Law Firm Bookkeeping 101: Choosing The Best Accountant for Your Firm

But the right account (and right bank, for that matter) will depend on where you’re located and how you like to bank. Law schools offer little to no training on how to manage these accounts. So, many lawyers go into the field without knowing the best practice surrounding trust accounts and how to manage them.

Be sure to do your due diligence and avoid banking headaches by developing a strong and beneficial relationship with a personal banker. During that time, you likely did not learn anything about legal accounting or bookkeeping. So the thought of legal bookkeeping and law firm accounting can sound intimidating to even the most experienced attorneys. They can choose either cash accounting for law firms or accrual accounting for law firms. Bookkeeping and accounting for law firms allow you to collect, record, and analyze financial data.

Double-Entry Accounting

When creating a budget, it’s important to think about mandatory expenses, like employee salaries and office expenses, as well as potential surprises. Three-way reconciliations are an important part of practicing law and must be performed on a regular basis to ensure accuracy in your financial records. For example, you can use the “Legal Billing” app to track your time, and then enter all of your billable hours into your accounting software. Double-entry accounting is a system of bookkeeping where every financial transaction is recorded in at least two different accounts. Alternatively, if a law firm has a goal of growing their business, they may choose to increase their marketing budget or invest in new technology.

The business will need to look at the firm’s finances and see what makes the most sense for your business structure. You are choosing to impact how you carry out your bookkeeping, tax filings, and more. Bookkeepers work directly to keep financial records in order at the law firm.

Keep track of tax deductions

For example, in order to ensure that client funds are not comingled with operating funds, attorneys must maintain a separate bank account for these funds. This is just one of the many compliance regulations that law firms must adhere to. Each month, law firm bookkeeping a team of professional bookkeepers with experience in legal accounting gathers your data for you and turns it into accurate financial statements. You also get smart software to help you monitor your finances and stay in control of cash flow.

Your business operates as its own entity with its own credit rating. It’s crucial to collect and organize your financial data regularly, not just at the end of the year. There are very specific rules regarding what you can and can’t do with them, and these rules vary depending on your jurisdiction. While new business owners may want to run their firm in a relaxed way and not set any budget, we don’t advise it. Keeping your firm professional in all matters goes a long way toward attracting new clients and high-quality employees. These rules and regulations change with every jurisdiction, so it’s a good idea to become familiar with what’s expected of you before jumping in.

Interest on lawyers’ trust accounts (IOLTA)

To ensure your firm’s financial statements are accurate, complete, and up-to-date, you need to use sound bookkeeping for attorneys. While bookkeeping is more transactional and administrative, accounting is more subjective, giving you insights into your law firm’s financial health based on legal bookkeeping information. One key part of the accounting process is analyzing financial reports that provide you with a better understanding of actual profitability and awareness of cash flow in your business. Bookkeepers maintain and record all financial transactions in the original books of entry and balance the financial accounts for your firms. They summarize and organize all the company’s financial transactions chronologically in a systematic manner.

• Deploying law practice management software is a simple method to track incurred costs in real-time and correctly subtract them from firm income.
• As with the law, too much can go wrong if you don’t have the right professional in charge.
• This feature allows users to quickly and easily sync their contacts, invoices, financial information, and transactions so that data entry is reduced or eliminated.
• Having an activity statement that shows your starting balance, deposits in, payments out, and the ending balance is the Client Trust Ledger.
• If you’re not dealing with trust accounts, and just want to accept payments online or in-person, we recommend using Square.

To pay for these tax reductions, committee members and staff carefully examined many other possible changes to the tax code, including the previous mandatory accrual accounting proposals. The potential of these records to serve as safeguards is realized only if the procedures set forth in Paragraph A(8) are regularly performed. The trial balance is the sum of balances of each client’s ledger card (or the computerized equivalent). Its value lies in comparing it on a monthly basis to a control balance. The control balance starts with the previous month’s balance, then adds receipts from the Trust Receipts Journal and subtracts disbursements from the Trust Disbursements Journal. Once the total matches the trial balance, the reconciliation readily follows by adding amounts of any outstanding checks and subtracting any deposits not credited by the bank at month’s end.

Financial KPIs Allow You to Monitor and Readjust

Law firms must adhere to the rules and regulations governing their area in order to remain compliant. It is essential for business owners to familiarize themselves with the compliance regulations specific to their jurisdiction before starting a law firm. A well-organized budget should include both personal and business goals and be tracked with reliable software such as Deskera. Having a clear budget will help you track expenses, revenue, and goals so that you can make sure that you have the necessary resources available for major expenses.

From here, review common issues that complicate accounting for lawyers, so you can better navigate your financial management process and avoid the challenges other practices may face. In the next chapter of PracticePanther’s Law Finance guide, we’ll look at best practices for billing for lawyers and law firms. Client trust accounting is the process of monitoring and tracking the cash funds a lawyer has received on behalf of or belonging to a client or a third-party entity. One way to manage recurring client trust accounting errors without putting more strain on your lawyers and paralegals is to leverage law practice management software.

Interest on Lawyers Trust Accounts (IOLTA)

Millions rely on TaxSlayer to ensure they comply with all of the necessary tax regulations and adequately fulfill their tax duties. FreeAgent has just one plan, giving law firms unlimited https://www.bookstime.com/ access to every feature the program offers without long-term contracts. At $10 per month for the first six months and $20 after, the price is just right for law firms on the move.

Consider consulting with an accounting firm to clarify your responsibilities and ensure you’re meeting them. Meanwhile, a legal business can use the cash basis no matter their revenues, and it often represents their activities more accurately. As a result, many lawyers can avoid a lot of trouble by electing the cash basis.

Determine how your firm will get paid

Many business owners think that they will hire an accountant but not a bookkeeper. However, for the sake of your firm’s finances and the accuracy of those finances, it is probably better to use someone with experience working in bookkeeping and accounting. Utilizing professional bookkeeping for attorneys to help keep accurate monthly documentation and consistent reviews of the business financial statements, you will see your firm’s accurate financial picture.