Just shy of a year ago, we started our journey enhancing Smokeball’s Trust Accounting in preparation for the certification submission with the Law Society of New South Wales.
Our first modification involved changing trust balances from being held at a contact level to a matter level. For the user, this meant no longer having to unnecessarily select a contact when entering particular trust transaction types.
Next, we altered our rules regarding overdrawing the trust balance of a legal matter. We previously prevented a user from doing so. Although to align with the compliance requirements, we now allow the user to overdraw a matter with a warning and capture a valid reason for their action. A user can now also generate an overdrawn report that lists the transactions that caused the trust balance to overdraw.
It is also vital that all trust balances are resolved before closing, cancelling or deleting the matter. To assist users in abiding by this rule, we now prevent the matter status from changing to closed, cancelled or deleted, if the trust account balance is not zero or a cheque has not been presented.
The Entered Date, which is also known as the system date, is now visible throughout the application and all of the trust-related reports. This will allow the person reading any of the trust reports, to quickly identify when the date the transaction was entered into Smokeball differs from the actual Transaction Date.
Our Bank Reconciliations were also driven by the Transaction Date, rather than the Entered Date. This too has been improved.
Additional trust reports were also created, and existing reports were refined to ensure they followed the correct formatting and contained the essential data. These reports include:
- Trust Ledger
- Receipts Cash Book
- Payments Cash Book
- Transfer Journal
- Trial Balance
- Overdrawn
- Audit Log
The above-mentioned reports plus the Bank Reconciliation were then collated into an End of Month report. This report can be generated monthly by a firm and includes page numbering that continues from the previous month and according to the report type.
After implementing the above changes and many more, we are pleased to declare that we now hold Certificate Number 16 of the listed compliant Trust Accounting Software for the Law Society of New South Wales!
Billing and Legal Trust Accounting that Leads to Profitability
Our complete Trust Accounting and Billing suite is included in your Smokeball subscription and will enable you to manage your trust account with ease.
It includes financial reporting, seamless integration with Xero, MYOB Essentials & AccountRight, and powerful invoicing to ensure you get paid faster.
Smokeball is the only legal practice management software on the market that automatically tracks your time, so you don’t need to complete a timesheet. Our clients report that they are billing on average 30% more time since switching to Smokeball.
Discover the Smokeball difference
If you'd like to see why over 2500 firms trust Smokeball for their practice management needs please call us on 1300 33 55 53, or book your free demonstration today.
