IOLTA account compliance and other financial management tasks pose big challenges to law firms — even to full-time accountants.
For a litigator without formal financial training, keeping the books in order — and the firm ready to pass a bar association audit — can be even more daunting.
Mix in the financial errors that can arise simply from having disparate systems, and you’ve got a minefield to navigate.
But with the right all-in-one platform, you can position yourself for success.
MyCase Accounting is a built-in legal accounting solution that works within your case management system, automating three-way trust reconciliations, business intelligence, expense tracking, and other financial processes.
Because this tool is included directly in the MyCase system, all transactions are automatically synced and recorded. This includes entering time, tracking expenses, generating invoices, and receiving payments, among other functions.
With these items housed in the MyCase Accounting module, they can be directly matched with bank transactions, particularly easing bank reconciliations.
Here’s a look at how MyCase Accounting could reshape your financial workflow. If you’d like to sign up for a free trial, feel free to do so here.
Getting Started
Signing up for MyCase Accounting includes an onboarding period, complete with training from the company’s accounting specialists.
The onboarding period will take you through your first three-way trust reconciliation process.
A subscription also includes a license for your accountant to use the system free of charge, so you don’t need to share any sensitive data outside of the system for taxes and other purposes.
MyCase Accounting, at the outset, provides detailed business intelligence data.
As a legal-specific tool, financial performance can be segmented by lawyer, office, practice group, or other custom filters.
The data is synced with the full MyCase system, so these metrics will automatically populate throughout the day-to-day operations of the firm.
Tracking Your Accounts
When it’s time to examine your financials, MyCase Accounting presents you with a Chart of Accounts interface. It comes pre-populated with legal-specific account types, but it is also customizable.
Users can also add sub-accounts, for example, one for federal taxes under a payroll account.
Some accounts will be marked “locked” because they are linked to the front-end billing processes.
This means that, as soon as a lawyer creates an invoice, or collects a payment, or records an expense, it’s going to automatically update the correct accounts listed here.
To drill down further, opening an account file generates a ledger listing every transaction for that account.
Each entry, in turn, can be opened to view detailed data.
These include all debits and credits the entry is linked to, and any invoice in which it was included. In the bottom corner, you can see two boxes labeled “not cleared” and “not reconciled.”
Once the transaction has been posted with the bank, the “not cleared” box will turn green, and once the entry is included in a monthly reconciliation, that box will turn green as well.
The status will also be updated in the Chart of Accounts view, and these processes will allow you to quickly find items that need to be addressed.
Easing Compliance
It’s hard to overstate the benefits of a unified system in remaining compliant with legal accounting rules.
To start, the MyCase system will automatically generate a trust ledger for each of the firm’s clients — which is included with all MyCase systems, not just MyCase Accounting.
Clicking into a client file will display all related debits and credits involving your trust account.
Adding the MyCase Accounting tool, however, will pull all of this information directly into the three-way trust reconciliation process. Your trust assets, liabilities, and bank balance will all be put into a prebuilt system, complete with guardrails to ensure compliance.
Additionally, MyCase’s back-end payment processing is powered by its sibling company LawPay, meaning all of the payment data is automatically synced to MyCase Accounting.
This means MyCase Accounting can create automated deposit slips for any online payment.
These individual deposit slips will then be automatically matched to the bank statement, saving additional time because they’re essentially auto-reconciled in this process.
This also ensures trust and operating funds are handled separately, eliminating risks of commingling funds and helping ensure compliance with legal accounting rules.
The broader reconciliation process is similarly automated. Here, a sample law firm operating account has each transaction displayed to begin a reconciliation.
If there are any discrepancies — maybe a misplaced check that never has made it into the bank account — the MyCase Accounting system will identify that and allow you to fix it.
A double-check of the transactions, a click of “save changes,” and your account has been reconciled.
The far more complicated three-way trust reconciliation process is similarly boiled down in MyCase Accounting.
To begin, each transaction is auto-linked to the relevant account and client record.
Once these transactions are double-checked — and matching numbers are confirmed — one click will auto-generate your reconciliation report.
This report will include individual client trust ledgers, bank transactions, and invoices, automatically drawn from the full MyCase system.
All of the records can be filtered by month or date in the event of a bar association audit, and the relevant reports can be generated by MyCase Accounting immediately.
A Complete System
MyCase Accounting demonstrates the advantages of having one unified system for all of your firm’s business needs.
It is constantly working in the background to ensure everything from case data, to client accounting, to IOLTA compliance records, to business intelligence is accurate and up to date.
It will ultimately ease your bookkeeping processes, eliminate waste, and become a key component of your firm’s financial success.
If you’d like to sign up for a free trial of MyCase, feel free to do so here.
