Trust accounting
Trust accounting is the highest-stakes part of Acculio, and it’s part of the Acculio Legal module. Mishandling client funds is how lawyers lose their licenses, so the safeguards here are enforced below the UI.
Accounts
Section titled “Accounts”Open a trust account as IOLTA (pooled client funds) or separate (a single client). Each account tracks every client’s balance independently in a sub-ledger.
Transactions
Section titled “Transactions”Every movement is append-only — there is no edit or delete:
- Deposit — client funds into trust.
- Disbursement — funds out, on behalf of a client.
- Transfer — between two clients in the same account.
- Apply to invoice — move earned fees from a client’s trust balance to settle one of their invoices.
The guardrails
Section titled “The guardrails”The database enforces the rules, so they can’t be bypassed by a bug in the app:
- No negative client balance. Any disbursement, transfer, or application that would overdraw a client is rejected. Acculio shows this as calm inline feedback, not a scary error.
- No commingling. Firm and client funds stay separate.
- Atomic transfers. An over-transfer rolls the whole request back.
Three-way reconciliation
Section titled “Three-way reconciliation”A trust account is in balance when three numbers agree:
Book balance ≡ Σ client sub-ledgers ≡ bank statement
Record a bank statement balance, then run a reconciliation. Acculio computes each figure independently — so a divergence surfaces instead of cancelling out — and snapshots the result. Out-of-balance reconciliations show up in an exception report.
Bar rules
Section titled “Bar rules”Acculio resolves the trust-accounting rules for your entity’s jurisdiction (no-negative balance, commingling, reconciliation frequency, record retention) and surfaces them as a compliance checklist. This guidance is advisory, not legal advice — confirm your obligations with your bar.