What Financial Data — WIP, AR, and Rates — Migrates Into LeanLaw?

Invoice-by-invoice history does not migrate to LeanLaw. It stays in QuickBooks Online, where your books already live. What does move is your current position: open work-in-progress, outstanding receivables as a per-matter opening balance, and your billing rates, so you start live without re-entering everything by hand.

Why invoice history stays in QuickBooks Online

LeanLaw is built on top of QuickBooks Online, not as a replacement ledger running in parallel. Your general ledger, and the invoice-by-invoice transaction history that makes it up, stays exactly where it already is. That’s true regardless of which practice management or billing tool you’re moving away from: migrating to LeanLaw is a change to how you generate and manage bills going forward, not a project to rebuild years of historical accounting inside a new system. What that means specifically for old invoices is worth reading directly if that’s the piece you’re weighing.

That distinction matters because “does my data migrate” and “does my history migrate” are really two different questions. Your firm’s current financial position, what’s owed and what’s in progress, moves. The line-by-line record of how you got there, invoice by invoice, does not; it’s already sitting in QuickBooks Online, and duplicating it into a second system would create two versions of the truth rather than one.

What moves as an opening balance instead

Open accounts receivable comes across as a per-matter opening balance: one figure per matter representing what’s currently owed, rather than a reconstruction of every invoice that built up to that number. Your onboarding team is not re-keying every historical invoice line by line. The opening position is what transfers, and it becomes your starting point going forward inside LeanLaw.

Unbilled work-in-progress works the same way conceptually: time and costs that haven’t been invoiced yet move over as current WIP tied to the right matter, so nothing sits in limbo between systems while you make the switch. What’s already been billed and paid stays as history in QuickBooks Online; what’s still open or unbilled becomes your live starting position in LeanLaw.

Say, hypothetically, a matter has three unpaid invoices totaling $9,400 and 6.2 hours of unbilled time at the point of migration. What arrives in LeanLaw is a $9,400 open balance for that matter and 6.2 hours of WIP ready to be billed, not three separate invoice records reconstructed one by one. The total is what matters going forward; the invoice-level history that produced it remains retrievable in QuickBooks Online if you ever need to look back.

Why an opening figure is enough to bill and collect on

The point of bringing over WIP and AR at all is so your firm keeps working from real numbers on day one, not so LeanLaw can display a complete transaction archive. A matter’s opening AR balance tells you what to collect on now; the invoice history that produced that balance doesn’t change what you’re chasing today, it only explains how you got there. The same logic applies to WIP: knowing a matter has 6.2 hours sitting unbilled is what lets you bill it, whether that time accumulated from one long session or a dozen short ones spread across a month.

This matters most for the part of a firm’s revenue cycle that’s easiest to lose track of during a transition: the gap between work performed and cash actually collected. A migration that lost sight of open receivables would widen that gap by accident, not because collecting got harder, but because nobody could see clearly what was still owed to whom. Carrying over the current position, rather than the history behind it, is what keeps that gap from growing during the switch itself, and it’s why “by the total” is the useful answer rather than a shortcoming.

Rates: what carries over

Your billing rate structure, timekeeper rates, and matter-level rates, and how they’re organized, moves as part of onboarding as well, so you aren’t rebuilding a rate table from scratch inside a new system. This is part of why onboarding scope depends on how your rates are currently structured: a firm with a handful of standard rates has a simpler mapping job than one with dozens of matter-specific exceptions built up over years.

Do you have to enter retainer balances yourself?

Retainer and trust balances that exist as of your migration date are part of what onboarding accounts for, alongside AR and WIP, rather than something you’re expected to reconstruct alone after go-live with no support. Exactly how much of that setup work you do versus your onboarding team does is a scope question tied to your plan and the state of your current records, which is really a question of who handles which part of migration work and worth raising directly rather than assuming either way.

What this depends on

• How clean your current system’s data is; well-maintained matter and rate records are simpler to bring across than years of inconsistent entry
• Which plan you’re on, since onboarding scope and what’s included can differ by tier
• Whether your trust and retainer balances are already reconciled in your current system before migration starts
• How many matters, timekeepers, and rate variations need to be mapped into LeanLaw’s structure

Rather than a yes-or-no about whether data moves, ask your onboarding team to walk through your specific opening position, matter by matter if needed, before you sign off on migration.

Related questions

Do you bring AR by the invoice, or by the total? By the total: open accounts receivable comes across as a per-matter opening balance rather than a reconstruction of individual invoices. The invoice-level history stays in QuickBooks Online.

Can you pull WIP, AR, and matter data so we can handle future collections and billing? Unbilled WIP and open AR move as your current position, tied to the right matters, so you can pick up collections and billing on live numbers rather than starting from zero.

Do I need to add existing retainer balances into LeanLaw myself? Retainer and trust balances as of your migration date are part of onboarding scope, not something you’re left to reconstruct alone; exactly how much falls to your team versus LeanLaw’s is worth confirming directly.