How Clio achieved full visibility and closed their books faster with AI-powered revenue orchestration in Leapfin

With 100 million+ records flowing through Leapfin and Luca building revenue rules from plain-language prompts, Clio’s finance team closed a full day faster — a 25% faster revenue close — automated six hours of refund work away, and reclaimed more than a full workday of monthly manual effort.

Key results

• Revenue close 25% faster — journal entries now prepared and posted one full business day earlier during month-end
• Six hours of refund reclass work, 100% automated away — a manual monthly process eliminated entirely
• More than a full workday reclaimed every month — roughly 11 hours total saved across refund reclass and data processing
• 100M+ records ingested and producing journal entries automatically — with zero manual revenue-engine runs
• Deferred revenue visibility at the invoice level — detailed answers the team previously had to assemble manually, now available on demand
• Luca-powered implementation — complex rules and edge cases built through plain-language prompts, without waiting on engineering or support tickets
• Sales tax reconciliation upgraded to precise GL-to-Avalara matching
• Acquisition-ready architecture — Future-proofing revenue recognition through data-agnostic foundation. New payment processors and acquired companies are onboarded faster, with rules built in plain language through Luca rather than waiting on engineering.

The challenge: Using data trapped in silos

Clio is the largest cloud-based legal practice management platform in the world. More than 400,000 legal professionals across 130+ countries use it for everything from client intake to billing to trust accounting.

Clio’s accounting team had done real work getting NetSuite to handle revenue recognition. The system was solid. Reporting was a different story — the team lacked the granular visibility needed to quickly analyze revenue drivers at the individual invoice level.

“Having the underlying data immediately available means we can provide details quickly, instead of stitching together multiple reports.”

Jordan Suen, Senior Accounting Manager, Clio

Manual processes still eating hours at month-end

Even with heavy automation in place, month-end still required hours of manual effort. Running the revenue engine, waiting for NetSuite interfaces to load, posting entries — none of it was investigative work. It was just running a process.

“NetSuite’s engine is actually really good at math and calculating revenue, but we lack malleability. If we wanted to suddenly change the logic of some revenue recognition, we couldn’t easily do that before [Leapfin].”

Aaron Petralba, Senior Accountant, Clio

The inflexibility became a bigger problem when Clio acquired vLex, which runs on a different tech stack and doesn’t use Stripe exclusively. Clio’s NetSuite setup depended entirely on Stripe’s SuiteSync connector, so any acquired company on a different payment processor meant starting from scratch.

“Our setup for NetSuite was solely dependent on Stripe’s SuiteSync connector. So if we use something else, we would have to build something from scratch or find another intermediary layer to help us transform the data.”

Jordan Suen, Senior Accounting Manager, Clio

Implementing Leapfin: Plain-language rules and edge cases no one knew existed

Clio was one of the first customers to implement Leapfin using Luca, Leapfin’s embedded AI agent for building and managing revenue automation rules. During their Leapfin implementation, the team described what they needed in plain English and Luca generated working rules in minutes — no tickets, no waiting on an engineer. This process even surfaced edge cases in Clio’s revenue data that the team hadn’t known about.

“In terms of hunting for problems or finding them, I actually found [the implementation] to be a really valuable exercise because it made us learn more about our revenue that I was unaware of — especially the things that our engineering teams were doing.”

Aaron Petralba, Senior Accountant, Clio

Aaron described Luca as a thinking partner. When he presented a problem, Luca offered multiple approaches. Even when the team chose a path Luca hadn’t suggested, having options to evaluate changed how they reasoned about the problem.

"Prompting Luca was super helpful. It gives me options — even if it’s not a complete list and we choose a different path. It was really useful to say “this is a problem” and get three options so that we could think about it from more than one perspective.

Aaron Petralba, Senior Accountant, Clio

Jordan was blunt about Luca’s impact on the project timeline. Clio’s implementation had started before Luca was available, so he saw the difference firsthand:

Results

A full day cut from the revenue close — 25% faster

Clio accelerated its revenue close by a full business day, a 25% improvement — the result of automated journal entries and real-time data processing. With the broader team working to compress its total month-end by two business days, picking up a full day on the revenue side is a meaningful step toward that goal.

Refund reclass: six hours a month, 100% automated away

The refund reclassification process used to take six hours every month. Management wanted visibility into refund activity, but the manual work to produce it was disproportionate. Leapfin now handles it end to end — the process went from six hours of human effort to zero.

“We were actually able to automate away our refunds reclass process, which saved us six hours a month. While that doesn’t sound like a lot, when you’re trying to condense your month-end, every hour counts.”

Jordan Suen, Senior Accounting Manager, Clio

Another five hours reclaimed — more than a full workday saved each month

On top of the refund reclass savings, Clio has more than 100 million records in Leapfin, with the platform ingesting transaction data and producing journal entries automatically. Aaron estimated that’s another five hours a month the team no longer spends running engines and watching loading screens. Combined with refund reclass, that’s roughly 11 hours every month — more than a full workday — redirected from time-consuming processes to analytical work.

Cleaner books: Sales tax reconciliation with precise matching

With granular transaction data now accessible through Leapfin, Clio has significantly enhanced the precision of its sales tax reconciliation process. Rather than relying on high-level manual adjustments to account for data gaps between systems, the team can now perform exact, transaction-level matching between our General Ledger and Avalara. This level of transparency gives the team faster, more granular support for its sales tax reconciliation workflow.

“Matching our GL to Avalara used to be a challenge, and we often had to settle for high-level adjustments because the underlying data was not accessible. Now, with Leapfin, we have the granular detail needed to verify every transaction to the dollar. That transparency is a game-changer. Previously, the underlying data was spread across systems and time-consuming to access. With Leapfin, we can verify at the transaction level much faster, which makes the reconciliation process significantly more efficient.”

Jordan Suen, Senior Accounting Manager, Clio

How Clio uses Luca day to day

Luca didn’t retire after implementation. Both Jordan and Aaron use it as part of their daily workflow.

Aaron leans on Luca’s SQL reporting most heavily — pulling quick samples and testing assumptions when questions come up, not necessarily to build saved reports but to get immediate answers. He described a recent example: a junior accountant asked whether tax country metadata was available on certain objects. Instead of delegating and waiting hours for a response, Aaron opened Luca and had his answer in seconds.

Clio team members also rely on Luca to remember and explain the business logic they’ve built. With dozens of complex automation rules in the system, nobody has them all memorized. Luca fills that gap.

“It’s super handy to have the workflow Luca help us understand the rules and the logic in the background, just because there’s so many. Having Luca explain how different rules can interact with each other – it’s just super helpful... It’s like having a really high-powered analyst.”

Jordan Suen, Senior Accounting Manager, Clio

Aaron summed up the relationship succinctly:

Learning to trust AI in accounting

Leapfin was the first AI-specific tool Clio’s accounting team adopted. Jordan had used Gemini before, and the company recently started rolling out Claude for general productivity. But nothing had been this close to the core accounting function.

Clio has built a culture where employees use professional skepticism, especially when it comes to AI outputs. What made Leapfin work for them was the ability to test every rule change before it goes live. Aaron flagged that bar as the one he’ll apply to every AI tool from now on.

“The testing functionality is really good — being able to verify every rule change before it goes live — is the bar I'll apply to any AI tool going forward. The ability to validate output before it touches the books is what makes a tool like this usable for accounting.”

Aaron Petralba, Senior Acountant, Clio

What comes next

Clio likely isn’t done acquiring. Each acquisition brings a different tech stack, different payment processors, and different accounting nuances. Jordan sees the ability to self-serve new configurations through Luca as the most important capability going forward.

Aaron leans on Luca’s SQL reporting most heavily — pulling quick samples and testing assumptions when questions come up, not necessarily to build saved reports but to get immediate answers. He described a recent example: a junior accountant asked whether tax country metadata was available on certain objects. Instead of delegating and waiting hours for a response, Aaron opened Luca and had his answer in seconds.