NSW · Legal Profession Uniform Law since 1 July 2015
Trust accounting for New South Wales law practices
New South Wales operates under the Legal Profession Uniform Law, which means your trust obligations come from the Legal Profession Uniform General Rules 2015, the same instrument TrustLedger implements. What is specific to your state is who you answer to.
Regulatory authority for trust money
External examiner's report lodged with
Law Society's Trust Lodgement Portal
Trust year
1 April to 31 March
New South Wales designates different authorities for different functions. For trust money it is the Law Society Council; complaints go to the Legal Services Commissioner.
The external examiner's report is due 31 May. Where 31 May is not a business day the date shifts, and the three states have not always shifted it identically, so this site does not publish a date for the current cycle. Confirm it with Law Society of NSW directly.
Not a NSW edition
The ledger machinery, the reports and the reconciliation are the same statutory requirements in New South Wales as they are in Victoria and Western Australia. The Uniform General Rules are one instrument, so TrustLedger is one product rather than three, and there is no state-specific version to be a generation behind the others.
What varies is the recipient and the lodgement channel, and that is the whole of the difference.
Who built it
Built by a practising solicitor to run his own firm's trust account. Not a practice management suite with a trust module bolted on, and not a spreadsheet with a bank feed.
There is no sales team. An enquiry reaches the solicitor who wrote the software, and a walkthrough is a screen share with him.
The rules it implements
- 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, BSB and account number.
- 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.
$25 per matter, including GST, charged once
When you activate the matter, and not again. No per-user fees, no monthly minimum, and your first two matters are free.