Trust accounting
The trust account you can put in front of a bar auditor
Every practice-management vendor claims IOLTA compliance. The difference here is where the rules live: not in a wizard that checks your work afterward, but in the ledger itself — which refuses the entry a bar auditor would flag, at the moment someone tries to make it.
The ledger refuses, so you don't have to catch it
A client’s trust balance cannot go negative in Briefcase. Not “shouldn’t” — cannot. The entry that would overdraw one client’s funds to cover another’s is refused by the database, with the reason named. Every posting belongs to exactly one matter, so one client’s money can never quietly blur into another’s.
Corrections are reversing entries, never edits. A typo in a deposit doesn’t get erased; it gets reversed, on the record, the way an accountant — or an auditor — expects. The ledger is append-only: what happened stays written.
Three-way reconciliation, built in
Bank statement, trust ledger, client sub-ledgers — entered by hand or by CSV, matched against the book with suggestions that are never auto-confirmed, any disagreement named on screen, and the period signed off into an immutable record with its PDF. The third leg counts every sub-ledger, including the firm’s own.
Account-level activity — bank fees, IOLTA interest — lives in its own place and can never touch a client’s money.
Honest about its own edges
Where the system hasn’t checked something, it says so — a balance reads “not yet reconciled” rather than implying a check that never ran. We think a trust account that admits what it doesn’t know is worth more than one that always looks green.
Coming — bank feeds. Statement entry is manual or CSV today — a live bank connection is planned, and we’d rather ship it right than claim it early.
Briefcase is in early access with a working firm on it today.
Request early access