@hcathcart
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I’ve used Clio in the past for a very small law firm. It is not a full service accounting program, more a front office program. It is very easy for lawyers to enter time and create bills but is terrible for the back end and with multiple trust accounts.
You must have a back end accounting program to integrate Clio into. Quickbooks is generally recommended but unless you use the cloud based version, you will have to run the export function from Quickbooks which means you don’t have up to date records in Quickbooks. The other issue that existed was the cloud version of Quickbooks which allows for real time integration of Clio did not support multiple trust accounts. That ended up being the deal breaker for our firm.
Another negative was the inability to run an aged AR schedule from Clio itself for a prior period. All reports are current as of the date ran. A real problem at year end when most firms are still billing a week after the year end date and also depositing payments. Clio deducts the payments made off the AR schedule. This may be different with the cloud based Quickbooks integration but we could not make it work with the desktop version of Quickbooks.
We moved off Clio to PCLaw and it is a much easier platform to work with from a back end point of view. Not to say PCLaw doesn’t have its challenges, it does!
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We use PCLaw and to segregate funds we are not to disburse we transfer them to a -99 matter for the client.
For example, client ABC has matter #1 where we’ve received $10,000 but are holding it pursuant to a court order. We would transfer the funds from matter #1 to matter #99 for the client. That is our internal numbering system that indicates to us the funds are not for release.
We’ve found it works well for us. Perhaps you could do something similar in esilaw?
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Unfortunately you are running into the same problems those of us in smaller firms face. There really doesn’t seem to be an alternative. Esilaw is not well liked either. It seems to be the devil you know vs. the one you don’t. Funny that in the US there are dozens of alternatives, but since Canada is such a small market they don’t develop their platforms to work with our tax laws.
One of the firms I work with uses Clio with an integration to QuickBooks. I will state firmly that this is not a good option!. It was already in place when I joined and they are reluctant to change. If you think PCLaw is bad, Clio is 50x worse.
Anyone know anything about the Elite “lite” platform ProLaw?
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We have the same issues even when setting up a term deposit. We use RBC and they will not put the term as ITF, they only have the firm’s name on it. When we argued that this is not accurate, their response was the ITF was an internal issue on our end! Only resolution I finally won was for them to put a note on the Term that it was ITF and the client name but they would not put it on the actual Term.
Very frustrating and not uncommon from what I’ve heard.
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