Legal Profession Uniform General Rules 2015 · NSW · VIC · WA
The trust account, done properly.
TrustLedger keeps the statutory trust records required of law practices in New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia — receipts, cash books, transfer journal, ledgers and the monthly reconciliation — and produces the reports an external examiner asks for. It does not do billing, matter management or documents.
TrustLedger brings receipts, payments, transfers and reconciliation into one application. Review the records and reports against your practice’s workflow before adopting it.
Using software does not transfer responsibility for a practice’s trust account or replace independent examination of its records.
$25 per matter, including GST, charged once — when you activate the matter. Your first two are free. How pricing works
Rule 48 · Bank reconciliation
Halloway & Finn · Month ending 31 March
Illustration
Balanced
The output
What your examiner gets
An external examination is a reading exercise. Someone sits down with your records and works out whether they hold together. These are the four documents they will start from, and the reason to judge this product on its output rather than its feature list.
Rule 36
Trust receipt
Fictional demonstration data. A receipt issued by the app, showing the payer, matter and form of money.
Rule 47
Trust ledger for a matter
Fictional demonstration data. A matter statement with dated movements, running balances and opening and closing figures.
Rule 46
Transfer journal
Fictional demonstration data. Two inter-matter transfers shown in the application, with both matter references and amounts.
Rule 48
Monthly reconciliation
Fictional demonstration data. Outstanding deposits and cheques, three matching balances and the reconciliation status.
Rule by rule
What it does about each rule
The Legal Profession Uniform General Rules 2015 govern trust money in all three states. The same rules, the same records, the same trust year. Here is what TrustLedger does about each one.
- r 36 Receipting of trust money
- Consecutively numbered receipts. The date the money was received and the date the receipt was issued are recorded separately, along with who it came from, the matter, the form in which it arrived — cash, cheque, electronic transfer, direct debit — and what it was for.
- r 44 Trust account receipts cash book
- Every receipt writes its cash book entry in the same database transaction that creates the receipt. Either both exist or neither does. The month exports to XLSX or CSV.
- r 45 Trust account payments cash book
- Every payment writes its cash book entry the same way, recorded against the matter, the payee, the method and the reason.
- r 46 Trust account transfer journal
- A transfer between two matters is written as a journal entry on both ledgers, each side carrying a reference to the other. It does not touch the cash book, because no money has entered or left the trust account.
- r 47 Recording transactions in trust ledger accounts
- One ledger account per matter, opened with the matter and carrying a running balance. An electronic payment will not submit without the payee’s account name, account number and BSB.
- r 48 Reconciliation of trust records
- Bank statement to cash book to ledger totals, monthly, with outstanding deposits, unpresented cheques and bank errors itemised. Produces the bank reconciliation statement and the trust trial balance, and says whether it balanced or by how much it did not.
Rules cited are those of the Legal Profession Uniform General Rules 2015, which apply in New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia.
A matter cannot be overdrawn
A payment or transfer that would take a matter below zero is refused at the point of entry, not found at month end.
Nothing is half-written
Receipt, ledger transaction, cash book entry and running balance move together in one database transaction, or none of them moves.
The chains are checkable from outside the application
A read-only checker walks every ledger and reports any account whose stored balance does not match the ledger read in date order, any account that does not close at the balance it holds, and any matter that was overdrawn at any point in its history.
How it works
Keep the records together.
Record a receipt, payment or transfer against its matter, then use the ledger and reconciliation reports to review the result.
Your practice remains responsible for its trust records and professional obligations. Ask for a walkthrough using fictional data before deciding whether the application suits your workflow.
Your records
They are yours, and they stay yours
Your own database
Each firm gets its own database with its own credentials, on infrastructure in Australia. Not a shared table with your firm’s name in a column.
Exports you can hand over
Cash books, ledger lists, reconciliations and the trial balance export to XLSX or CSV. Receipts, payments and matter statements come out as PDFs. Nothing is trapped in a format only we can read.
We never delete your records
Trust records carry a seven-year retention obligation, and it is yours, not ours. Cancelling ends the subscription, not the record. Your ledgers stay available to you and to your examiner. This is a deliberate design decision, not a service level we reserve the right to revise.
The obvious question, given that this is one person: what happens if TrustLedger stops. The honest answer today is that your protection is the export — every ledger, cash book, reconciliation and receipt comes out in formats that open in Excel and in any other system, and you can take a full set whenever you want one, including on your last day. Ask about it on a call. It is a fair thing to ask and you will get a straight answer rather than a reassurance.
Price
One number
$25 per matter, including GST. Charged once, when you activate the matter.
No per-user fees. No monthly minimum. Your first two matters are free.
A matter that never holds trust money is never charged. Most files in most practices never touch the trust account, and those cost nothing.
The charge does not repeat for the life of the file. A conveyance that runs eight months costs the same as one that settles in three weeks.
The fee report identifies each activated matter and its payment status. These software fees are separate from client trust funds. What you do with that on your own retainer is your professional judgement, and not something a software vendor should be advising you about.
$150.00
for those activations, including GST
For those matters, once. They are not charged again next month, or in any month after that — so next month’s estimate covers new activations only. The first two free activations are a one-off allowance, not a monthly allowance.
The full pricing page — including what happens if you stop paying.
Who is behind it
The business behind TrustLedger
Contact us to discuss your practice’s workflow and the records you need before adopting TrustLedger.
- Entity
- Viridian Lawyers Pty Ltd
- ABN
- 81 603 176 781