Law Firm Owners: The 6‑Month Trust Recon Time Bomb (Random Audit Story)
Law firm owners, if your trust account hasn't been properly reconciled in six months, you're not just "behind on bookkeeping" – you're one bar letter away from a nightmare. In this first episode of Confessions of a Law Firm Bookkeeper, I walk through a composite story of a two‑attorney estate planning firm that got randomly selected for a trust account audit after six months of no real reconciliation – and what we had to fix before they could sign that certification. I cover: • What actually happens when you get the "random trust audit" letter from the bar • How a $3,491.38 mismatch between the trust bank balance and the trust ledger exposed months of sloppy accounting • The month‑by‑month process we used to clean up the firm's IOLTA activity before the audit • 3 simple checks you can run this week to see if your own trust account is audit‑ready • Common red flags I look for: negative client trust balances and "ghost balances" that don't belong to any client At the end, I answer a few law firm bookkeeping questions and share a quick Tax Corner tip so you can stop guessing on quarterly estimates. Free Trust & Books Checkup If you're doing between $300k and $1M a year and you're not confident your books and trust account would survive an audit, grab a free Trust & Books Checkup here: https://bigbirdaccounting.com/checkup I help small law firm owners keep clean books, stay audit‑safe on trust accounting, and legally pay less in taxes.
