How does the Trust Trial Balance report work?

This is a list of all matter ledgers in the Trust Account system with respective balances, displayed in account number order. The total shows you how much you have in trust for all your clients.

The Trust Trial balance is a required report by the Law Society.

This report is intended to provide you an individual balance for each and every matter that has Trust funds available and will provide you with a grand total figure at the end of the total funds you should have in your Trust Account.

From the reports window, when you click on this report, you are able to choose the date range as well as the way the report is sorted - either by client name or matter number.

The report will then come up as below. An explanation of each section is:

1. As at (red box) - This date will be based on the date range you chose. For example, this report was printed on the 20th of March 2023 for the current financial year, therefore the as at date is the 30th of June 2023 and it will show balances up until that date. If however, the previous quarter was chosen, it would show the balances as they were on the 31st of December 2022. That report would not include any entries after that date even though it was printed almost 3 month later.

2. Matter Number - The matter number linked to that trust leger

3. Client - The name of the client linked to the trust ledger

4. Matter Desc - The description of that matter

5. Amount - This is the total amount of trust transactions for that trust ledger 

6. Last Trans - the last time an entry was made for that trust ledger

7. Total Client Ledger Accounts (blue box) - This is a total combination of all trust ledger balances 

8. Statutory Deposit (green box) - This is the amount of money you have entered as a statutory deposit

9. Reconciled Cash Book (purple box) - If you run the bank reconciliation report for the same end date, the total should be identical to that on this report

10. Variance (orange box) - There should be no variance between the total above and the reconciled cashbook

11. Prepared By (pink box) - This will show whoever is logged on as well as the date the report was created