Navigating IOLTA Trust Accounts

In this episode of the Accountants LawPod, hosts Lynda Artesani and Stephen Libhart (with moderator Tiara) dive deep into the complexities of trust accounting for law firms, focusing on IOLTA (Interest on Lawyers' Trust Accounts) compliance. They discuss how state bar rules differ—some states require monthly reporting, others quarterly—and the importance of understanding each jurisdiction’s specific forms and filing requirements. The conversation covers the treatment of trust funds on tax returns, the pitfalls of labeling them as unearned revenue, and the need to keep trust and operating books separate. They examine software solutions such as Clio, LeanLaw, and QuickBooks Online Advanced, highlighting integration challenges, Clio Pay e‑check timing, and the necessity of accurate date entry. Timing and reconciliation issues are explored, including bank feed delays, mismatched transaction dates, and the three‑leg reconciliation (bank, billing software, accounting system). Practical workflow tips are offered: bucketing trust and operating accounts, using sub‑accounts for liabilities, setting up trust suspense accounts, and leveraging QuickBooks’ new parent‑account lock feature. The hosts stress best practices to avoid commingling, prohibit using trust funds for operating expenses, and manage client loans and advanced costs correctly. They outline steps to prepare for a trust audit—remain calm, involve bookkeeping professionals, use the bar’s prescribed forms, and document everything promptly. Throughout, they share real‑world anecdotes, cautionary advice, and actionable recommendations for accountants and law firms to maintain compliant, efficient trust accounting systems.
Chapters
Welcome to Accountants LawPod, where accounting professionals and law firms converge, hosted by Lynda Artesani, Sarah Prevost, and Stephen Libhart.
Hello everybody, and welcome back to the podcast. We're so glad that you're here. And how are you, Lynda?
I'm good. We're still Sarah-less, but next week we'll have her back.
I know. I miss Sarah. It's like, where did she go? Where in the world is Sarah?
Exactly.
But I hope she's having, having a fruitful time and that the conference was good. And, and she—
Yeah, the conference was good. She rocked it and it was a big stage and she did a great job from whatever I've heard from other people who, our team that's, you know, our global team that's there, they said she did amazing. And I thought, you know, there's no doubt that she did a great job. I mean, I wasn't worried about that at all.
Looking forward to hearing from her. So today we're going to talk about trust accounts again, but this is a good time of year to do it after tax season and a good time to kind of refocus on where you're at with your trust accounts.
We never talk about trust accounting either. This is really important.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is a good one. Never, never do we.
Navigating.
But, you know, this is the time of year where, when we are catching up after tax season, where we find a lot of opportunities, I'll call them, With the trust accounts and the different client files, you know. Oh, they—
Well, you think about it. I mean, sometimes you get a tax return and it will have that listed on there, the trust account and the liability. And sometimes it's completely obliterated. It's not even there at all because the tax person must look at it and say, well, it's not their money, so I'm not even going to include the details of that on the file. So I always like it. I like it if it's on there because if you get somebody with a messy trust, I want to know what they've told The government, basically. But, um, I like that. I've seen it both ways. I've seen it on the tax return and not on the tax return, which is kind of weird.
Let's talk about that for a minute. Do you point that out then when you don't see it on the return?
No, I think it's really dependent on the tax person. Don't think it's necessary on the tax return. I don't— there's no purpose. There's no line for it that, you know, this is separate money.
They don't consider it as a liability per se at that point then?
It should, but no, like, I guess they just kind of negate it. But, um, you know, because you get the money back, you already money for it. So, and it's not used, so you could technically give it back. I don't know the reasoning behind it because I have to ask a tax person, but I think that having it there is helpful. I've seen clients who keep it off the books completely too and have a separate side set of books just for trust. And then they have, for example, Clio, and then they don't even connect Clio. So now you got another siloed section off somewhere.
Yeah.
None of them ever add up and equal the way they're supposed to. Because you've got them separated, you're having to do this redundant work, which is extra work. You're doing things 3 times over because of the setup you have. And there was at a time, at one time, there was somebody pretty prominent who was insisting everybody have 2 files. But that's back in the desktop days when it didn't—
Back in the desktop days, sure, sure.
It didn't cost you to have another file. And the mindset around keeping the trust separate, because it's really not part of the business till The income is earned. I get that. But when I see it in today's world with somebody in QuickBooks Online Advanced, I think, oh, they're paying 2 QuickBooks Online Advanced files. That's a lot of money. Why not have it all in one? It's a lot easier together.
I wonder if an unknowing tax preparer has ever booked it as future revenue of some sort.
Oh, I've seen it as unearned revenue on books.
Yeah. You know, I'm thinking back to a CPA I worked with and he insisted that it be called unearned revenue on the books. And I wonder what he did with it. Now I'm going to have to go back and do some digging.
But yeah, it's just, you know, it is unearned revenue, but it's not how we list it because we have to follow the bar rules. And ultimately, that's the number one thing. And I think I say that 1,000 times in all the content on the Accountants Law Lab blog. First step, if you're going to do this kind of work, is go memorize and learn every detail about wherever your attorney practices law. They're not all the same. They're like having different banks, right? There's different banks, different looks of the bank accounts, and different ways the bank presents itself in QuickBooks. The same thing with the bar. You have to go look. Like in Oregon where Sari lives, you go by the county rules as well as everybody follows the American—
Oh, I know, an extra layer there that you have to think about.
Yep. And every— I mean, you go to, I think it's North Carolina where you don't have to report the trust only quarterly, where most of them are required to do the reporting monthly. And then in California, you have a form you have to to fill out at the end of the year where you have to validate your balances to the bar. This is what I have. This is who it belongs to. And I don't know if you have to actually— I think it's just a form you fill out. So I don't think you actually have to throw it like a bank statement in because the bank statement might be things are in transit. It won't exactly match it.
Right.
Just like our— we have the lovely conversation with our clients when they go, why does the bank feed say— why does the bank say this but your books say that? And it's like, well, The bank feed only shows what's cleared the bank. So it's not going to always match. I think people get tripped up on that sometimes.
Well, you know what else they get tripped up on? Let's use Clio as an example. Great software program. Love it. But, um, through Clio Pay, a trust deposit will come in on X date and it might take 3, 4, or 5 days to get over to the bank. Then, you know, another weekend hits or a holiday hits at the bank and then it finally comes to the client. And I, I find them in some situations using wrong dates in Clio when they're entering on their bill. And who protects the money between, between Clio Pay and the bank? And who's protecting that trust money?
That should be our job because when you— we had this happen with a client, past client now. They would see the transaction come through that they paid through Clio Pay, but if they paid through Clio Pay, With the e-check that takes sometimes 7 to 10 business days to hit the bank, you can't pay yourself. And I'm seeing that the money— because the money's not even there yet.
Right.
I have to— and we've had that conversation over and over, like, that money, you really don't have that money in your possession in your— until it hits your bank account. Regardless of what happened in Clio Pay, if it's not physically in your bank account, you can't take the money and transfer it. because you're stealing from other people because it's not there yet. And I think that's one of the things that we see that is a navigation issue, right? It's a timing issue. And also, when you're saying timing, we see it where the staff or the attorney, whoever's doing the booking into the transactions, they're kind of lackadaisical about putting the dates in. They could have an old date, they could have a new date, and nothing aligns. And then we're stuck trying to figure out, especially if they have a lot of repetition around Transactions, everything's $300 or $600 or whatever coming through. How do we know which one's which?
Well, and let's walk that back a little bit. If I'm a client and I, I pay that trust request from Clio and Clio accepts it, and so now it's in transit on the way to the law firm's bank and all that, all those steps, can I still Stop that payment?
I don't know. I don't know how that works.
Who's protecting that money? What's— I— that's something I really want to dig into.
When you work with personal injury and you get it, they get a big check in from Geico Insurance and you think, well, it's a Geico check, it's going to be okay. But I think a lot of those PI firms actually move things into like segregated accounts and then they get paid. And if the timing isn't quite right, I've seen them Bounce.
Yeah.
And you've got that, and you have to be very careful in the timing of paying out on a transaction that, if you— as you know, with personal injury, it can go on for years. And the person is desperate for money, which is when you start to see all those loans happening from law firms. And that's another thing that's got— you got to go to your bar rules to make sure it's allowed. But when the loan— the law firm has to pay itself back when they get the money. And yeah, it can get really messy. It's a There's a lot to learn. People think, well, it's a law firm, how hard can it be? Trust accounting, like, that's kind of like getting a deposit up front, like for a contract or whatever. It's the same thing. But there's so many sticky rules around it that I think that you don't realize, you know, we didn't even get into advanced client costs, but you've got a lot of different scenarios that things can go wrong. And because of the compliance—
Exactly.
Of the transactions and the fact that you have to make sure that you follow the rules of compliance. If you don't, You could get sanctioned. You could lose your license to practice law. I mean, there's a lot of things that can happen. You really want to make sure you protect that. And they know that. The attorneys are very well aware of the rules around that kind of stuff.
You know, I could see in criminal law, in divorce law, family law, whatever, um, where there could be— yeah, there could be more instances of, of those sorts of things happening. You know, that you can't just automatically assume that that check is good. You've got to stop. And breathe.
Yeah, you've got to wait. You've got to wait. We put in— we instituted a rule, especially with the PI firms. There's a rule to make sure it hits the bank before you start to disburse and pay the liens and everything else that goes along with it. You really have to slow it, to slow the process down. And that's where it works well when you have an outside firm doing the accounting, because now I can be the bad guy and go, this is policy, you know, this is our policy, this is what we do. We don't release the funds. Yes, the fund happened, you were— you won the matter, The insurance has submitted the payment. We don't physically have the funds yet, and then we have to make sure they clear the bank before we start to process it. So there's going to be time, a down period of time, a transition period of time. And I think it's better for the law firm to put that in words in their engagement with their—
In their engagement, correct. And I even— one, one PI firm I had that, uh, they were so anxious to disburse the money and be the hero to the clients And I saw a couple times where the check bounced, and I would— I put in place they had to call their bank officer, not the customer service line at the bank. They had to call their bank officer and document on this date, this time, I talked to Lynda, she said the funds are good, blah, blah, blah, or she said wait 4 more days or whatever, because the bank knows. They know what's going on behind the scenes with, with that check, with that money, right? You know, with their experience, you know, in their, their backend systems.
And with PI firms, you're talking some big dollars, you know. Sometimes these cases, you know, come to fruition and there's a lot of money that needs to be paid back, you know, cover what the law firm fronted for all the case fees that came through. And then, you know, you get your piece, the law firm gets their piece. So yeah, you just want to make sure it's done right. And that's a big, big part, especially with PI firms, is a lot of navigating the IOLTA because you have to track all those client fees and keep track of them over a very long period of time. And ensure that you don't miss any, because if you miss any, once that matter is closed and that money's divvied out, you're done. More money. Yeah, there's no more money coming in to cover that stuff. You can try, but you're probably not going to get it. So I think that that's—
Well, Linda, if I'm a PI attorney, here's a baited question, and the check comes in and I'm waiting on it, can I loan you— can I loan the client money? And then—
Well, that's the problem, right? So you can find firms that do it. They don't usually— they'll get a loan. And they— the firm takes out a loan to be able to loan the client.
I was hoping that was your answer.
But, um, then there's interest. They're on the hook for the loan, right? So it's not a loan from the— it's divvied out by client, and that's also in their engagement, but they're on the hook for the loan. The firm is, and it has to get paid back at the time that the case settles.
It's—
those are— oh my God, there's some murky waters trying to figure out And track all that stuff because you now have to track the loan like a lot, and I like it like a trust account basically, but it's, it's an asset. So it's, yeah, um, and it's a loan to the firm. So it's a loan to the— it's, it's a liability to the law firm. So you have to correct the asset side, the advanced client costs.
So it makes me weak thinking about all of that.
I have a client that does this. He, and he's always Cash Apping it to all his clients and And it's also some states don't allow it, so you need to know the rules. Uh, the attorney should really be doing that. But yeah, I would say that's important.
Well, you know, I've seen so many times young attorneys who break away from the big firm that they joined after they graduated from law school, and they, you know, they got burned out on the billable hours and all of that. I'm gonna go do PI, I'm gonna go do DUIs, I'm gonna whatever. And they get into trouble because they don't study the, the Law, the, um, the bar rules. They don't become cognizant of those. And number 2, they try to do their own books, um, instead of, you know—
Yeah, that's how they start, right? And they start off in a spreadsheet, which, you know, right, not really growable. Yeah, it's—
So, you know, what software— like, we always talk about Clio and LeanLaw, and those, those 2 are the golden, you know, software platforms to use to help Track trust accounts. And I really like, um, what I've seen in Clio lately. I've seen the workflows starting to come into the different transactions that said you did this, do this next, do that next, so on and so forth.
Yeah, Clio has so much in it. I mean, I learned a lot more about it taking the test and getting Clio partner certified. Um, I learned a lot more about what it does for the attorneys though, was more about that, which was fascinating. They have a great PI module, which has come a long way since we first saw it when it first came out a few years ago. I think it's worth looking at, but I know a lot of PI firms, they stick with CasePeer or something like that because they need something more robust to kind of really dig into the client fees. And it also has all the forms built in. But yeah, there's a lot inside of Clio. And I think a lot of people, we find that a lot of the clients, they just touch the surface with it and they use it for one specific purpose, but they don't use it for—
Right.
They don't use it for like the email and they don't use it for the client portal. And all those things are really— it's right there in one tool. Why not use that workflow? Um, I don't know. We're, we're jumping more into our Carbon workflow. It's the same thing. If you don't know what it does, sometimes it's hard to see the forest.
Oh, sure.
Yeah. And I think that that's it. And a lot of times my head doesn't go the same way Carbon's workflow does. And It's probably the same way for attorneys because things get added on and added on. But it does have a lot. It does a lot. I was surprised to see there's a lot about Clio Grow in that. So, and that does a lot. So there's a lot of pieces that you could pick up, but it gets expensive. So if you're an attorney coming off of a big firm, you're trying to keep your costs down, don't cheap out on software though. Even if you don't learn Clio and only use it for one thing, Still get the Clio because you're going to outgrow your spreadsheet and you're going to be glad you stuck it out.
Or LeanLaw.
Or LeanLaw. Or LeanLaw.
I mean, LeanLaw plays with QuickBooks so well.
It does. It plays with QuickBooks better than Clio does in my opinion. And it was built for that. So it's great for us. That's a lot of reasons why we like LeanLaw better because it's great for us. It's less work for us than Clio's workflow is. And it has, I think, less problems because Clio has these things that happen that really affect our workflow more than the attorney's workflow. But it's same thing though. If somebody doesn't put the data in correctly into Clio or any software, yeah, it's still going to be wrong and you need to track it. I mean, if they put the wrong dates in, which is typically the thing that happens, they do the wrong dates and it's hard to figure out. I've got one client, they just put them— they're off by a month every month. Oh my gosh. You know, I can figure it out now. And now I know when they put in—
You know what to look for, right?
Yeah, they put in April 18th. I know they really meant March 18th or vice versa. They'll do March 18th or they'll do May 18th. And well, that hasn't happened yet. So I don't know how you could have billed for that. And then I'm like, oh, it's always off by exactly the month. Like they're not just not paying attention to detail. So it does really come down to who's putting the data in and, and possibly just slowing things down would probably help, or we can help them with that kind of stuff. And I think too, with when you're working with them, making sure that they're using things like when they're requesting a retainer, use the retainer request feature.
Yes.
So that's going to help making sure it's correct. Start to implement the tools for merchant services, because even if you don't want to accept those, both Clio and LeanLaw have partnerships. Clio's built-in called Clio Pay. LeanLaw's is with Confido Legal, but you can Do the trust request, the money lands in the trust, the full amount, and then the fee comes out of the operating.
It comes out of operating.
Uh, have an ability to charge it back to the client. So then the client's paying the fee. So because you have all those scenarios, you know, if you're afraid to do the fees, you can offset the fees to the, to the client if you want to. I always think that looks cheap, but, you know, a lot of people—
I do too. I don't— I always just discourage people from doing that. But, um, so we've talked about 2 legs of the 3-leg reconciliation here that we should talk about. We've got the bank, we have the billing software, and now we have the, the accounting system. And all 3 of those have got to tie.
They've got to tie together. You know, you get these clients like this time of the year, we start to get all these files that come forward and you look at the records and you think, wow, how have you been able to work for years? It's not matched.
Under the radar.
Yep. And another thing is a really simple tip, and I've been seeing this on files that are coming our way that we're giving pricing on. If you're going to have multiple trust accounts because you have to, you work in different states, you have different styles of trust, real estate or whatever, bucket them though. Bucket the operating accounts. If you have a payroll or regular operating savings, bucket those. And then do a header account, trust accounts, and then put the trust banking accounts together. And then make sure that if you have multiple trust accounts, have multiple liability accounts that are the subaccounts under the particular accounts. So don't bucket them all under one. It makes it harder to find errors.
Oh, that's really good advice.
So I think that those little things, those are simple, small little things that will really save you in the long run. And it's I wish someone had told me about the bucketing underneath in separate accounts. Like, I didn't realize that until later, that that was a much better workflow to track. You know, have multiple accounts, you're able to have multiple subaccounts, right? And you can collapse it and it should match the bank account balance. That's a simple thing. But—
And did you see in QuickBooks now they've added a new feature where you can lock down the parent account? Thank you, QuickBooks. Thank you, Intuit, for doing that.
Yes, except that sometimes when it comes to the trust account, we put things in the header for various reasons. We don't know where it goes, and we could put it in an unknown client account if we wanted to, but sometimes we want to leave it in the header as a temporary place. And I only know this because I looked at it and I actually locked one out, and you— I couldn't figure out how to unlock it.
Oh.
And it was locked and frozen, and I couldn't use the header anymore, and I had to make like a holding place as a sub-liability. But yes, thank you, Intuit, because, um, and that team's wonderful that did that, because it keeps— if you can't, like advertising, but there's always these separate little things. If you—
Right.
Block that out, I'm curious to see how it lands with the client if they're putting the num— putting things in. What are they going to do when they can't find their advertising? You know, because maybe it's— maybe it says online ads and they're going to try to put it in advertising. Advertising isn't going to be locked. They can't put it there. So they're going to figure it out. I hope so.
I hope so. But, you know, to the— to that point, I like that it's locked because it keeps you from using the parent account to dump everything into it. Yeah, it's a plus for that. So a lot, a lot less cleanup.
Yeah, it should, it should be. It should make it better, especially if you have, you know, outsourced teams or global teams or even your own staff. It's going to keep them putting it in the right place. It's very easy to just go fast through the bank feed and go advertising, boom. And then at the end of the month, you're going through and you're having to shift them all down to the subline.
You have to shift them all down.
Yeah.
And to your point about using the parent account on the trust liability, I kind of— I like to set up a trust suspense subaccount because it sticks out like a sore thumb. It's like, what is this? You've got to handle this right now.
Yeah, that is a good— that's a good idea. Trust suspense. And then we do unknown client because a lot of times you just don't know who it belongs to. And then you should have one for your trust interest, because that's another place where, you know, the money comes in, the money comes out, but you want to have it flowing through that trust account because it came in there. I see a lot of times they put it in interest income and interest expense, and yeah, they zero out.
Oh, no, no.
But we see that when you look at files, and I get why they're doing it, but what if it doesn't zero out?
Right.
So it's another place. Wire fees that get wired, or even a check order, because a lot of these people get these check orders and they, they're not supposed to take it out of the trust, but they do. If it's a check order for the trust account, you want to have, you know, bank fees and wire fees to be reimbursed. That you name that a sub-account and then it's there. You can show the client on the listing because you got to do the 3-way bank reconciliation, right? That should be being done. But you know what? What's the one thing you notice when you get a new file or a file you got to go through? What do you see that they never did it? They think that just reconciling is it.
Yeah.
That doesn't cover it. I've seen people that think because they've matched their bank fee, their bank feed, they think that that's reconciling.
Well, one thing on our side with that, it was, is the new layout that QuickBooks has for the bank feed ought to torture people enough that they'll back off on something like that.
Yeah, I know. That's not, it's, I like parts of it and then parts of it seems like I'm clicking more.
Like, why?
I agree.
I got an email, 2 different emails. One said that you still had to attach the attachments, you know, from somewhere in your computer or wherever. And another one said you could do it directly in the bank feed, and you can't. So, you know, I would love to just drag and drop in there, and you can't. I wish they would.
No, you have to click and upload it from the computer. Yeah, they made it harder.
They made it harder. Yeah.
Which, who knows why. Maybe it had to do with Security. I don't know. Who knows? Who knows with Intuit?
It's bigger than all of us.
Yeah, exactly. And of course, when you're navigating trusts, you want to make sure there's never any hint of commingling. So having the funds in the account and putting the transfer in but not moving the funds is commingling.
It is.
And I think that needs to be said because a lot of times they think, I'll just leave it there. I just leave it in the trust as a cushion. No cushion.
It's not a savings account for the firm.
Because when you hide that and don't move it to the operating, you've now hidden, uh, income.
Correct.
So, correct.
Big no-no.
I think sometimes they— people forget that. And then obviously, if you're running low on money and you don't have enough money to do your payroll, you don't ever use your trust account funds.
No, please, no, no.
That's really a big no-no.
It's not your money.
Right. Or moving the funds before you've earned them, like we mentioned earlier on. That's another thing. There's a lot of best practices for managing the trust, mainly for us. If you're talking about it from an accounting perspective, make sure that whatever they put into the trust, whatever they put in Clio, whatever they put in LeanLaw, in the legal tech, make sure it actually— the money actually landed in the account that they said it did. Because a lot of times they'll put it in and say this went into trust, and then you see it hit the operating account. Make sure they transfer the money if they have a bank fee or something. Make sure they transfer it quickly.
Correct.
I think it's 7 days. No, not even. I think it's like, it's very short term, or 48 hours in California. If you know this has happened, you have 48 hours to move the money. And California's got some pretty strict rules, and I think you're going to start to see that kind of taking A little trickle-down effect.
You know, I've thought about that. I agree. Yeah, yeah.
So let's touch on—
let's touch on a trust audit. Attorney Regulation Council comes knocking at the door. The very first thing that you want to do is do not panic. They really are there to help you, and it could be a simple reason that they're asking to take a deeper look into the trust bookkeeping.
It doesn't feel that way though, Steve.
It doesn't feel that way, but the very first thing you do is don't panic. This is The second thing you do is get your accounting, us, your bookkeeping and accounting people involved. Just like when the IRS comes knocking at the door, you get your tax preparer involved. You get us involved in that trust compliance issue and we'll help you out through it. And if you show a reasonable effort right away, you're not afraid, you give them what they need, generally you come out of it just fine.
Use their forms too.
Use their forms.
Don't go printing forms out of QuickBooks saying, ah, this is about the same. They want ledgers and they send you a PDF, fillable PDF, To put each ledger in. Yeah, it's a pain. You got to type it all over because you can't move it over. You've got the list in QuickBooks. They don't want that list. They want this on the form. Use the form. Don't piss them off. And then also timeliness. So most of the times you get 2 weeks to produce the records. You don't have a lot of time. If your trust is out of balance, fix it now before there's a random audit or an audit audit. You just don't want to be up against it if your books are messy because— Cleaning up messy books. I mean, we're in right now, our firm's working through 2 very large cleanups. It's taking a lot of time and resources to fix because they had multiple software. They thought, oh, this is not balanced, I'm going to go to this software. Well, that didn't fix anything, especially when the bookkeeper that was there— and this is another good tip for using trust accounts— if you have a trust account in Bank of America and you're out of balance and now you're going to move it over to Chase because you think that's going to fix everything, Oh. and you cut the money and open the money and put it into Chase, You've got the same issue. You've just moved it from one place to another. And then you don't just do a transfer. You need to move that money account over account. I have one right now that I'm looking at and it says opening balance entry. They booked it to that in the bank account. That's the opening balance of the trust back in 20— I don't know, 2010, whatever. And it's— I'm looking at it going, but what was behind that number?
What was behind it?
Almost $2 million. Like, what was in the $2 million? I have no way of knowing. They might have been in God knows what software back then. Hopefully they have a record of that. Hopefully there's nothing. And I now I see the money coming out, but I don't know how to apply it because you can't apply it against opening balance equity. That's not an account. You don't use that account except for when you're entering a beginning trial, a beginning balance sheet, and that's just there as a holding until you're done. That should always be zero. And as we know, when we we is it is it that the account that when you First plug in a bank account into QuickBooks and you connect it, isn't that where it dumps the opening balance?
It does, yeah.
And then it reconciles it.
It's not a card or whatever, yeah.
It reconciles it too. So you don't think it's something you're supposed to delete. But yeah, yeah, it— there's a lot. And yeah, when there's a trust account audit, yeah, you want to be ready for that. You really want to be ready for that. And if it's— if it's not— if you're not prepared before You're going to put a lot of pressure and a lot of stress on you, and you're at their mercy. So if you want more time and they say no, yeah. And then if you're working with an outsourced accounting firm, that does help you because the bar likes that it's somebody that's qualified doing it.
They do.
And especially if you have somebody that's familiar with doing audits like we, we are. And there's plenty of people in the Law Lab that— we have one person, she wants to, that's all she wants to do. She loved it. But you notice how she changed her mind now?
Yeah, yeah.
I love it so much, but yeah, we should have done it there for a while. And I could picture you'd be perfect for that job too. I mean, doing that, um, you have to like— you have to like what you're doing.
And if you're an accounting bookkeeping professional and you're working with a messy set of, uh, trust transactions, document everything because that'll really help during an audit.
Lots of notes.
Yep, yep.
This is a good topic, Steve. We never talk about trust, so this is good.
This was good. Yeah, no, new, new subject for us, right?
Yeah.
How many times we've mentioned trust accounting? I don't think— I think it's probably one of our most popular, which is probably why it is back up, because it's something that if you're new to this, you kind of gravitate. That's where I would be looking. Let me hear what they have to say about it, because there's lots of, lots of good gold, as Seth would say, lots of golden nuggets in the conversations we have that I think would be really helpful to people if you're just starting out to kind kind of know, things that I wish we knew.
I think Tiara just likes to make you— make us sweat on a Monday morning. We love Tiara. Well, thank you, Linda. That was a great conversation.
Yeah. If you enjoyed today's episode, please take a moment to like, share, and leave a quick review. It's the easiest way to help other accountants and lawyers find our little corner of the podcast world. And while you're at it, Hit subscribe so you never miss an episode. Have a question or a topic you would love us to cover? Drop us a line at info@accountantslawpod.com, send us a message through our website at accountantslawpod.com, or leave a comment on our socials. Your idea might just make it into a future episode. And want to go beyond just listening? Consider sponsoring an episode and get your company in front of our growing community of accounting and legal professionals who love learning, laughing, and leveling up. And as always, don't forget to join the conversation inside the Accountants Law Lab Mastermind group at accountantslawlab.com, where collaboration meets inspiration every week.
Thank you, Tiara. I just love her. Well, thank you everybody. Have a great week.
Yeah, thank you. Next week we're going to be talking about Sarah's— she's going to recap all her travels, so we will have to talk next week.
Yeah, okay, good. You know, I, I watched that snippet on— I think it was on Facebook.
Yeah, I mean—
She did a great job on stage. She just— she was awesome.
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