What’s The Easy Way To Allocate Matters To Your Trust Accounts?

By Author: Mayank Kapur
Total Articles: 278
Comment this article

Business bank account recordkeeping is simple. You make deposits and withdrawals. You can keep more detailed records for your taxes, financial statements, and other reasons—but you don't have to. No one is looking over your shoulder.
Trust accounting is different. The state bar requires you to allocate each and every deposit (or credit) and withdrawal (or debit) to a given matter. The failure to do so is grounds for disciplinary action.
This sounds easy enough. One matter per deposit or withdrawal, right?
Not so fast.
Let's say you deposit retainers from 100 clients in your law firm trust account. At the end of the month, you debit those retainers against work performed on each client matter.
You're shifting money from one account into another. But you'd prefer not to issue 100 different checks to your law firm's operating account. You'd rather make a single withdrawal from the trust account-and allocate that withdrawal to your various client matters.
To do this in Easy Trust our trust accounting software ...
... is-as our name promises-easy.
First, you create a new “transfer” matter, and give it a name. We'll call ours the “Internal Funds Transfer.”
If you're crediting a single deposit to multiple matters, then you select the new transfer matter on the left, add the new deposit transaction, fill in Payor and Payee, and then select the Credit (Deposit) Allocation function.
If you're debiting a single withdrawal to multiple matters, then you follow the same steps, with a new withdrawal transaction, and the Debit (Withdrawal) Allocation function.
Select the matters to be credited or debited, and fill in the entire amount. The amounts will be now allocated among the multiple matters—and your final transfer matter balance will be 0.
Easy, right? That's why we call it Easy Soft.
If you'd like to learn more about Easy Soft and any of our escrow account software, call us at 800-905-7638.

Author Bio

Easy Soft specializes in helping law firms with law office software. Easy Soft has automated software solutions for virtually every practice area, from case management, document assembly and time & billing, to divorce settlement, amortization and escrow accounting.