Core Bookkeeping
Monthly Bookkeeping for Law Firms
Every month, your operating account, your credit cards and your trust account get reconciled, your transactions get coded to a chart of accounts built for a law practice, and you get financial statements you can actually read. Closed on a schedule — not in a panic every April.
Sound familiar?
- You genuinely do not know whether your trust account balances right now
- Your books get done in a panic the week before the tax deadline
- Advanced client costs are sitting in your P&L as expenses, so your margins look wrong
- Your CPA charges you extra every year to clean up before they can file
- You are doing the books yourself at 9pm on a Sunday
What you get
What changes once this is running.
- Books closed by a fixed date every month, not "sometime after quarter-end"
- A three-way trust reconciliation on file before your bar association ever asks for one
- Financial statements that separate fee income from reimbursed case costs
- A year-end package your CPA can work from without sending questions back
- Someone who notices when a number looks wrong, before it becomes a problem
Included
What the engagement actually covers.
Transaction categorization
Every transaction coded against a chart of accounts designed for legal work — fee income by practice area, advanced client costs as a receivable rather than an expense, and trust movement kept entirely separate from operating.
Account reconciliation
Operating accounts, credit cards, lines of credit and merchant accounts reconciled monthly. Every balance on your statements traced to a real bank balance, with the differences explained.
Three-way trust reconciliation
The trust bank statement, your trust ledger in QuickBooks, and the sum of every individual client ledger — reconciled to each other, every month, with a documented record of the result.
Financial statements
A profit and loss statement, a balance sheet, and — from Precision Pro up — a cash flow statement, delivered on a fixed schedule with a plain-English note about anything unusual.
Year-end close and CPA handoff
A clean, documented year-end package handed to your tax preparer, plus answers to the questions they inevitably have, so you are not the middleman in February.
How it runs
No surprises about the process.
Diagnostic Review first
Before we touch anything, we read your existing books and tell you what shape they are in. If there is a backlog, we scope the cleanup separately rather than quietly closing this month on top of eighteen bad ones.
Setup and access
We get read access to your accounts, review or rebuild your chart of accounts, and connect your practice management software if it is not already talking to QuickBooks properly.
The monthly rhythm
Transactions come in throughout the month. After month-end we reconcile, close, run the three-way, and send your statements by the date in your agreement. Questions go into one consolidated list, not a drip of emails.
Review and adjust
A recurring call to walk the numbers, flag what changed, and adjust anything about the reporting that is not earning its place.
What “clean books” actually means for a law firm
Most bookkeeping advice assumes your business is straightforward: money comes in, money goes out, the difference is profit. A law practice breaks that assumption in three specific places, and those three places are where general bookkeepers get into trouble.
Money in your possession is not money you have earned. A retainer sitting in trust belongs to your client until you earn it. It is a liability on your balance sheet, not revenue. Firms whose books show trust deposits as income look far more profitable than they are — right up until the money has to be refunded.
Money you spend is not always an expense. When you advance a filing fee or an expert witness deposit on a client’s behalf, that is a receivable — you expect it back. Coding it as an expense understates both your assets and your real margins, and it makes recovery tracking impossible.
Revenue does not arrive when the work is done. Contingency practices can work a matter for two years before a dollar lands. Hourly firms bill in one month and collect in the next, or the one after that. A P&L that ignores that timing tells you almost nothing useful about whether the firm is healthy.
Get those three right and the rest of the work is ordinary bookkeeping done carefully. Get them wrong and every report you produce is quietly misleading.
What you get, every month
You get statements you can read without a translator, a trust reconciliation on file, and a specific person who has already looked at your numbers before you do. When something is off — a client ledger that went negative, a case cost that never got billed back, a month where collections dropped and nobody noticed — you hear about it from us first.
That is the actual product. The reconciliation is table stakes.
Questions
About Bookkeeping
Do you handle IOLTA and trust accounting?
Yes — it is the reason this practice exists. Every engagement includes a monthly three-way reconciliation of the trust bank balance, the trust ledger in your books, and the total of your individual client ledgers. We maintain those client ledgers, flag any variance immediately, and keep the documentation your state bar expects. We do not give legal or ethics advice about trust rules — your bar association and your ethics counsel own that — but the accounting underneath it is our job.
How quickly are the books closed each month?
It depends on your tier and how quickly we get statements: day 15 on Growth, day 10 on Precision Pro, day 7 on Executive Pro, counted in business days after month-end. The date goes in your agreement so it is a commitment, not an aspiration.
What software do you work in?
QuickBooks Online, integrated with whatever practice management system you already use — Clio, MyCase, PracticePanther, LawPay and similar. If you are on QuickBooks Desktop, migration is part of onboarding.
Do you replace my CPA?
No, and you should be wary of anyone who says otherwise. We keep the books accurate and current all year so your CPA can do tax planning and filing from real numbers instead of reconstructing your year in March. We are not a CPA firm and we do not prepare returns, provide tax advice or perform audits.
Keep going
Related services and tools.
Ready when you are
Find out what shape your books are actually in.
A 30-minute call is enough to tell whether we are the right fit for your firm — and you will leave it knowing more about your own numbers either way.
- No obligation, no sales script
- Straight answer on whether we fit
- Talk to the person who does the work