Accounting ▸ Trust accounting

This page documents the Accounting ▸ Trust accounting view inside the Matter detail page. The Matter detail page is a two-level tab strip — see Matter detail for the parent overview.

The unified Trust Ledger

Trust receipts, trust payments, matter-to-matter transfers and reversals all appear in one sortable, filterable table on a single chronological running balance — the matter’s net trust position. Receipts increase the balance, payments decrease it, and a reversal flips its original entry’s sign.

Above the ledger, the Linked Trust Accounts and Trust Transfer Requisitions panels are unchanged.

Columns

Column	What it shows
Date	The date the entry occurred.
#	The durable ledger number. It is fixed for the life of the entry and does not change when you sort or filter — use it to reference an entry in audits and reports.
Type/Acct	The entry type (Receipt / Payment / Transfer / Reversal) with its chips (reverses/replacement links, retainer, reconciled, multi-matter, FX, partial), and the trust account name beneath.
Party	Who the funds were received from or paid to, with this matter’s display ID beneath.
Method/Ref	The payment method, with the reference beneath.
Description	The entry description (reversal rows show a live-derived Partial / Final / Full reversal label).
Receipts / Payments / Reversals	Contra amount columns so money-in and money-out are both readable in one table.
Balance	The single running balance after this entry.

Notes are not a column — when an entry has a note, a small note icon appears in the Type/Acct cell; hover it to read the note. Status is not a column either — click an entry’s detail icon to see status, reconciliation information and FX detail.

Sorting and filtering

Click any sortable column header to sort. Filter by Type (Receipt / Payment / Transfer / Reversal) and by Trust account. Sorting and filtering only change the display order — they never change an entry’s durable # or its running balance.

Adding entries

The toolbar above the ledger has Trust Receipt, Trust Payment and Transfer to another matter. Trust Payment routes through the Trust Transfer Requisition flow; sub-threshold amounts auto-approve and post.

If posting a signed requisition is refused because the money is not there (or nothing is owed any more), the requisition is voided automatically and the requester, every signer and the person posting are notified with the reason. Raise a new requisition for the amount as it now stands.

Requisitions: funds held and the settlement date

Every requisition holds its amount. From the moment a requisition is drafted — including one raised to pay an invoice — its amount is held (reserved) on the matter’s trust balance until the requisition is posted or voided. Unposted requisitions show a Funds held tag in the Trust Transfer Requisitions panel, so you can see where the money is reserved.

Each requisition records two dates:

• Requisition date — the day the requisition was raised, which is also the day its funds start being held.
• Proposed settlement date — the date the payment is recorded in the trust ledger and general ledger when the requisition posts. It defaults to the requisition date. You can back-date it or post-date it, either when you draft the requisition or later with Change settlement date (the calendar icon on the row) at any point before the requisition is posted or voided.

The settlement date cannot fall in a reconciled or closed period — the change is refused and the reason is shown.

If the settlement date is before the requisition date or before a signer’s signature date, you are warned, not blocked: the row shows a Back-dated flag naming the date it precedes. Signature dates are kept as a record only; they never change the settlement date.

Paying a cost out of the client’s trust funds belongs here, not on Disbursements. A disbursement is the firm’s money advanced on the client’s behalf and recovered on an invoice; the client’s trust money was never the firm’s to recover, so it is recorded as a trust payment on this ledger and never appears as a recoverable cost or on an invoice. See Costs paid from the client’s trust money are not disbursements.

A transfer to a matter with a different primary client requires both clients’ signed consent first, and the amount is held (earmarked) on this matter until the consent completes, is voided, or the hold expires — see Cross-client transfers, consents & holds. Posted entries are append-only — use Correct entry or Reverse entry from a row’s action menu to unwind them; both preserve the audit trail.

One unified entry form

Trust Receipt, Trust Payment and the firm-wide multi-matter form all use the same entry form with the same field order, so the layout is identical wherever you record trust money. Fields, top to bottom:

1. Trust account — pick the account; its currency is shown read-only (you never type the currency).
2. Date
3. Method and 4. Reference
4. Participant — for a receipt this is an optional Payor participant (tag who sent the funds, or skip for ad-hoc payors); for a payment it is the Payee participant, which surfaces that participant’s saved banking methods. Then the free-text name.
5. Description
6. Amount (single, for one matter) — or the allocations grid when the entry spans several matters.
7. Retainer toggle
8. FX details — only used when the money moved in a different currency from the trust account; the source currency excludes the account’s own currency.
9. Notes
10. Negative-balance override — payments only, for admins, when it applies.

The form is the same everywhere; only where the entry is saved differs behind the scenes, and that is invisible to you.