Trust accounting
Three records, checked against each other
Your bar requires the trust bank, the liability on your books, and every client's own ledger to agree to the penny. Most firms check two of the three, once a quarter, in a spreadsheet.
Trust Accounting
The three-way reconciliation your bar requires: bank statement against books against every client ledger. A clean, empty exceptions list is the goal.
1 · Trust bank balance
$187,750
IOLTA Trust Account
2 · Client funds liability
$186,500
Client Trust Funds Held
3 · Client trust ledgers total
$186,500
7 client sub-ledgers
Exceptions
Every dollar the three records disagree on, and what to do about it
Trust bank holds funds not attributable to any client
Money sitting in the trust account that no client ledger accounts for — usually an earned fee or cost reimbursement deposited to the wrong account. Move it to Operating and record the correction.
$1,250
Client trust ledgers
What is held for whom — each must never go below zero
Trust activity
Every movement through the trust account, newest first
Hartwell & Voss LLP’s books, as at 28 August 2026. Not a mock-up and not a screenshot — this is the screen, drawn from the same figures the firm sees.
The third record is the one that finds things
Bank against books catches a missing deposit. It cannot catch money in the account that belongs to nobody, because both can be internally consistent and still wrong about whose money it is. Only the client ledgers answer that.
An exception is named, not just counted
Every dollar the three records disagree on gets a title, an explanation of what usually causes it, and the correction to make. A number with no next step is not a finding.
A licensed CPA decides what it is
Automation surfaces the difference; a person decides whether it is a misposted fee, a timing difference, or something worse. Nothing is corrected in your books without you seeing it first.
Open it yourself
The whole application, on a firm with six months of books behind it.
The rest of the product