Systems & Strategy
Software Setup & Integration
Your practice management system, your payment processor and your accounting file should be one connected workflow. We map what you have, fix what is silently breaking, and make the data flow in one direction — correctly.
Sound familiar?
- You enter the same information in two systems every day
- Payments show up in QuickBooks but nobody is sure they hit the right account
- Your practice management reports and your accounting reports disagree
- Processing fees are being taken out of trust deposits
- Nobody has looked at the sync error log since it was set up
What you get
What changes once this is running.
- Time and expenses entered once, flowing through to billing and accounting
- Payments landing in the right account, with trust and operating kept separate
- No more double entry between your practice management system and QuickBooks
- Sync errors surfaced and resolved instead of quietly accumulating
- A documented map of what connects to what, and what each connection does
Included
What the engagement actually covers.
Systems audit
Every tool that touches money or time, what it connects to, what it is supposed to sync, and what it is actually syncing. The last two are frequently different.
Integration configuration
Connections between your practice management system, payment processor and QuickBooks configured with the correct account mapping — particularly the mapping that keeps trust separate from operating.
Payment processing setup
LawPay or your processor configured so trust payments land in the trust account, operating payments land in operating, and processing fees are handled in a way that does not touch client funds.
Sync monitoring
Failed syncs get caught and resolved. Left alone they compound quietly — a week of missing transactions is a nuisance, six months is a cleanup.
Workflow documentation
A written map of your stack: what enters where, what flows where, and what still has to be done by hand. Invaluable when staff change.
How it runs
No surprises about the process.
Map the current state
Including the shadow processes — the spreadsheet someone maintains manually, the report that gets re-keyed monthly. These are where the real time is going.
Fix the mapping
Most integration failures are account mapping errors, not connection failures. The sync is working perfectly; it is putting things in the wrong place.
Test with real data
A full cycle — time entry to invoice to payment to deposit to books — run end to end and verified before it goes live.
Document and monitor
Written documentation, and ongoing monitoring so failures surface in days rather than at year-end.
Where legal software integrations actually break
Integrations rarely fail loudly. They fail by working perfectly while doing the wrong thing, which is considerably harder to notice.
Everything maps to one income account. The single most common finding. Fee income, cost reimbursements and trust deposits all landing in “Services.” Your revenue is overstated, your trust liability is understated, and your P&L is fiction. The integration is not broken — nobody configured the mapping.
Trust payments routed to operating. A payment processor accepting a retainer into the operating account. This is an accounting error with genuine professional consequences attached, and it usually comes from a single wrong setting in the processor rather than anything complicated.
Processing fees taken from trust. When a merchant processor deducts its fee from a trust deposit, the firm has effectively used client funds to pay a firm expense. Legal-specific processors are built to avoid this; general processors are not. It is a configuration question with a real answer, and it is worth checking yours.
Time entries syncing as revenue. Recorded time is not revenue until it is billed and collected. An integration that pushes unbilled time into your books as income will show you a profitable month that has not happened yet.
Silent sync failures. Every integration has an error log. Almost nobody reads it. Failures accumulate for months, and by the time the gap is noticed it has become a cleanup project.
Fix the flow before the history
There is a natural instinct to clean up the miscoded transactions first, because they are the visible problem. Resist it. Correcting six months of history while the integration continues miscoding everything new means doing the same work twice.
Map first. Test with real transactions. Then correct the history once, against a system that will not immediately re-break it.
Questions
About Software Setup & Integration
Which systems do you work with?
Most commonly Clio, MyCase and PracticePanther on the practice management side, LawPay and similar processors for payments, and QuickBooks Online for accounting, plus payroll providers like Gusto and ADP. If you are running something less common, tell us on the call — we will be straight about whether we can support it well rather than learning it on your time.
My integration is already connected. Is that not enough?
Connected and configured correctly are very different things. The most common problem we find is an integration that has been running happily for a year while mapping every payment to a single generic income account — including trust deposits. The sync is not broken. It is faithfully doing the wrong thing.
Can you fix the mess a bad integration already made?
Usually. That is a cleanup engagement rather than an integration one, and the order matters: fix the mapping first, then correct the history. Cleaning up while the integration is still miscoding new transactions is work you will have to do twice.
Will this let me stop using spreadsheets?
Some of them. Be sceptical of anyone who promises all of them. A properly integrated stack eliminates the spreadsheets that exist purely to move data between systems. The ones that exist because you need an analysis nobody's software produces will still be there — but at least they will be built on reliable data.
Keep going
Related services and tools.
Ready when you are
Find out what shape your books are actually in.
A 30-minute call is enough to tell whether we are the right fit for your firm — and you will leave it knowing more about your own numbers either way.
- No obligation, no sales script
- Straight answer on whether we fit
- Talk to the person who does the work