Does my outside bookkeeper or accountant need their own LeanLaw seat?

Whether your bookkeeper needs a LeanLaw seat comes down to where their work happens. Anything done entirely inside QuickBooks Online — categorizing, reconciling, journal entries — needs no LeanLaw login. A seat only becomes necessary once someone is creating invoices or touching client and matter records directly inside LeanLaw.

What a bookkeeper’s work actually touches

Reconciliation, categorization, journal entries, and financial statements are QuickBooks Online-side work. None of it requires visibility into matter-level billing detail — a bookkeeper closing the books for the month doesn’t need to know which timekeeper worked which matter, only what landed in which account.

Where LeanLaw enters the picture

LeanLaw is where matter-level detail lives: time entries, invoices, trust ledgers tied to a specific client’s work. Someone only needs a LeanLaw seat if they’re the one creating that detail — building an invoice, entering time, or managing a matter record directly. A bookkeeper who reconciles the resulting accounts in QuickBooks Online, without ever generating that detail themselves, is working entirely on the QuickBooks Online side of the same books.

Some firms give a bookkeeper a seat anyway, even when they’re not creating invoices, because they want that person looking directly at LeanLaw’s own reports rather than reconstructing matter-level detail from the QuickBooks Online side. That’s a legitimate reason to add a seat — it just isn’t the same reason as needing one to do the reconciliation work itself.

Per-user pricing counts LeanLaw users, not QuickBooks Online users

LeanLaw’s Core and Pro plans are priced per user, per month — Core at $55, Pro at $75. That count is about who logs into LeanLaw itself. Say a hypothetical firm has three timekeepers and an outside bookkeeper who only ever works inside QuickBooks Online, reconciling trust and operating accounts. Because the bookkeeper never creates a matter, an invoice, or a time entry in LeanLaw, the firm’s seat count stays at three, regardless of how central that bookkeeper is to the firm’s actual books.

What this depends on

• Whether your bookkeeper only reconciles in QuickBooks Online or also builds invoices or matters directly in LeanLaw.
• What kind of QuickBooks Online access they need for their own accountant-side work.
• Whether they need visibility into LeanLaw-side reports, rather than just the underlying accounts.
• How your firm splits trust reconciliation responsibility between the outside bookkeeper and internal staff.

If your bookkeeper’s job stops at the books, the question that matters more than whether they need a seat is which QuickBooks Online plan supports the access they actually need.

Related questions

Do we need everyone on QuickBooks Online, or just certain people? That’s a QuickBooks Online access question separate from LeanLaw seats. What counts as a LeanLaw user only tracks who’s logging into LeanLaw itself, not who has QuickBooks Online access for their own work.

Does it matter if our bookkeeper has never used LeanLaw, Soluno, or Timeslips before? Not for the QuickBooks Online side of their work. LeanLaw is built on QuickBooks Online rather than a separate ledger, so a bookkeeper who already knows QuickBooks Online can do their part without learning a new accounting system underneath it.