Request Payment at the project funds level and you can send a link right here and email it. You can have it open-ended so they could enter any amount or partial amounts. But if I want my clients, per our agreement, you owe us $1600 or you just need to get your trust. You don't owe us, but you need to get your trust back into good standing. You'll email it. And same thing, they'll receive an email very similar to that invoice email. I have it right here where it's requesting. Usually firms will send a mail merge to everybody that they need to replenish. And the moment they pay it, let me do that. Same thing, they pay in here. I'm like, wait, that's back in time.

[00:46:51] Speaker 2: The cool thing about following payments too is when, if they use a credit card, the fees do not hit your trust account. The fees always get kind of routed to a general account. So you're never out of balance trust-wise from that.

[00:47:09] Speaker 1: And I tried to do some studio magic. So I had a pre-done link, which expired. Oh. You all got to see, but this is the live one from the button click. One moment. So you would pay it. It would flow in the same way. Let's just try. We're going to do it one more time. And so the moment that comes in, it's just going to flow right into Project Funds. And if you do the drawdown method, it'll just draw down and you're just always sending those replenishment requests. Payments. And the last thing I want to show is just the settings that I enabled for that to happen. So under billing setup, if you're like an experienced billing admin, this is totally fine. You probably already know this. What I enabled was auto-applying payments, auto-applying payments, and what I enabled was auto-applying payments, automatically creating payments when either an invoice is finalized or a positive current balance is added to Project Funds so it starts paying down. So it's really doing two things. If there is a positive invoice, we create a payment and we apply it. Or if there is a new amount of Project Funds and there's an outstanding invoice, we create a payment and apply it. And so this is in Filevine Core, not related to Filevine, or related to Filevine Payments, but not part of like our payment capture. Yeah. And the last thing, Zach, do you want to just show kind of the quick connect on the payment? I'll try to get that $1,600. I'm not sure why the link. Hi, Marshall.

[00:49:18] Speaker 3: I actually have a couple of questions in the chat for you.

[00:49:20] Speaker 1: Oh, yes, yes.

[00:49:22] Speaker 3: Is it possible to get notified of client payments via email for control or do we need to check the projects individually?

[00:49:30] Speaker 1: Let me see. Clients payments via email for control. Okay. So you get notified. So when you set up your account through Filevine Payments, you will set up one email that is the notification email. And that will, you will always get notified when there's payment. So the same notification email that goes to your client after they pay through Filevine Payments, they'll get a receipt email. That also goes to your, essentially it's a reply to email. A lot of firms set up like a billing distribution list, like their billing team or accounting at lawfirm.com. Yeah. I hope that answered that question. And let me know in the Q&A if there's any further questions on that. Trying to... Sending invoice for a contract project. We have... One of these questions might've been a response to another answer.

[00:50:33] Speaker 3: I think the next one down is for you.

[00:50:35] Speaker 1: Is there a way to see the email project funds request to request your... Ooh, not yet. Good question.

[00:50:49] Speaker 3: All right.

[00:50:51] Speaker 2: Cool. I'll just share my screen real quick to go full circle on how Marshall's payments automatically hit QuickBooks. So you remember when he started, he did the payment link on the emailed invoice that sent out, which was 800 bucks. And so that came in seamlessly. So it's posted in QuickBooks automatically. All he did was email the invoice out and everything hit. So the payment posted in QuickBooks and payment posted in Filevine. And it also flows through our dashboard here as well. So the accounting team can kind of keep tabs on that. We did 800 twice. So it's one of these two, but yeah. So I just wanted to go full circle there. And then, yeah, I think that's it. Cause the trust one didn't go through cause we had an old link, but it's the same kind of concept would sync right through writing QuickBooks.

[00:51:42] Speaker 1: Yeah, it's the exact same. The one example is fine. We were kind of just doing it.

[00:51:47] Speaker 2: Yep, for sure.

[00:51:51] Speaker 1: All right. Well, that moves us on to, of course, our Q&A portion. Yeah, so any questions that folks have, we also do have some links that you can scan. I'm going to spend about 15 to 20 seconds on each of these. I'll leave the second link up to either connect with Zach and Zoe on QuickBooks Connect or to connect with them on finance skills. I'll leave that up, but let me just see what Q&A questions we have. Is it possible to receive multiple emails? Right now it's only one. Our recommendation at the moment would be to do that like group email. So that way you can always update the group in Outlook or Gmail. And so that way you don't have to update it from Filevine payments.

[00:53:01] Speaker 2: Oh, I could do, I can answer this one. We'll be able to make refunds as well. That is something we're working on. And I would definitely be curious for you to reach out and let us know how you would want to see that hit QuickBooks. But basically on the Filevine side, there is already a button for it. So in, well, this one doesn't have project funds, but if I go to this one and project funds, there's a debit button as anytime you have a balance. And that's going to kind of document your refund. So you can, you know, oops, you can put in some sort of amount. And save it. And that's going to de-increment your project fund balance. Currently, that's going to get flagged in the dashboard. So if I just give this a refresh, we'll see this number bump up to four review. So here's that $300 refund. So right now we're just capturing it in the four review to kind of allow the accounting team to issue payment however they want to. But I am interested in streamlining that and having that post either a bill or a check or something to QuickBooks. I just, we're kind of doing a little bit more of kind of asking for feedback on that. Just kind of survey and see how many, how most people would like to see that hit QuickBooks before we build it.

[00:54:32] Speaker 1: So there was one question I wanted to answer live. So it was the simplest workaround you'd suggest for billing the client that is not the billing contact. I have a follow-up question for the person that asked this. Is this a situation where the person is under 18 or where the client is set as, or maybe it's like sometimes it can be like a spouse or a different family member. Depending on that situation, our general recommendation is to have your client or whoever you're working with, or at least the main contact email as that first email within the client contact card. How do I write off and file a line? Ah, so that's a great question. I can take that one too.

[00:55:29] Speaker 2: You think it's more accounting side?

[00:55:31] Speaker 1: Yeah.

[00:55:32] Speaker 2: I can take that one just because I know Marta. Marta and I meet once in a while and talk through the integration and stuff. I'll just share my screen for this.

[00:55:43] Speaker 1: Oh yeah, let me stop.

[00:55:44] Speaker 2: Marta, we're looking at, oops, let me hit the right button here. Marta's on an older version of the integration where we do have invoices in QuickBooks. So writing off an invoice in that system is a little bit more cumbersome. You have to do some things in QuickBooks, some things in FileVine. But if we switch to this version of the integration, the write-off action is actually really easy. I'll just create an invoice that's not paid here. Actually, this is going to get automatically paid with trust. So I'm going to go to immigration and create an invoice.

[00:56:29] Speaker 4: Just put something on there.

[00:56:31] Speaker 2: Save and finalize. And so the nice thing with this integration is your invoices aren't getting synced to QuickBooks. Accounts receivable only exists in FileVine. It doesn't also exist in QuickBooks. And so the write-off is like a precast transaction. And so this $500 is floating in our accounts receivable balance. If we need to write it off, it's as simple as coming in here and clicking write-off balance. And so that's going to give us, reduce that AR balance to zero. And it's going to give us a write-off transaction than our payment. And so that sort of process is really easy once we switch, once we kind of move into this newer or more modern integration.

[00:57:32] Speaker 1: All right. Marta had one more. Oh, I think you saw it, Zach.

[00:57:35] Speaker 2: Oh no, I didn't.

[00:57:37] Speaker 3: Can I do the same write-off for expenses?

[00:57:40] Speaker 2: That's a little bit trickier. With expenses, once that transaction exists in QuickBooks, we want to make sure that QuickBooks person kind of has the authority over what the record is. So that does require like boarding or deleting the expense on the QuickBooks side. When you do that, I'll share my screen again. I think I forgot to actually show this, but in our expense request section, there is a payment status section. And so this is QuickBooks, the kind of the QuickBooks status of that expense transaction sinking into Filevine in a real time. And so if you were to delete or void that payment on the QuickBooks side, we would sink the status back for the legal team. And so from there, you either you can remove it manually or keep it in as just avoided transaction. You kind of can treat it however you want to. But the main idea is that we make sure once a transaction exists in QuickBooks, we want to make sure that QuickBooks person is responsible for it because we don't want to break a bank rec or mess anything up.

[00:58:55] Speaker 1: And we're almost at time, but there are so many coming in. But I do want to answer at least one. So someone asked about the $800 invoice scenario. What if a client has no retainer balance and pays 450? What happens to the remaining 450 that needs to be paid? So I think the question, let me know if I'm understanding this and I'll kind of just walk through the logic briefly. If I have $800 and someone does a partial payment of 450, it'll just, you could do, I don't know if it's a trust situation or operating, but let's just say you put in a partial payment or that auto, I'm just going to pretend it's an auto 450 transfer. Let's just pretend they have 450 in project funds and an auto applies because you finalized the entire transaction. Auto applies because you finalized the invoice. You'll just have a partially paid invoice there.

[00:59:53] Speaker 2: And if you sent that partially paid invoice, that link would go to the operating account?

[01:00:00] Speaker 1: Yes.

[01:00:01] Speaker 2: So they could finish payment through operating.

[01:00:04] Speaker 1: You do have to just at this time, remember to regenerate the PDF if you want them to have an updated partially paid invoice with like how much they've paid thus far. But yeah, and Ginger, feel free to reach out. I'll send you my email if you have any further questions. Oh, there's more questions. These are fantastic. Let's just see credit card payments directly from a website. You could link, you can generate a general operating or trust link that you can have available that could be hyperlinked from your business's website that they could just like pay in. The only downside is you will have to just, you will see it come into Filevine payments, but you will have to manually add either the project fund or the payment entry into Filefine because we won't know which project it's for or maybe they paid using a different email that isn't related to their project. And let's just see. I think just, I'm just seeing if there's any others just for the recording that might be helpful.

[01:01:35] Speaker 4: Sure.

[01:01:37] Speaker 1: Some, is it possible? There are multiple billing contacts. I believe it just sends to the main.

[01:02:05] Speaker 2: I think right now it's going to, the invoices are just going to send to the first email.

[01:02:10] Speaker 1: The first, yeah, it doesn't, yeah, if you put like three L's under the contact, I don't believe it does email comma. Right now it's just that.

[01:02:17] Speaker 2: But I think Filevine's adding like a billing contact field.

[01:02:23] Speaker 1: Right? Maybe.

[01:02:24] Speaker 2: Maybe.

[01:02:25] Speaker 1: Maybe.

[01:02:25] Speaker 2: I probably, I don't know. I don't know for sure. I don't work for Filevine, so don't take that into consideration. Yeah, I don't know. I don't work for Filevine. So don't take my word, but I think something might be coming. All right. Are we able to like save these questions and reach out and answer them?

[01:02:39] Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, Aaron or Jane, should we include some answers on like the email that goes out tomorrow? Would that be? These are great.

[01:02:51] Speaker 5: We'll be able to download a report of all the questions in the Q&A and we can plan to follow up with folks individually, but I would definitely recommend if you still have questions to either set up time with the Filevine or Vineskills team to get those personalized questions answered. So that would be our suggested next steps. And thank you all so much for joining. I'll let you close it out, Marshall.

[01:03:24] Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I don't have much else to add. Like, thank you so much for joining. I was very surprised that we got so many questions that people showed up to essentially an accounting webinar, but it is fun. It is exciting. Like, I love this stuff. I love working with Zach and Zoe and helping all of you out, just, you know, help you with your businesses. So with that, I will close it. For anyone I've seen the question, there will be a recording that goes out tomorrow to everybody. And thank you all so much for joining.