Does QuickBooks have a built-in time tracker for lawyers?

QuickBooks Online Plus (and up) and QuickBooks Desktop both ship with QuickBooks Time, the rebranded TSheets product. It is built for hourly employees clocking into job sites — geofence punch-in, kiosk timeclock, manager approval — and it works fine for that. It is not built for an attorney trying to recover the eleven-minute call from the parking lot or the sentencing memo edited at home after dinner. Solo lawyers who try to use QuickBooks Time as their billable-hour capture system end up with the same problem manual timers create: the work that doesn't get punched-in never gets billed. ClaimHour is the upstream capture layer; QuickBooks remains your invoicing and bookkeeping system.

Which QuickBooks SKU should a solo lawyer use, and does ClaimHour work with all of them?

The honest ranking for a no-PMS US solo billing hourly: QuickBooks Online Simple Start ($35/mo) for a one-attorney shop with low matter volume; QuickBooks Online Essentials ($65/mo) once you need recurring invoices, time entries by customer, and the basic AR aging report; QuickBooks Online Plus ($99/mo) once you need class tracking for matters or want QuickBooks Time bundled. QuickBooks Desktop Pro / Premier (now subscription-only at $549/yr) is the right pick for solos who already run it and value the on-prem data control. ClaimHour exports to all of them via the universal IIF format on Desktop, the .qbo / CSV import on Online, and a future direct-API push for Online (on the 2026 roadmap).

How does ClaimHour map matters to QuickBooks customers and jobs?

QuickBooks models the client → matter relationship as Customer → Sub-customer (Online) or Customer:Job (Desktop). ClaimHour's matter list mirrors this: when you create a matter you tag it with a parent client and an optional matter code. On export, each captured time entry becomes a billable Time Activity line item (or an Invoice line item, depending on which workflow you pick) attributed to the right Sub-customer / Job. Service Item is configurable per matter — most solos use one Service Item per practice area (Family Law Hourly, Immigration Flat Fee, etc.) so the P&L slices cleanly by practice area without needing class tracking.

Can I use ClaimHour to push time entries directly into QuickBooks Online without manual import?

Day-one is IIF / .qbo / CSV import — you click Export in the ClaimHour digest, save the file, and run it through the QuickBooks import dialog. That is one click in either system and takes about thirty seconds for a week of entries. A direct-API integration using the QuickBooks Online v3 API (OAuth 2.0, Time Activity create) is on the roadmap for 2026 once the file-import workflow has stabilized in production. Direct-push raises the integration-failure risk surface materially (token refresh, rate limits, partial-batch failures) and we are deliberately shipping the simple workflow first.

What about IOLTA trust accounting? Does QuickBooks plus ClaimHour cover that?

Honestly: barely, and not without help. QuickBooks Online and Desktop both can be configured for trust accounting if you set up a separate Liability account for client trust funds and discipline yourself to record every retainer deposit and trust-funded billable hour as a journal entry against it. Most state bars audit trust accounts on a three-way reconciliation (bank statement vs. trust ledger vs. matter sub-ledger), which QuickBooks does not produce natively. The realistic stack for a no-PMS solo handling trust money: QuickBooks for the operating account, LawPay (or your bank's IOLTA-compliant tooling) for the trust deposit and three-way reconciliation, and ClaimHour for the captured hours feeding both. ClaimHour is upstream of trust accounting, not a substitute for it.

Does ClaimHour replace LeanLaw, TimeSolv, Bill4Time, or other QuickBooks-friendly billing layers?

It depends what you want from those tools. LeanLaw and TimeSolv are full billing suites bolted on top of QuickBooks at $40–$70/user/month — they handle invoice templates, retainer draws, statement generation, and trust accounting on top of the QuickBooks ledger. Bill4Time is a similar all-in-one billing layer. ClaimHour does not replace those if you need their invoice templating or trust-accounting features; it complements them by capturing the upstream hours nobody else sees. Many no-PMS solos run leaner — QuickBooks alone for invoicing, LawPay for trust, ClaimHour for capture — at a total stack cost under $80/month versus $90+ for any of the bolt-ons. The right comparison page if you're evaluating those: read our buyer's guide on time tracking without a practice management system.

Integration guide · Updated April 2026

QuickBooks for lawyers time tracking: capture billable hours upstream of your invoicing

QuickBooks is the de facto bookkeeping and invoicing system for the roughly thirty percent of US solo lawyers who never bought into a practice management subscription. Walk into any one-attorney shop billing out of a corner office and the back-end is QuickBooks Online plus a Word folder of templates plus a manual time log on a yellow pad. The bookkeeping side works. The time-capture side is where the leaks hide. This is the integration story for solos who want their billable hours to land cleanly in QuickBooks without first surrendering to a $89/month PMS.

TL;DR

QuickBooks invoices brilliantly, tracks AR, slices the P&L, and runs the books. It does not see the eleven-minute parking-lot call, the seven-page motion drafted on a Tuesday night, or the half-hour of hallway plea negotiation. ClaimHour is the upstream layer that captures all of it and exports clean to QuickBooks Online (.qbo / CSV / Time Activity), QuickBooks Desktop (IIF), QuickBooks Self-Employed (CSV), and the bolt-on billing suites that sit on top of QuickBooks (LeanLaw, TimeSolv, Bill4Time). The matter list maps to QuickBooks Sub-customer / Job records; each captured entry becomes a billable Time Activity tagged to the right matter and Service Item. Starter $29/mo, Pro $59/mo. The total no-PMS stack — QuickBooks Online Essentials at $65/mo + LawPay for trust + ClaimHour Pro at $59/mo — runs about $124/mo total, versus $159/mo for Clio Complete alone. The capture-data quality is comparable; the savings are real; and your books stay in QuickBooks.

Why QuickBooks runs the no-PMS solo's books

Three reasons, in roughly the order that matters to a working solo:

It already exists. Most solos opening their own shop set up QuickBooks during week one because they need a way to invoice clients, file 1099s, and produce a Schedule C. By the time they start asking themselves whether to buy a PMS, the chart of accounts is already populated, the bank feed is already linked, and the year-end accountant already knows the file. Switching to a PMS-bundled billing system means re-implementing all of that — and most solos are not interested.

It costs $35–$99/month, not $89–$159. QuickBooks Online Simple Start is $35/mo. Essentials is $65/mo. Plus is $99/mo. The bundled-PMS competitors start at $39/mo for the lowest tier and go up to $159/mo for Clio Complete. For a one-attorney shop the QuickBooks-only stack is materially cheaper, and the PMS does not deliver enough that's not in QuickBooks plus a tab of Word templates plus a competent capture tool to justify the difference.

The accountant already speaks it. Solos lean heavily on a fractional bookkeeper or year-end CPA. Those professionals are fluent in QuickBooks; many of them charge a premium to work in a PMS-native ledger. Staying in QuickBooks is, partly, a labor-arbitrage decision — it lets you hire bookkeeping help at the cheapest available rate.

The trade-off, of course, is that QuickBooks was built for a hardware store, a contractor, a consulting firm — not for a lawyer billing in tenths of an hour against retainer-funded matters with trust-account discipline. The built-in time tracker is QuickBooks Time, formerly TSheets, and it is built for hourly employees clocking into job sites. We will get to why that does not fit a solo lawyer's workflow.

Which QuickBooks SKU does a solo lawyer actually use?

The four product lines you will see in the wild:

SKU	April 2026 price	Best fit	Time-capture gap
QuickBooks Self-Employed	$20/mo	Pre-bar contract attorneys, document-review per-diem work, freelance paralegals — anyone whose 1040 is a Schedule C and who does not invoice on letterhead	No matter / sub-customer model. Can't tag time to a client at all. CSV-only export from ClaimHour.
QuickBooks Online Simple Start	$35/mo	One-attorney shop, low matter volume, mostly flat-fee work. Send invoices, track AR, file taxes.	No native time tracking. ClaimHour exports CSV; you create invoices manually from the digest summary or roll captured hours into a flat-fee narrative.
QuickBooks Online Essentials	$65/mo	Most no-PMS hourly solos land here. Recurring invoices, time entries by customer, AR aging, multi-user (you + your bookkeeper).	Time entry exists but is manual entry-by-entry. ClaimHour batches captured time as Time Activity records via .qbo / CSV import.
QuickBooks Online Plus	$99/mo	Solo with a paralegal or part-time associate. Class tracking for practice areas, project profitability, QuickBooks Time bundled.	QuickBooks Time is included but built for clock-in/clock-out hourly employees, not billable-hour capture. ClaimHour replaces that workflow.
QuickBooks Desktop Pro / Premier	$549/yr (subscription-only as of 2022)	Solos who already ran Desktop for a decade and don't want to migrate. Strong with on-prem control and Mac-via-virtualization is doable.	IIF import is the universal time-entry format. ClaimHour exports IIF directly. The 2027 announced sunset of Desktop Pro/Premier for new customers means new solos start on Online.

If you are reading this to figure out which SKU to start on: Essentials is the right answer for the median hourly-billing US solo. Simple Start works if your matter volume is low and most of your work is flat-fee. Plus is overkill unless you have a paralegal or want class tracking by practice area. Self-Employed is structurally wrong for any attorney sending invoices on a firm letterhead — the lack of a customer model breaks too much.

Why QuickBooks Time isn't built for billable-hour attorneys

QuickBooks Time (formerly TSheets, acquired by Intuit in 2017 for $340M) ships bundled with QuickBooks Online Plus and Advanced. It is the only time-tracking tool Intuit publishes for QuickBooks. It is also, structurally, built for a use case that does not match a billing attorney's day:

It is a punch-in / punch-out timeclock. The expected workflow is an employee opens the app at 9:00am, taps "Clock In," and taps "Clock Out" at 5:00pm. The product features (geofence-restricted clock-in, manager approval workflows, payroll-grade rounding rules, GPS-tracked field crews) make sense for a contractor's framing crew. They do not make sense for a lawyer who switches between four matters between 9:00 and 9:30am while answering the phone, opening Mail, and reading a docket text from the courthouse clerk.
It does not see anything you don't punch. The eleven-minute parking-lot call is unbillable in a punch-clock model unless you remember to start the timer before you answer. The two-hour evening motion-drafting session at home is unbillable unless you remember to clock in, switch matters, and clock out. This is the same problem manual time logs have, with a phone app instead of a yellow pad. It does not solve the leak; it just digitizes the question of whether you remembered to track.
It does not understand "matter" — only "customer:job." Which is fine, because that is the underlying QuickBooks model. But it means you do not get matter-level reporting, retainer-draw tracking, conflict-check integration, or any of the other things a legal-specific layer provides. You get a customer record, a job record, and an hours total.
It does not capture passively from anywhere. No call metadata, no email signal, no document edit time. Pure self-report through the app's punch-in interface. That self-report is the leak. The whole reason an attorney needs passive capture is that a self-report system requires the attorney to remember to use it — and forgetting is not a bug, it is the predictable behavior of a brain doing legal work.

This is not a knock on QuickBooks Time as a product. For a contractor's hourly field crew it works fine. It is a knock on the implicit suggestion in QuickBooks marketing that the bundled time tool covers a lawyer's needs. It does not. The hourly-employee timeclock is structurally not the same product as billable-hour capture for a knowledge worker who switches contexts every few minutes.

Worth noting: the same gap is what created the entire automatic time tracking for attorneys category. Smokeball AutoTime, Clio Duo, and Billables.ai all exist because manual punch-in tools are insufficient for a billing attorney. ClaimHour is the standalone, no-PMS-required, Mac-first version of the same idea.

How ClaimHour exports to QuickBooks

Three export paths, depending on which QuickBooks edition you run:

QuickBooks Online — .qbo / CSV import

From the ClaimHour daily or weekly digest, click Export → QuickBooks Online. ClaimHour writes a .qbo file (proper Intuit Interchange Format for time entries, the modern Online-native flavor) or a CSV in the QuickBooks Online time-entry import schema. You open QuickBooks Online → Settings → Import Data → Time Entries → upload the file. QuickBooks validates the file, shows you a preview of the entries with their proposed Customer:Sub-customer mappings and Service Items, and asks you to confirm. Confirm, and the entries appear as billable Time Activity records on the matters they belong to. You can then add them to draft invoices via the standard "Add to invoice" flow.

For a typical week of captured time — say, 35 entries across 8 matters for a solo billing 22 hours — the import takes about 30 seconds end-to-end and produces clean billable Time Activity records. The first time you do it, set aside 10 minutes to verify the Customer:Sub-customer mappings; after that the mapping persists per matter.

QuickBooks Desktop — IIF import

IIF (Intuit Interchange Format) is the universal time-entry import for QuickBooks Desktop. ClaimHour writes a properly-formatted IIF with TIMERHDR / TIMEACT records and the matching customer / employee / service-item references. You open QuickBooks Desktop → File → Utilities → Import → IIF Files → select the export. QuickBooks Desktop is famously strict about IIF formatting; ClaimHour's export is tested against QuickBooks Desktop Pro 2024 and Premier 2024, including the Mac-via-Parallels configurations that some solos still run. We do not generate IIF features Desktop Pro doesn't accept, and we don't rely on undocumented IIF dialect quirks.

QuickBooks Self-Employed — CSV summary

QuickBooks Self-Employed has no time-entry concept — only Schedule C income lines. For attorneys who run Self-Employed (typically pre-bar contract counsel or document-review work), ClaimHour exports a CSV summary you reformat into your invoice template; the captured hours feed the dollar amount on each invoice line, but the time data does not flow back into the QuickBooks ledger as a separate object. This is a limitation of the SKU, not of ClaimHour's export.

The bolt-on billing layers

If you run LeanLaw, TimeSolv, or Bill4Time on top of QuickBooks, ClaimHour can export directly to each via their respective time-entry CSV schemas. LeanLaw in particular maintains a clean QuickBooks Online sync for the entries it receives, so the workflow becomes ClaimHour → LeanLaw → QuickBooks Online with the LeanLaw layer handling invoice templates, retainer draws, and trust accounting on top.

Mapping ClaimHour matters to QuickBooks Customer:Sub-customer records

QuickBooks's data model for legal billing is Customer (the client) → Sub-customer (the matter) → Time Activity (the hours). On Desktop the same shape is Customer:Job. ClaimHour's matter list mirrors this exactly. When you create a matter in ClaimHour you specify:

Client. Maps to QuickBooks Customer. Existing or new.
Matter description. Maps to QuickBooks Sub-customer (Online) or Job (Desktop) name. Free-text.
Matter code (optional). A short string (e.g. "SMITH-2026-FAM") used for internal reference, not exported to QuickBooks but useful in CSV exports for accountants.
Service Item. Maps to a QuickBooks Service Item — usually one per practice area (e.g. "Family Law Hourly," "Immigration Flat Fee," "Criminal Defense — CJA") so the P&L slices cleanly. Per-matter Service Items are also supported if you want finer-grained reporting.
Billing rate. Maps to the Service Item's hourly rate. Per-matter overrides supported (a discounted rate on a friend-and-family matter, a premium rate on a federal felony case).
Billing model. ClaimHour-internal — hourly, flat fee, retainer-against-hourly, contingency, mixed. Determines how captured hours route through the digest. QuickBooks does not need to know.

The first-time setup for a solo with twenty active matters takes about fifteen minutes — most of that is finding the matter list, not entering it. Subsequent matters created during the digest review take about ten seconds each.

The end-to-end billable invoicing flow

Here is what a Friday afternoon billing run looks like for a no-PMS solo running QuickBooks Online + ClaimHour:

Capture happened automatically all week. Calls, emails, document edits, calendar events — all metadata-only, all on-device, all already in the digest queue.
Open the ClaimHour digest, Friday at 4:30pm. Forty-three captured entries from the week's work. Each one is pre-attributed to a matter based on counterparty, document path, calendar event title, or your manual prior tagging.
Review and approve. Two minutes of clicking through. Approve forty-one as captured; edit the duration on one (you took the call but it ran longer than the metadata showed because you stayed on hold); reject one (it was a personal call from your spouse that the auto-classifier mis-attributed because they share the same area code as a client).
Export to QuickBooks Online. One click. ClaimHour writes the .qbo file and asks if you want to upload it directly via the system browser or save to disk. Either works.
QuickBooks Online imports the entries. About thirty seconds, including the preview-and-confirm dialog. All entries land as Time Activity records on their matters.
Generate invoices in QuickBooks Online. Open each matter ready for invoicing → Add to invoice → review the auto-populated line items → save and send. For matters on monthly cadence, a recurring invoice template auto-pulls unbilled time activity at month-end.
LawPay (or your trust tool) handles retainer draws. If the matter is retainer-funded, the invoice net amount is drawn from the trust account in LawPay; the operating-account deposit lands and reconciles in QuickBooks via the bank feed.

End-to-end Friday afternoon time: about twelve minutes for a forty-three-entry week. The same week reconstructed from a yellow-pad time log on a Saturday morning is two hours of trying to remember what you did on Tuesday afternoon, and the bill is materially smaller because half the captured entries never made it onto the pad.

Trust accounting and IOLTA — the QuickBooks gotcha

Every solo handling client funds in trust runs into the same wall: QuickBooks does not natively produce a three-way reconciliation report. State bars audit trust accounts on a three-way: bank statement vs. trust ledger vs. matter-level sub-ledger. QuickBooks can be configured to track trust funds as a Liability account and trust-funded billable hours as journal entries against it, but the native reporting will not produce the three-way report your bar wants — you have to assemble it manually or use a bolt-on.

The realistic stack we see solos running:

QuickBooks Online or Desktop for the operating account, billable invoices, AR, and tax filings.
LawPay (or your bank's IOLTA-compliant tool, or Clio Manage's trust module if you happen to have it for some reason) for the trust deposit, trust ledger, and three-way reconciliation report.
ClaimHour for the captured hours that feed both — the operating-account invoices and the trust-draw discipline.

ClaimHour is deliberately upstream of trust. We capture the hours; LawPay (or equivalent) reconciles the dollars. We are not a trust-accounting tool, do not pretend to be one, and will not be one — bar-grievance risk on trust software is high and the right specialists for that lane already exist.

For a solo who wants the trust-accounting layer integrated more tightly: LeanLaw bolts onto QuickBooks Online and adds proper trust accounting plus invoice templating for $40–$70/user/month. Stack cost there is QuickBooks Essentials ($65) + LeanLaw ($60) + ClaimHour Pro ($59) = $184/mo total — still under Clio Complete ($159/mo) by less than people assume, but the data lives in QuickBooks (your asset) rather than Clio (their asset). For solos who care about the data-residency point, the LeanLaw stack is the right pick. For solos who don't, plain QuickBooks + LawPay + ClaimHour at $159/mo total is the cheaper path.

What ClaimHour doesn't replace in the QuickBooks stack

Your invoice templates. QuickBooks Online and Desktop both ship customizable invoice templates. ClaimHour exports time entries; QuickBooks renders the invoice. We don't do the rendering.
Your AR aging and collections. Whether you nudge clients at 30 / 60 / 90 days via QuickBooks's built-in reminders, a paid service like Anchor, or by phone — that workflow stays in QuickBooks (or its add-on layer). ClaimHour is upstream of the cash collection.
Your bookkeeping reconciliation. Bank feed, credit-card categorization, monthly reconciliation, year-end close — all QuickBooks territory. ClaimHour writes one type of object (billable Time Activity) and stops there.
Your tax preparation. Schedule C income, deductions, quarterly estimates — QuickBooks Self-Employed handles the simplest cases, your CPA handles the rest. ClaimHour doesn't see income, expense, or P&L data and has no role in tax prep.
Your conflict-check system. If you run a Word-document conflict list or a tool like Lawyerist Conflicts, the conflict check happens before intake. ClaimHour reads the matter list to attribute captured time; it does not gate intake.
Your case management. Documents, calendar, contacts, client portal — if you run a PMS, those features are there. If you don't, you run them out of iCloud Drive + Apple Mail + Calendar + Word. ClaimHour was built for the latter setup; we don't replace the former either way.

How ClaimHour fits the QuickBooks-running solo

If you bill out of QuickBooks Online or Desktop, work hourly or mixed-model, and have ever had the end-of-week realization that your timesheet shows fewer hours than your week actually contained — ClaimHour was built for that gap. Your books stay in QuickBooks. Your trust accounting stays in LawPay. Your invoicing flow stays exactly where it is. The only thing that changes is that the captured-hour numbers feeding the invoices reflect the work you actually did, not the work you remembered to write down.

Join the waitlist and we'll email when early access opens. Starter $29/mo, Pro $59/mo (most popular for QuickBooks-running solos because of the bar-standard 0.1-hour rounding), Scale $99/mo (two-seat, for solo + paralegal practice).

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