- Trust bank accounts - Used for day-to-day matters where funds are to be held in trust. This may be for the purpose of paying bills or remittance to some other payee. The account balance is distributed across many files. Most practices will have a single trust bank account.
- Investment accounts - Also called controlled money, accounts of this type are typically used by the practice to hold non-trivial sums of money on behalf of a client. They are likely to be associated with only a single matter (although there is provision to allocate funds to other files within an investment account). Unlike trust bank accounts, these accounts may attract interest. Their balances are reported separately on the Trust tab.
Both types of account can be created from the Trust tab within The Practice. Additionally, investment accounts can be created from the Trust tab on a file. Funds can be moved between accounts using the
trust account transfer transaction type.
All trust accounts are subject to
reconciliation. The
Legal Profession Act 2008 has strict record-keeping requirements which should be adhered to when operating a trust account. ContactsLaw either enforces or can be used to facilitate all of these requirements (current as of June 2016).