While you spend many years honing your expertise and experience to become a professional attorney and run your law firm, you didn’t learn about bookkeeping and accounting for law firms. And even you have an overview of what is bookkeeping and accounting, you wouldn’t know what involve when it comes to bookkeeping and accounting for law firms. Law firm accounting is more complex than plain business accounting.

And when you’re missing out on 12% of your billable hours, that’s 4.8 hours in a standard 40-hour workweek. And law schools don’t really go into how to manage these accounts properly, so we see a lot of lawyers going in blind. But every payment provider has a different fee structure (for example, credit card payments often come with a fee) so look into that law firm bookkeeping beforehand. If you own a business, you need to get good at recordkeeping. Your bookkeeper, accountant, and the IRS will thank you for holding onto documents proving your income, credits, and deductions. If you commingle your personal and business funds, you’re “piercing the veil,” and courts will ignore the legal protection that comes with incorporating.

Learn More About Law Firm Bookkeeping From the Supporting Strategies Team

Many states or jurisdictions now require 150 semester hours of education to obtain the CPA license—even to sit for the exam. The career is often stigmatized as being boring and is a haven for math wonks and number crunchers, but many accounting duties require strong people skills and diplomacy. Public accountants spend the majority of their workweeks at various third-party client offices. These professionals must be capable of assimilating into diverse corporate cultures. Our principles help us in our aim to remain a truly global organisation, attract respected member firms and ensure the quality of the multidisciplinary services they provide.

A simple mistake could send your firm into the red for the month. Or, you might lose track of critical transactions that affect your taxes. A controller can help you set up and oversee your financial system and accounting infrastructure. Controllers often oversee the bookkeeper’s work, reconcile the accounts, and make more significant ledger adjustments. They can use your financial data to understand what it tells you about your business.

How to Choose an Accounting Software for Your Firm

Both general accounting and trust accounting are necessary for your firm’s success—and integrations seamlessly tie the two areas together. Entering numbers manually often leads to mistakes and duplicated data entry in the accounting process. This results in wasted time, mismatched records, billing complications, and even compliance violations. Double-entry accounting is a system of bookkeeping where every entry to an account (i.e., every financial transaction) requires a corresponding and opposite entry to a different account.

• Caseware’s innovative tools and platforms help more than half a million customers in 130 countries work smarter, dig deeper and see further as they transform insights into impact.
• We examine not just your books but also your business model, providing you with innovative ideas that increase your profitability and afford you more time to focus on your clients.
• Bookkeeping tasks are ongoing and can be performed daily, weekly, or monthly.
• The standard law firm business structure is a limited liability partnership (LLP).
• The act of “bookkeeping” produces financial statements, which your CPA then uses to file your taxes.