Accounting · Trust accounting
Your clients’ money, checked every day and never touched by AI.
Trust is where a bookkeeping mistake becomes a bar complaint. EdgeLex keeps client money apart from yours, reconciles it three ways, and has an Agent check every client’s ledger each morning. The Agent can tell you something is wrong and prepare the fix. Only you can move the money.
Bank, adjusted
$632,100.00statement $634,350 − $2,250 outstanding
Trust book
$632,100.00general ledger 1020
Client ledgers
$632,100.0041 clients, each checked alone
All three agree Equal totals are not enough, so every client is tested on its own.
Card fees on trust deposits post to operating. The client is credited the full amount they paid.
How trust is kept
The rules your bar expects, enforced by the system.
Built around the safekeeping rules state bars apply to client funds, such as California Rule 1.15: client money held separately, a ledger for every client, and reconciliations that prove it.
Trust is never your cash
Money held for clients appears on its own line on every screen and is never counted in operating cash or in what you can spend.
Every client checked alone
Three-way reconciliation ties the bank, the trust book and the client ledgers, then tests each client ledger by itself. A shortfall for one client can't hide behind a surplus for another.
Card fees never come out of trust
When a client pays a retainer by card or ACH, the client is credited the full amount and the processing fee posts to operating. If a provider takes a fee or a chargeback from trust anyway, it is flagged at once and the replacement transfer is prepared for you.
Payments routed by purpose
Unearned retainers and advances go to trust. Payment of an invoice for earned fees goes to operating. A mixed payment is split before it is deposited.
Retainers in the wrong account, caught
A retainer deposited to operating shows up the next morning, with the transfer to trust already drafted for your approval.
Records that hold up
Each reconciliation is frozen with its statement, its ledgers and who certified it. Corrections are reversals, so nothing that happened can quietly disappear.
The Trust compliance Agent
Checked every morning, not once a month.
- Tests every client ledger for a negative balance
- Flags any disbursement made before the deposit cleared
- Finds processing fees and chargebacks taken from trust
- Spots retainers that landed in operating
- Warns when a reconciliation is getting stale
It raises each problem as a critical item with its evidence. It never disburses, transfers or edits a client ledger.
Autonomy rules on this account
With EdgeLex Billing
Retainers, evergreen top-ups and transfers of earned fees stay on the client’s trust ledger in Billing, and post to your books with the Matter attached.
Time & Billing →See EdgeLex on your own terms.
We'll walk through your firm's workflows, where you want it to run, and which AI you want it to use. A real person answers at sales@edgelex.com.