Customer Support

How to run customer qbrs as Small Law and Accounting Practices

Customer SupportFor Small Law and Accounting Practices2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

You run a six-attorney firm or a four-CPA practice, and client QBRs are a Friday-afternoon reconstruction project. You're pulling matter status from Clio or Karbon, billing totals from QuickBooks, deadline notes from a wall calendar, and email history from Outlook — then writing a client-update email from scratch that somehow synthesizes all of it. A thorough QBR prep for one client takes 60-90 minutes. Multiply that by a dozen active clients per partner and it never gets done properly. Clients ask what happened last quarter; you dig through threads. Associates ask what's pending; you explain verbally. Nothing is systematic. The paralegal who held it all together just gave notice.

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Customer SupportFor Small Law and Accounting Practices2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A per-client QBR dashboard that pulls matter status, open invoices, upcoming deadlines, and recent email threads into one place — described in plain language, built by Starch

An automated meeting notes system that transcribes your QBR calls, extracts action items by client and responsible attorney, and stores them in a searchable archive

A CRM surface that tracks every client relationship — last contact date, open matters, billing history, and next review date — so 'who haven't we talked to in 60 days?' gets a real answer in seconds

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

CRM Meeting Notes

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your QuickBooks data on a schedule (invoices, payments, outstanding balances, billing history). Connect Outlook from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries your email threads live when a dashboard or automation runs. Connect Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar from Starch's integration catalog so deadline and meeting data feeds into client cards. For Clio or MyCase, Starch automates those portals through your browser — no API needed — to pull matter status into your QBR surfaces.

Prompts to copy

Build me a client QBR dashboard for a small law firm. Each client card should show: open matters with status, total billed YTD vs. last year, outstanding invoices from QuickBooks, next deadline or filing date, and the last email thread summary from Outlook. I want to be able to filter by partner and by client type (litigation, transactional, estate planning).

Set up a meeting notes workflow for our client QBR calls. After each call, generate a summary with: key decisions made, action items assigned to specific attorneys, any client commitments we made, and a one-paragraph matter status update I can paste directly into the client email. Archive everything by client name and date.

Build me a CRM that tracks our active client relationships. Fields I need: client name, responsible partner, matter type, date of last billable activity, date of last non-billable contact, open invoice balance from QuickBooks, next scheduled review, and a notes field. Alert me when a client has had no contact in 45 days.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect QuickBooks as a scheduled-sync provider. Starch will sync invoices, payments, outstanding balances, and billing totals on a regular cadence so every QBR dashboard shows current numbers without manual exports.

2 Connect Outlook from Starch's integration catalog. The agent queries your inbox live to surface the most recent thread with each client when you open their dashboard or run a QBR prep.

3 Wire in your calendar. Connect Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar from Starch's integration catalog so filing deadlines, client calls, and court dates appear on each client's card automatically.

4 For Clio Manage, MyCase, or TaxDome: Starch automates those platforms through your browser — no API needed. Describe the matter fields you want pulled (status, next action, responsible attorney) and Starch builds the extraction workflow.

5 Start from the CRM app in the Starch App Store. Tell Starch what fields your practice actually uses — matter type, partner responsible, open invoice balance, last contact date, next review — and it adapts the schema to your firm instead of a generic sales pipeline.

6 Describe your QBR dashboard surface: 'One card per active client. Show open matters, YTD billing vs. prior year, outstanding invoices, last email summary, and next deadline. Filter by partner and matter type.' Starch builds it from your connected data.

7 Set up Meeting Notes for your QBR calls. Before the next client review, activate the meeting notes workflow. After the call it generates a summary, extracts action items with assigned attorneys, and stores the record under that client's name.

8 Tell Starch: 'After each QBR meeting notes summary is generated, draft a client-facing status email using the key decisions, our commitments, and the next steps. Tone should be professional but plain — no legalese.' Review and send; don't start from scratch.

9 Build a deadline tracker automation: 'Every Monday morning, pull all matters with a filing or response deadline in the next 30 days from Clio and my calendar. Group by responsible attorney. Send me a summary in Outlook.' This replaces the wall calendar and the Friday panic scan.

10 Configure a 45-day no-contact alert: 'If a client has had no billable activity and no email from us in 45 days, flag them in the CRM and send me a daily digest of who needs outreach.' Retention starts with knowing who you've gone quiet on.

11 For partner-level reporting, describe a weekly rollup: 'Every Friday at 4pm, generate a one-page partner summary: active client count, total outstanding invoices, matters with deadlines next week, and any clients flagged for no-contact. Pull from QuickBooks and the CRM.' No manual assembly.

12 Before a QBR, type: 'Summarize everything I need to know before my 2pm call with Hartwell Industries — recent emails, open invoices, matter status, last meeting notes, and any outstanding action items from us.' Starch pulls it in under a minute. The paralegal briefing is now a Starch query.

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Worked example

Q1 2026 QBR Prep — Hartwell Industries (Business Transactions Client)

Sample numbers from a real run

Legal fees billed Q1 2026	47,200
Outstanding invoices (QuickBooks sync)	12,800
Prior year Q1 billings (comparison)	38,500
Open matters (active)	3
Days since last non-billable partner contact	38

Hartwell Industries is a mid-size commercial real estate client with three open matters: a lease negotiation, an entity restructuring, and a pending vendor dispute. Before Starch, the partner responsible — Sarah Chen — would spend 75 minutes before the QBR pulling invoices from QuickBooks, searching Outlook for the last thread, checking Clio for matter status, and writing a status email. With Starch, she types: 'Give me a full QBR brief for Hartwell Industries ahead of my 10am call.' Starch surfaces $47,200 billed Q1 (up 23% from $38,500 in Q1 2025), $12,800 outstanding on Invoice #2241 (net-30, now at day 38), three open matters with current status pulled from Clio via browser automation, the most recent email thread from Outlook (a March 14 exchange about the lease timeline), and action items from the February QBR meeting notes. Sarah also sees a flag: no non-billable partner contact in 38 days — the relationship outreach has been all-billing. She adds a personal check-in to the agenda before the call starts. The QBR prep goes from 75 minutes to 8.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

QBR prep time per client (target: under 15 minutes from any attorney, not just the one who 'knows the file')

Outstanding invoice aging — percentage of AR over 45 days, tracked per client in the CRM

Client contact cadence — days since last non-billable touch per active client, flagged at 45 days

Action item close rate from QBR calls — items extracted by Meeting Notes vs. items marked complete within 30 days

Partner utilization visibility — billable hours reconstructed from calendar and QuickBooks vs. manually estimated on Fridays

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Clio Manage + manual reporting

Clio tracks matters well but doesn't draft the client status email, doesn't pull in QuickBooks billing context, and can't answer 'who haven't we contacted in 45 days' without a custom report nobody has time to build.

Karbon (accounting practices)

Karbon is strong for workflow and task management in CPA firms but doesn't synthesize a QBR brief across billing data, email history, and matter status — you still write the client email yourself.

TaxDome

TaxDome handles client portals and deadline tracking for tax practices but has no cross-client QBR summary layer and no meeting notes capability — it's a portal, not an analyst.

MyCase + QuickBooks + Outlook (manual stack)

This is most small firms today — three tabs open, a yellow legal pad, and an hour of prep. The tools don't talk to each other; you're the integration layer, and that's time you're not billing.

Notion or Google Docs QBR templates

Templates help with structure but they don't populate themselves — someone still has to pull the numbers, and that someone is usually the partner who should be preparing for the conversation instead.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — crm, meeting notes all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

We use Clio Manage, not a system with a direct API connector. Can Starch still pull matter status?

Yes. Starch automates Clio through your browser — no API needed. Describe the fields you want (matter name, status, responsible attorney, next action date) and Starch builds a workflow that logs into Clio and extracts them on the schedule you set. It works the same way for MyCase or TaxDome.

Can Starch send the client update email, or does it just draft it?

Starch connects to Outlook or Gmail and can both draft and send. Most firms prefer to review before sending — Starch drafts from your meeting notes and matter data, you read it in 90 seconds, and hit send. You can also set it to auto-send for lower-stakes updates if you want to.

Is our client data secure? We have confidentiality obligations.

Worth asking directly. Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today — that's on the roadmap. There's no on-premise deployment option. If your bar association or state CPA board has specific data-residency requirements, check those before connecting client matter data. For firms where this is a hard requirement, Starch may not be the right fit yet.

We use QuickBooks for billing but our partners reconstruct hours manually. Will Starch see the billable time entries?

Starch syncs your QuickBooks data on a schedule — invoices, payments, vendors, journal entries. Time entries that have been invoiced show up in that sync. If your time entries live in Clio or a separate timekeeping tool before they hit QuickBooks, Starch can pull from both: QuickBooks for what's been billed, Clio via browser automation for what's still in progress.

We only do QBRs for our top 20 clients. Is this worth building for a small list?

That's actually the sweet spot. The CRM surface tracks all active clients but the QBR automation runs for whatever list you define. Start with your top 20. The payoff is that prep time drops from an hour per client to under 15 minutes, and the quality of the review goes up because you're not spending that time gathering data — you're spending it thinking about the client.

Can the meeting notes workflow handle calls that include client audio, or just internal calls?

Meeting Notes transcribes from your meeting — if the client call happens over Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams (all reachable from Starch's integration catalog), it can work from the recording or live audio depending on how you configure it. For calls where recording consent applies, you'd handle that on your end before enabling transcription.