The Best of Both Worlds: Clio and QuickBooks Online

Clio handles clients, matters, billing, and trust transactions. QuickBooks provides the accounting tools, financial reporting, and a platform that most CPAs are already familiar with.

Using both systems allows a law firm to take advantage of what each does best. The challenge is keeping both systems consistent without having to enter the same information twice.

Why We Built LedgerPost

At Tandem, we have worked with law firms since 2010. We know that financial records in a busy law office are often subject to corrections and adjustments. Clients get renamed, duplicate matters are opened, invoices are edited or voided, and transactions are corrected or deleted.

Books are in motion until they settle.

When Clio and QuickBooks are connected through automatic synchronization, those changes can find their way into QuickBooks as well. Some integrations also create entries at a level of detail that makes the accounting records unnecessarily complicated. The result can be more work for the bookkeeper, not less.

Manual entry avoids some of these problems because the bookkeeper decides what goes into QuickBooks and when. But entering the same information twice is time-consuming and creates opportunities for mistakes.

We wanted the best of both approaches: the efficiency of automation with the control of manual posting.

That is why we built LedgerPost.

LedgerPost reads data from Clio and QuickBooks Online in real time, compares the records, identifies differences, and lets us select which records to post, without storing the firm’s data.

We review and correct the work in Clio first. Once the records are ready, we post them to QuickBooks. No automatic synchronization, no unnecessary activity carried over while records are still being corrected.

Trust Accounting Requires Special Attention

Trust accounting is one area where the source of a transaction is particularly important.

A bank feed may show a deposit or withdrawal, but it does not tell us which client or matter the money belongs to. That information is maintained in Clio.

We often encounter situations where transactions have been added to QuickBooks directly from bank feeds without checking the corresponding records in Clio. The bank account may reconcile, but the accounting records and individual client balances may not agree.

Our approach is to start with the transactions in Clio, post them to QuickBooks using LedgerPost, and then reconcile against the bank records.

LedgerPost also provides trust-balance checks to help identify differences between QuickBooks and Clio. These checks are useful, but they do not replace proper three-way trust reconciliation.

Putting LedgerPost to Work

We built LedgerPost for our own bookkeeping work at Tandem, and we continue to use it every day.

LedgerPost does not replace Clio or QuickBooks Online. It helps connect the two while giving the bookkeeper control over what gets posted and when.