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By Tammy Hoang, Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor If your law firm is taxed as an S corporation, reasonable compensation is one of the most important tax issues you will ever face — and one of the easiest to get wrong. Many attorney-owners hear that S-corp distributions avoid self-employment tax and decide to pay themselves a tiny salary while pulling most of the money out as distributions. The IRS is very clear that this does not work. An S-corp shareholder who performs real s

By Tammy Hoang, Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor Attorney compensation is one of the most sensitive subjects in any law firm, and it is also one of the most misunderstood from a bookkeeping standpoint. This guide is not about how much an attorney should pay themselves — that depends on each firm's situation and is a conversation for your tax advisor. It is about how compensation is recorded once those decisions are made. Partner draws, salaries, bonuses, profit sharing, and eq

By Tammy Hoang, Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor Opening a new law firm is exciting, but the financial setup is where many new attorneys feel lost. Law school teaches you how to practice law, not how to structure a firm's bank accounts, set up an IOLTA trust account, or build a chart of accounts that keeps you compliant. The good news is that getting the money side right from day one is mostly a matter of working through a clear checklist. This guide walks a new law firm throu

By Tammy Hoang, Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor Getting a State Bar trust account notice in the mail can make any attorney's stomach drop. Before you panic, the first thing to understand is that not every notice means you are in trouble — and the right next step depends entirely on which kind of notice you received. Some are routine, some are time-sensitive, and some are serious. What they all have in common is that they turn on your records: clean law firm bookkeeping and a

By Tammy Hoang, Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor When a law firm first reaches out about law firm bookkeeping, the conversation almost always sounds the same. The attorney is not sure whether they need a full cleanup, they are uneasy about their IOLTA account, and someone has probably told them their books are 'fine.' Over years of working with law firms, we have heard the same honest questions again and again — about start dates, IOLTA reconciliation, how long catch-up takes,

Clio Accounting can take a law firm's most tedious bookkeeping tasks — categorizing transactions, matching deposits, printing checks, and reconciling trust accounts — and turn them into a fast, repeatable, audit-ready system. For many firms, bookkeeping is still a pile of manual entry and month-end stress, but Clio Accounting is built to remove that friction with rule-based automation and compliance-focused tools. Unlike a generic accounting program, Clio Accounting is design

Knowing how to create an invoice in Clio is one of the most important skills for getting your law firm paid on time. Clio Manage turns your tracked time and expenses into a clean, professional invoice in just a few steps — but only if you follow the billing workflow correctly. This step-by-step guide walks you through exactly how to create an invoice in Clio, from opening the Billing section to sending the finished bill to your client. One quick note on terms: Clio calls invo

Learning how to create a bill in Clio is about more than generating a document — it is the full billing cycle that ends with money actually moving into your operating account. Clio Manage takes you from filtering unbilled time all the way through applying trust payments and recording the draw, but each step has to be done in the right order to keep your books and your trust account accurate. This step-by-step guide walks you through exactly how to create a bill in Clio, from

The Clio QuickBooks integration is one of the most popular software setups in the legal industry, and also one of the most complained about. When it works, it syncs your bills and payments between Clio Manage and QuickBooks Online automatically, saving hours of double entry. When it is set up wrong, it creates duplicate transactions, mapping messes, and trust accounting errors that can take a bookkeeper days to untangle. This guide covers the whole picture: the real problems

IOLTA accounting is where most personal injury firms quietly go wrong, because the rules are not intuitive: client money in an IOLTA account is not income, advanced client costs are not expenses, and a single miscategorized entry can put your books out of compliance with Rule 1.15. This complete guide explains IOLTA accounting the way a bookkeeper does it — which account type each dollar belongs in, why trust funds sit as a liability, why advanced costs sit as an asset, and h

Done correctly, IOLTA trust accounting in QuickBooks gives a personal injury firm a clean, audit-ready trust system without expensive specialty software. Done incorrectly, it creates exactly the kind of mess that triggers a Rule 1.15 problem. The difference is entirely in the setup. QuickBooks can track every deposit and disbursement by client, keep a running balance for each client, and support the monthly three-way reconciliation the State Bar expects — but only if the acco

IOLTA violations are among the most serious mistakes a personal injury firm can make, because the penalties reach all the way to a lawyer's license. The State Bar of California treats trust account violations as some of the gravest ethical breaches in the profession, and the consequences range from noncompliance fees and inactive enrollment to suspension and even disbarment. The good news for personal injury firms: nearly every IOLTA violation is preventable with clean bookke