For law firms
Finance for law firms, run properly
Client money reconciled and evidenced. Matter profitability you can actually see. Lock up managed as a number rather than discovered as a surprise. For firms turning over £500k to £5m across the South East.
Two ledgers, one truth. That is the whole job.
We have worked inside high street law firms
We know what they are up against, and we built AI Finance Partners to help them.
The squeeze is straightforward. Compliance obligations keep rising. High street costs keep rising. And fees cannot keep rising unless there is real merit behind the increase, because clients will not wear it and competitors will not follow. That leaves efficiency as the main lever a firm actually controls, and security and control of client money sit right alongside it, because neither can be traded away in exchange for speed.
Underneath all of that sits a data problem. The practice management system reports on matters and work in progress. The accounting system reports on the ledger. Nothing joins the two and tells the managing partner what it means. So the firm grows, adds fee earners, and gradually loses sight of which work actually pays.
The problem is specific to law firms
Most outsourced finance providers do not understand a client account. They understand a bank account. Those are not the same thing, and the difference is a regulatory one.
Client money must be ring fenced from office money, reconciled accurately, evidenced, and the follow up items closed out rather than carried forward. There is no margin for error and no room for catching it next month. Open items left unresolved compound into regulatory risk.
We understand that structurally, because it has been done first hand inside an SRA regulated practice.
What we do for a law firm
Client account reconciliation, monthly. The client bank statement, the client cash book and the client matter ledger listing brought together, reconciled to zero, with the reconciling items named and the audit trail intact. Prepared with the mechanical work automated, then reviewed and signed by a qualified accountant.
Matter and client profitability. Which matters made money and which did not. Which fee earners recover their time and which do not. Which service lines are quietly subsidised by the others.
Lock up. Work in progress plus debtors, tracked as a number and managed, instead of arriving as a surprise when the bank balance drops.
The statutory work. Year end accounts, corporation tax, payroll filings and VAT, prepared and signed by our qualified accountants.
The Accountant's Report. Kept in mind all year rather than assembled in a panic once a year.
What we do not do
Legal cashiering is not part of our work. Your cashier stays your cashier, and the client account stays under the firm's own control.
That is a deliberate difference from the outsourced cashiering bureaus. They replace the cashier. We equip the cashier, and tell the managing partner what the numbers mean. You keep control of the function and you get the efficiency. Those two things are usually presented as a trade, and they should not be.
Fee earner recovery is a number, not a feeling.
Where the technology fits, and CARE
Technology is part of the kitbag. It is not what we sell.
It does the processing. Reconciliation matching, data capture, the repetitive comparison work that eats a cashier's week. The judgement stays human, a qualified accountant reviews and signs every output, and their name is on it.
The reconciliation itself runs through our own tool, CARE™, the Client Account Reconciliation Engine. It takes the client bank statement, the client cash book and the matter ledger listing, brings them together, and produces a reconciliation with every difference named and an audit trail a reviewer will accept. CARE is a UK trademark. It is in preparation rather than generally available today, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise.
What it is built around
The SRA Accounts Rules are not optional, the COFA signs for the reconciliation, and the audit trail has to outlive the matter. CARE is built around those obligations rather than retrofitted to them.
- Three way reconciliation between the bank, the cash book and the matter ledger listing, every period.
- A sign off pack the COFA can hand over without editing it first.
- A tamper evident audit log, signed and exportable.
- Period locking, so once a reconciliation is signed off it stays signed off.
Spotted too late, these things are breaches that have to be reported. Sometimes worse, something has already happened. When compliance becomes fast it becomes everyday work, and when it is everyday work you stop carrying it around with you. Why reconcile every five weeks when you could reconcile every day?
Three shapes, and the honest difference between them
Same software, same compliance behaviour, different places for the data to live. We help you pick the one that suits the firm you actually have.
| Shape | Right for | Where the data sits |
|---|---|---|
| EssentialsOne workstation | A firm with one cashier and a manageable matter list. No server, no firewall change. | On that machine, inside your building. Nothing leaves the premises. |
| ProMulti user | Finance teams. Server side audit log and period locking across users, white labelled to your firm. | On your own server or your own cloud instance. Your infrastructure, your control. |
| HostedRun by us | Firms who would rather not run anything themselves. | Stored under a European Union jurisdiction restriction. Not a UK only guarantee, and we will not claim one. |
Reconciliation built by the people who do it for a living
Whichever shape you choose, two factor authentication is required on every account, your ledgers are isolated from every other firm's at the data layer, and there is a full audit log of who ran what and who signed it. Where we host, you get a data processing agreement before anything is uploaded, and the storage position is described exactly as it is rather than dressed up.
Built and signed off by Chartered Management Accountants regulated by CIMA, not by a software company that spotted a gap in the market.
We are not selling you software. We are selling the reconciliation done properly, monthly, signed by a qualified accountant. CARE is the tool we use to do it.
Fifteen minutes with your COFA, every quarter
Every three months we take a quarter of an hour with your COFA. We check the reconciliation is doing what it should, flag any Accounts Rules changes that affect you, and answer whatever has been sitting at the back of their mind.
Compliance is a relationship, not a transaction. The person who signs should never be the person guessing.
Who this is for
Law firms turning over £500k to £5m, in Surrey, Sussex, Kent and the South East. Firms that have grown faster than their finance function, firms carrying more than one authorisation, firms where the cashier is the single point of failure, and firms where the partners cannot say which of their practice areas actually pays.
If your month end lands three weeks after the month has finished, you are not unusual. You are just making this month's decisions on last quarter's information.
Common questions
How often does a law firm have to reconcile its client account? The SRA Accounts Rules require a reconciliation of the client account at least every five weeks, with the client bank statement compared to the client cash book and the client matter ledger listing. In practice most well run firms do it monthly as part of a fixed close timetable, because a five week gap makes it far harder to find the cause of a difference.
Do you take over our legal cashiering? No. Legal cashiering is not part of what we do. Your cashier stays your cashier and the client account stays under the firm's own control. An outsourced cashiering bureau replaces that person. We equip them, make the work faster, and tell the managing partner what the numbers mean.
Where is CARE data stored? It depends which shape you choose. CARE can run on a single workstation inside the firm, on the firm's own server or cloud instance, or hosted by us. Where we host it, data is stored under a European Union jurisdiction restriction, which is a hard constraint set when the database is created rather than a preference. Two factor authentication is required and each firm's data is isolated. We provide a data processing agreement before anything is uploaded.
What happens if a law firm has two SRA authorisations? Two authorised bodies means two sets of obligations. Two client accounts to reconcile, two sets of Accounts Rules to satisfy, and two Accountant's Reports each year. Most firms in that position have never priced what the duplication costs them in fees and in partner time, and it is one of the first things worth measuring.
Which work in a high street law firm is actually the most profitable? It varies by firm, and that is the point. Legal aid crime and public law family run on fixed fees with slow payment and often lose money once the true cost of administration is counted. Conveyancing is volume work priced almost transparently. Private client probate and lifetime planning is usually where the margin sits. Very few firms can prove which is which, because nobody produces profit by service line each month.