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Hi everybody and welcome to the conference room at my office. This is Andy Chen and I'm
coming to you from Mountain View, California on what turns out to be a very, uh, rainy
Saturday afternoon. A rather surprisingly rainy Saturday. This video goes over the online
ledger system that I use with clients. So, without further ado, if you guys can hope
online with me, I'll show you the details of this system and the benefits that it can
give you.
So the first thing you want to do in order to use this online ledger system is open up
a web browser. On my computer I use Google Chrome so click on the icon and Chrome opens
right up. When I normally go online, I go to gmail first so that's the screen that you
see here. But for today what I want to go to is another Google site so go up here and
type in google.com forward slash drive - d - r - i - v - e - and it brings up a very
similar screen. Over here you have a field where you can type in your username, your
password, and then click sign-in.
Before we do that, though, let me give you a little background about why this drive,
why this online ledger system came to be. If you hire a professional person -- be it
a lawyer, an accountant, a contractor to do work on your house, something like that, you
get bills periodically. So once every two weeks, once a month, something like that.
In that case, it's actually fairly inconvenient for me as a service provider because every
two weeks or every month I have to essentially stop what I'm doing and spend a lot of time
tracking down bills, mailing stuff out, sending out emails, you know, tracking which clients
have paid, which clients haven't, running to the bank to cash checks and stuff. So that's
not real convenient for me.
From the client's perspective it's actually fairly, um, fairly poor also because if you
bill every two weeks, for example, the client knows what's happening, but they only know
it two weeks at a time. So at the beginning of the two weeks they know. At the end of
the two weeks they know, but during the middle of those two weeks they really have no idea
how much money their case is costing, how much work you're doing, and so on.
So, hopefully, with this online ledger system, I manage to solve both of those problems.
And the model I was using was actually banking. So if you have an account at, say, Citibank,
Chase bank, your local credit union, whatever it happens to be, you can essentially logon
to that credit union's website, that bank's website 24 hours a day and see how much money
is in your account, what checks you've written, whether those checks have cleared, if you
have a credit card how much money you owe. So that type of instantaneous information
is what I'm hoping to accomplish with this online ledger system.
That said, the first thing you want to do when you get to the Google Drive homepage
is actually log in. For the purposes of this video, I've created an ID called andychenthelawyer.
If you have gmail, for example, and your gmail username is chickenfarmer123@gmail.com, you
would type in chickenfarmer123 and then whatever password you normally use to logon to gmail.
In my case again, andychenthelawyer, type in the password, click sign in.
And it pops up, Google Chrome pops up this message at the top Use this account to sync
all your Chroms stuff? That's not really relevant for what we're doing so we'll get rid of that.
This down here is the Google Drive homepage. Depending on whether or not you've used Google
Drive before, this page might a little bit different. It might look exactly the same.
It doesn't really matter. What does matter are these buttons here on the left. This first
one is called My Drive and it essentially brings you to this homepage right here. This
second one here is called Shared With Me and that's the one you're interested in so go
ahead and click on that. It lists a bunch of the files that other people, other users
have shared with you.
For those of you who aren't familiar with Google Drive, it's essentially a cloud-based
drive so it's a drive on the Internet that allows you to upload files to. So if you have
a bunch of Word documents, Excel files, PDF files that you want to have accessible wherever
you are, go ahead and upload them to something like Google Drive and you can access them
from pretty much any Internet-connected computer. You can also access them from a cell phone,
a tablet, basically anything that has the Google Drive function built in to it.
So, anyway, in this case for the purposes of this video, I just have this one file that
I've shared with this particular user. The name of the file is called Online ledger template,
but if you were an actual client, I would rename this file to include your name. If
your name is John Smith, this would be John Smith cost ledger or if your name is Tom Jones,
Tom Jones cost ledger, and so on. To actually look at the file, what you want to do is click
on it.
And if you do, it opens up in another tab. For those of you who have ever used Microsoft
Excel, this interface should look very, very familiar to you. Up at the top here is bunch
of what I'd call, I guess, bookkeeping information, kind of administrative stuff. Your name's
going to be right here. If your name is John Smith, I'd type in your name John Smith as
the client and over here would be a description of the type of case you have. If it's a personal
injury case, that's what I would put there, divorce, child custody, wills and trusts,
whatever it happens to be that's what would go in this field right here. If your case
is one where I need to go to court, the court case number would go right there and then
right below that the address of the courthouse where the case is at. Over here on the right
would be the trust account number. Trust accounting is little bit more in-depth than I can go
in to in this video, but the basic idea is this. The money you pay me as a client, the
initial retainer that you pay me, that doesn't actually belong to me so I can't keep it in
the same account as all my other money. I actually have a separate account for that
called a Trust Account and the account number for that would actually go right here and
right beneath that the name and address of the bank where the trust account is actually
at.
Aside from all this administrative, not so interesting stuff is this stuff down here
and this is probably what most clients are going to be really interested in. Reading
across it's Date, Credit, Debit, Description, Hours, Hourly Rate, and Balance. Let's say
for example that at the end of 2012 you hire me to represent you in a personal injury case.
On January 1, 2013, you give me a check for $5,000 and that $5,000 is used as an initial
retainer deposit so under Description that's what I would write Initial Retainer Deposit
and $5,000 credit. If you carry that over, in your account I now have $5,000 worth of
money. Let's say on January 2, 2013, you and I have a meeting regarding your case. That
meeting lasts one hour. My normal billing rate for an hour is $180. So $180 an hour
for one hour represents a debit of $180. So $5,000 minus $180 gives you $4,820. So of
the original $5,000, $4,820 remains while $180 has been spent on the meeting that we
had on January 2nd. So continuing the example on January 5th, let's say you had me go to
court for you for a conference. Under Description I would type in going to court for case management
conference. My normal billing rate for that is $200. Whenever I go to court, it's $200
an hour. So $200 an hour for one hour represents another debit, except this time it's for $200.
So $4,820 minus $200 gives you $4,620. So that's what remains of the original $5,000.
Now if you continue this example on, you have another debit here, another debit here, here,
here, here, and so on, so you can see that this original $5,000 will trend down to zero,
down to a hundred, whatever it happens to be. If the case lasts beyond the original
$5,000, the client John Smith will need to put in some more money later on. If the case
doesn't last beyond the $5,000, at the end of the case whatever money happens to be left,
let's say it's $1200, that $1200 I would need to return to John Smith.
One other benefit that clients have told me about that is really helpful is this Description
field. I update this ledger system once a day, once every two days, something like that
so this Description field will allow the client to see what's going on in their case. For
example, if I have a meeting, if I do research, if I write a letter, if I have a phone call,
something like that, the client can actually see basically track their case not in real
time, but pretty much real time.
So, aside from tracking how much their case is costing, they can track the actual task-based
progress of the case. That's essentially the online ledger system. If you have a spreadsheet
like this that I've shared with you, you'll be able to look at it, but you won't be able
to edit it. If you have any problems with the spreadsheet that I've shared with you,
if you notice a mistake, an accounting error, something like that, go ahead and give me
a call or shoot me an email, basically get in touch with me and you and I can work it
out together real quick. It's usually something pretty simple that I typed in, maybe I transposed
a number or something.
Well, there you go, I hope that video was helpful. If you have any questions or you
want to give me a call, go ahead and do that or shoot me an email or visit me on the web
at andychenlaw.com and, uh, I'll talk to you later.