Conflicts of Interest for Attorneys

Welcome to Accountants Law Pod, where accounting professionals and law firms converge, hosted by Linda Artesani, Sarah Prevost, and Stephen Libhart.

Welcome back to the podcast, everybody. So how is everybody? I know it's really gloomy here in Florida today and raining on and off, which is so weird. We don't usually get that right now. We usually don't get rain until June. So, and it's a little cold for my liking. I had to walk. I usually walk to the gym and I had to like, I had to take my car because I was like, it's too cold.

Well, we had 7.5 inches of snow 2 days ago and now it's 60 degrees today and the snow's all gone.

I heard it was going to get warm again. Sarah, warm enough now that you had tea on your hand?

Oh yeah, I know, my accident coming into here. It's actually Well, for one, my office was freezing cold when I got in here this morning. And so I kindly sent a note to my significant other and said, do not touch my heater.

Significant other? He's no longer a husband. You just like— It's right after the weekend.

What happened?

No, no, no.

So he said, oh my God, I'm so sorry because it was really warm yesterday. And then today it's just raining and raining and raining to the part where I—

Better than the snow.

Fell. I would take the snow because I can walk in it.

You know why you fell? Because you walked too fast.

No, I wasn't going fast at all. I was holding a cup.

You don't know how to go slow. You go so fast.

I know.

Sarah's legs are literally— and I know this is a podcast, but if you could just picture, like, 2 inches between my fingers, Sarah's like— and I'm 5'6 and a little bit more than that. And she's like— I got, like, a whole foot over her almost. And she still walks faster than me, and I have a hard time keeping up.

So she's very—

I'm 6'1.

And all I can see is the top of her head.

On this topic of moving fast, I was walking so fast the other day that it thought I was driving on my driving app. And I said, no, I'm not driving.

There you go. There's your proof. I've never had that happen. I'm almost all the way to the gym and it goes, oh, are you walking? And like, I've already walked a mile and it's like, oh, are you walking? It took you that long to figure out I'm walking? Sarah's watch thinks she's driving. That's pretty bad.

It's so funny.

I was like, wait, I'm sorry, hold on a minute.

Let me look at these settings. But in any event, so, yes, so, but it has been raining sideways. We're just having a, I don't know, a river of rain, I guess you could call it.

But yeah, it's green soon in the sun, and we're getting like the daylight savings time coming up pretty soon.

Oh, I'm loving— well, and the other thing too is I don't know if y'all are having this, but the cherry blossoms, they're coming out and I'm loving it. So I've been seeing those. Wow.

It doesn't do that here until like May or June.

Yeah, we get it. I think it's March normally, but it's a little bit early because it's been such a weird climate change in this area of time.

I have a conflict over this. No, I'm kidding. I'm trying to segue into conflict of interest for attorneys. Yeah. How did we get in? Because we did conflict of interest for bookkeeping professionals last week. And this week we're going to talk about the attorney side of it because it is different.

It is different.

The only time I ever think about this is when you're doing— I remember when I first started doing data migrations for LeanLaw and the people would say, I want every client I've ever had since the beginning of time brought into the new software and be like, well, why do you need that? And they would say, because of conflict checks, they need to know if they had this client in the past, or if— I guess it can be— it can fall under a lot of different buckets, right?

Yeah.

So they would want that, and then it would bog the system down. And it's like, well, you're not losing your old system. You still can look it up in the old system. Maybe they figured nobody would do that. And the system probably had this client before, so you wouldn't make a new record.

Yeah, I think in looking at the rules and the guidance, you really do— like, it makes sense that in data migrations, why so much of that data you would want to do just for precaution, just for the conflict check going forward. So anybody coming in going forward, because you wouldn't have had that otherwise.

Right. You'll lose all that if you're—

but you also don't want to bring in—

I mean, some of these firms have been around for 25, 30 years. Do you want to bring in 25 or 30 years worth of client data into a file that you're never, ever, ever going to do? Because a lot of the systems read, like, you log into QuickBooks and then you go into LeanLaw. LeanLaw's data is to read all— it's reading in the background all the data.

Yeah.

Which will slow down LeanLaw. If you start to add all that data, it's going to suck the living life out of it. Or if you push, we've had clients say, I want all the clients in QuickBooks. And it's like, you know, that's a lot of data. I mean, I'm talking like 25,000, 30,000 names and information pushed into QuickBooks is also gonna slow the system down, even if it's, you know, advanced version of QuickBooks, which is their enterprise suite one. I mean, that's still advanced and that can get really slow. In fact, this weekend working on it was painfully slow. Just working on anything.

It was.

I'm like, is this me? Is it my area? Is it I mean, I'm trying to run reports and it just— it's not you. The 4 dots spinning around. I'm like, this is like the Microsoft icon spinning. I'm like, oh my gosh, it's so slow. Whatever it was doing, I tried clearing all the cookies out. It was hard.

I think they were updating things over the weekend because it was everywhere.

So, really slow.

Yeah, it wasn't you. But definitely, I do feel I make the crack all the time. I'm faster than my own software. What's going on? Yeah. There's also conflicts in, in the payment management too, is what we've found in, in how things are being paid, who's paying for it, because it results to a conflict. And that's not your client, but who's paying on behalf of the client could create a conflict moment.

So that would be with immigration firms, right? They have one person who speaks English and can do any side of it, and they'll pay for everything for multiple people. Yeah, but that could cause a conflict. Yeah.

Well, you know, communication styles can cause conflicts as well. You know, we have all these different softwares that we use to communicate with clients, and things are documented, and, you know, password-protecting reports and things like that, as opposed to verbal communication over the telephone and, and getting okays for things that they— that aren't documented. I mean, that can create conflicts with accounting. Real easy, very easily. I can't even say that. It can easily create conflicts.

And for the attorney side, I think you—

Ladybird?

When we were talking about it, um, we were saying— I brought up Suits because Suits is back on and it's Suits LA. And you were saying how that Steve was looking through the rules and it said the attorney can't have a relationship with their client. And I'm like, they have that in Suits all the time. Like, the whole show premise of the show half the time is that But that is an issue, and that's something— these lines that they can't cross when it comes to ethics. I mean, I think, um, and conflicts of interest, right? You can't have a personal relationship and then also be representing them.

Yeah, well, and, and, you know, I, I saw a colleague post about bartering, uh, this weekend. I saw that you got to be really careful when it comes to the attorneys too. You— that's not a thing that you should— you really have to be There has to be documented pieces to show that, that service agreement. And it goes back to when you think about with the whole paying situation too. You know, I— we could also see this in family law. You know, the client is X, but who's paying for that? And a lot of times we have to know that as accounting professionals because the information through the payment portal is not clear enough. To tell us who the money's for.

And where it came from.

Yeah, it's not that we want to know these things, but we have to know for the purpose of acknowledging and accepting it correctly and posting it correctly so that it's not just floating money out there. And so that kind of stuff has come up. Steve, you talked about some sort of contingency-style cases that may pose conflicts based on types of cases they are. So there's a lot on the attorney side that you have to— that it's not in our interest to want to know, but we have to be aware of. Like you said, Linda, data migration, payment collection. There's these other things, any kind of conflict that would actually come into the accounting space where you otherwise, as the average accounting person, you're not— this is not your MO. You're not doing this right.

I mean, well, you know, here's another ethical one: when the attorney doesn't give you all the details, which limits our ability to provide accurate advice, accurate record-keeping, and not having to go back and, and do it again when we get the real story.

Yeah.

Um, these, these sort of things can really create— grow legs and create problems. Or non-compliance with financial reporting standards. You know, I mean, that's huge. Um, when they, when they resist your recommendations to improve the bookkeeping practices and they want it done a certain way and, and they're not listening to why you're recommending it to be done this other way.

Yeah.

And that, that generally works out okay because they just don't understand. They don't know the accounting side because they're attorneys. That's how they're trained.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, and so I always use the analogy of, well, you, you don't want me to be a plumber and come do the plumbing in your house because It's not going to be any good. You don't want me to file briefs for you as an attorney, as you know, from my side of the fence. But you need to listen to what I'm recommending over here to keep you compliant to the generally accepted accounting principles, to bar regulations, to, you know, to all the things that come into play on the numbers side. That's what really makes us so valuable.

Yeah.

To attorneys. And we can get into some really sticky ethical things When they don't quite understand it all.

Well, and so we— the conflict check would include what you kind of brought up with personal conflicts as well as professional conflicts, right? Assuming so. So both.

Um, well, back, back to your immigration law.

Yeah.

How in the heck do they sort all that out and not have conflicts on some things? You know, I don't understand. But—

Well, like, if you think about it in a simple sense, and I'm only going to speak a little bit from experience here, is Having worked through an operating agreement.

Yeah.

And, you know, 2 partners looking over an operating agreement. But because previous work had been done, the one attorney that was preferred was unable to be selected because of previous work. That was a conflict. However, there was not a conflict if there was representation of the one individual versus the other and then have the joint conversation. So it's It's really, you know, when you're looking at things as business, just business, and then how you, to your point, Steve, bring it back into the accounting fold, all of these other pieces. Whereas in a traditional model of accounting, when you're working with other types of industries, this is not something you think of. That's not like Linda and I have these ideas ahead of ourselves when we're client comes to us and says, I want to move data, or I want to look at a different software. Okay, well, what's in the one? How do we make sure— how, how do we move forward to give you as much information as possible and abide by this rule?

So we're on the outside, but yet we're all 3 of us abiding by as much as we have that, that extra layer with attorneys, like you said, that you don't have in other industries. Um, uh, food and beverage industry, a mom-and-pop restaurant or a hotel or whatever doesn't have— you know, they have, they have health, more health standards that they have to adhere to. Yeah, but they're not adhering so much— a little bit they are, but any businesses— but not as much as we are to the law.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, you think about lawyers too. If they— if an attorney has especially family law, I think of family law like you get a you represent the, the, the husband's side of the dispute, and then years down the road, the wife's like, you know, that guy did a really good— the ex-wife did a really great job for my husband. And then they come up because they have some other event and they try to hire, but now the attorney has one whole bed of knowledge from doing the, the case.

Yeah.

Can they legally represent the wife if it has nothing to do with the husband, ex-husband? Can they legally represent the wife without a conflict. And I think it's like a kind of a gray line that you have to be very, very careful not to cross. In the case of that, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, I'm just thinking of where you'd see a scenario like that, and that kind of would be one of them.

Yeah.

Well, you know, we've discussed this in other podcasts too, the scenario where the attorney takes cash for the retainer and what do they do with it? Big conflict there.

Yeah, you have to have good procedures. And whenever there's cash, exactly, there's got to be a workflow that's very transparent. I know when I worked in an office and I had the petty cash box in my desk with the key, and anybody needed petty cash, I mean, they were literally the person who gave me, you know, I moved in and that person's job when they left, they had nothing, no chain of events. They just, person would show up, say they need the money, and then she'd get the receipt afterwards. And I'm like, you know, I'm not comfortable with that workflow.

Mhmm.

Had something in writing where they were asking for a certain amount. It was approved by the business owner, and then I would give it out. And then I had, like, a spreadsheet of the ins and outs because I just didn't want any— who's the person gonna come to if there's money missing?

Exactly. That's the thing.

So I wanted to protect my butt on that, you know? And that was really my— I was worried about that whole thing. To me, just didn't sit well.

Yeah. Well, and, and I feel like that's probably what they're, you know, making sure that they're in good standings with the checks that they need to be doing, but also for us to be aware of certain things because it may enhance or prohibit what we're doing on the accounting side. It's just a whole— it's interesting because it's just one layer of multiple things that happens to this profession that really parlays and plays into certain aspects of what we do, whether you're inside a firm doing the work or you're an outside group like ourselves. And you're seeking the additional advice, we have to be aware of what are the rules so we can make sure we're advising you as best practices of what to do on the payment collection side, or making sure we understand, or we— like you said, erroneous things. Steve, you're asking me to put a lot of stuff in, or the trust accounting is not done well. These are areas that we have to make sure we're— We're not creating any additional conflict. So yeah, it's, it's—

well, or the, you know, for the beginner bookkeepers out there and beginning accounting people working with lawyers, their compensation. How is their compensation set up based on the type of corporation that they are, how they're incorporated? And if you don't know, pick up the phone and call their CPA. Get a copy of their operating agreement. Find out how they're really incorporated and what their operating agreement says and have that conversation.

Mm-hmm.

loan out there, because if you do it wrong, if they suddenly say they want to change it from a draw scenario on the balance sheet over to a payroll item on the, on the P&L, and they're not incorporated correctly, that's a conflict.

Yeah, but I guess in the, in, in the sense of like conflicts with clients specifically on this topic The accounting space, it's not in our interest to want to know all of that business, but it is part of our workflow that we have to be careful because we're, we're looking at parts, pieces of it. And, you know, honestly, I think I'm the type of person too. I have a nondisclosure agreement, like Linda and I both have a nondisclosure agreement. We make sure it is not our business to talk about your business with other people. It's not our business to display—

Right.

your information out there. And, uh, the thing that has come up before in the past, you've had this experience, is to your point, Steve, if a partner breaks up, there's a conflict for you in that moment. And there's cases—

That's a really rough one.

There's cases that get, you know, separated. And so they're—

One partner dips into the bank account while the other one doesn't. And, you know, all these things can happen, or they'll They'll, you know, the— it's like a divorce. There's, you know, some of the staff goes this direction, some goes that direction, and they get different— yeah, they get different marching orders. And, you know, all kinds of conflicts can arise, and you have to work through that with them.

It has to be hard for you because you're in a spot where you are probably being maybe like a partnership, like Sarah and I have. We're equal partners, right? And then something goes wrong and you're trying to split up, and then you've got the person in the middle— we'll just say Tierra because she's, you know, in the background here— and I'm telling her one thing, Sarah's and her another as we're starting to divvy everything up.

Yeah.

And that puts that person in a bad place. And I would think as a bookkeeper of a firm like that, and they're in the middle of this, it's going to be difficult because—

And that happens a lot in the legal industry. I think it does.

It's not happening here. I'm just going to make it—

Let's have that disclaimer.

Yeah, it wasn't a great example, but I mean, you know, as far as that goes, I mean, you're looking at the same type of scenario. So I could see where it would put you, the monkey in the middle. Because you're trying to please both sides and keep them compliant and keep them from fighting.

Yeah.

Right. You're trying to be that mediator. Basically, you're the mediator in the situation.

You become a mediator. Yeah. And there's a lot of ethics that have to come into play there.

And you have to be really careful. And just casually having conversations. I think about this all the time, too, is just casual conversations. You got to be careful with the information that you have.

Right. Because you could be giving that information out and you don't want that. I mean, it all falls Falls back into what, you know, your mother told you, just do unto others as you would like done unto you. And you just don't share certain things because it's not— and then the same thing would go, but the lawyers have a different level on this because their conflict of interest is they can't be sharing information about a client to another attorney or to, you know, opposing attorney or whatever. You just have to be very careful what you share. And I would think under their rules, they have to get like permission to share certain things. So if you're in the middle of this divorce and something—

Yeah.

comes up that you need to share, you must have to get permission from your client, I would think, to be able to share that with the other side for whatever reason.

Okay, here's another one. Here's another one. We 3 have talked about this.

Okay.

The, the accountant recommends a tax strategy that requires delaying income recognition.

Yeah. No, no, no, no, no.

When does— Linda, when does that happen?

Yeah, that is not— you should not be doing that.

No, no, no. Don't hold the checks at the end of the year.

But oh my God, I don't get to prepay your rent. It doesn't happen too much with attorneys. I have not had it happen, but with contractors, oh my God.

Don't pay your rent. What do you— wait, wait, wait, hold on.

They pay their rent in December for January.

Okay, well, they can do that.

That's fine.

That's fine. That's cash basis. That's fine.

But it doesn't win anything.

There's always more. There's always more.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, there is—

That's how I felt about it. Even when the contractors did it, I was like, all right, so you're not putting the money into the tap this tax year because you're hedging your bets that next tax year will be worse. And then if you have to do it again at the next year, you haven't done anything because you pushed everything in. You haven't done anything. You kicked the can down the curb a little bit, but you haven't really done anything effective. It's only good once.

And I never understood why doing that, like playing around with numbers and You know, when they do that, Linda, when they start that, that's what I was saying a second ago, is that there's always something else behind that. You just have to raise the flag a little bit and go, wait a minute, why are we doing this?

Yeah.

You know, what is your thought process here?

You know.

And as the bookkeeper, you want to ask those questions. And sometimes you feel intimidated by the person that you're working with, especially if you're new. You don't really know what you can say. That's why you should join the Law Lab. We'll help you with that. But, you know, that's the thing. You don't know what to say. And I think back of myself as that person. years ago where I, I didn't even really know what was going on sometimes in the very, very early parts of my career. And knowing something like that was not a good practice. And I can remember being— taking it from a curiosity perspective of asking, why are you doing this? And what is that gonna accomplish? And, you know, those questions, question it, because then those questions might go back into their head because they know why they're doing it. I mean, they obviously know why they're doing it.

The innocence of asking. I love that, Linda, because it's so true. You're right. When you think back to your beginnings and what— You're not Yeah, it's just you have to be inquisitive so that you can follow the trail of information and understand it.

And everything in writing today.

Maybe there's some logic there that's like new to you. Okay, then.

They could have talked to their tax person, the tax person authorized that for whatever reason. Something is in there.

Yeah, you don't know. I think in general in accounting, we try so hard to be so, you know, transparent, ethical in everything that we touch and do and try to be very You know, very black and white when it comes to our stuff. Yeah. And we get thrown things all the time. And I feel like this is something that's kind of in a similar vein, but also very pragmatic too. It's, it's got a, it's got a check there for a reason. It's got things in place for reasons. And so I feel like the balancing act of this in general for a business as it is, for those of us that service this industry, it's a little, just slightly different of a workflow in our environment. And it is interesting, especially in the immigration space. I will, going back to that, it is interesting to find how communities find, like Linda mentioned, this one person that ends up being that conduit to pay for all of these things.

Yeah.

I wonder, how does a firm, a law firm work realizing, okay, I see this name repeatedly. Do I need to make— do I need to reach out to them? Do I need to like, Because it's hard to have everyone have the great aunt that pays for everybody, right?

Right, exactly.

I wonder, like, I have no idea what that looks like, but it's understandable too if it's a trusted source, the community knows it's a trusted source, and that's kind of how this works, right? Like, that's how that happens. So, um, and then how you represent minors compared to adults when you have cases like that, and when does that conflict come up, and As you all were talking, I was also thinking about like spouses that get divorced that own businesses together.

That's— oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like that's a twofold thing. That's like not just the business, but it's also the, the marriage too. Um, so it's like a lot of conflict there, right? The more you think about it, I'm sure you can drum up even more. I'm sure your ChatGPTs of the world can also drum up a crap ton of this too.

How about Personal expenses. What about them being run through the books?

With the attorneys, conflict of interest.

Uh-huh.

You know, they advertising Steve.

They will ask the accountant to take their new shoes. We've talked about this. Their their whatever, and make it a marketing expense.

And you know, and you know what?

There's Sarah.

If we have it in writing. And we understand what it is, and it's being very clearly written out that this is something different. And we make that— just that work paper. Well, we make that work paper available to—

The rule.

That's what you need to do. Yeah.

And take their words and stick it in the transaction. So if it ever comes up later, because they'll say, I never told you to do that. And like, oh, really? Here's a copy of the message that you did tell me to do that. And then that shuts that right down because we use that a lot when we're doing our workflow. Because if there's something that seems out of norm, try to put that information into QuickBooks so that if it comes up in the future, you can only bring the horse to water. You can't make them drink, right? So you just educate. And obviously this is not doing anything that's unethical.

Yeah.

But if it comes to those gray type areas, that's the best you can do, really. I mean, Yeah.

Yeah.

That's the fun part of our job.

I need a nap now.

Me too.

Okay, this is a lot to talk about. There's so much more.

There is.

Yeah.

Rule 0.17, right? Rule 0.17.

Yeah, it's for the bar, for the ABA. And then, of course, very long states have their also additional layers to it.

American Bar Association Rule 0.17.

Yeah. You know, one, one last piece on the accounting side of it. This was interesting, and this came up in Law Lab where the ethics behind the work performed on the trust accounting cleanup was done to a certain level and it wasn't done as well. And the individual receiving that set of books doesn't have that in their engagement. They need to go back to the individual, to the attorney, and say, hey, I need to go and clean up the prior period, which will be an additional cost. But aside from that, this work isn't done. And the question that was kind of centering was, how do I handle that? What do I do? Do I, do I bring this up? Yes, you bring it up. Yes, you need to remain compliant. And to Linda's point, you have to make sure you have it documented because it's not your responsibility to make all the adjustments and nothing happens. It's the attorney of record that needs to have that say and agree to what it is that your findings are.

So it's on their license. If it's a prior period that we weren't hired to work in, we're not exposed there, but we bring it to their attention. We educate them on what to do. And if they don't want to pay to dig it back, you know, a lot, like multiple years, then you true it up and you document that transaction so that you know that It's there that they said, I'm not going to pay to go back that far. So if the bar comes knocking and then they are going to have to go back that far because they don't have a choice.

That's always such a sad bridge to have to go over. And I use the word sad because the attorney knows that it's out of balance way back when and it's going to cost money to find it and do the work for them. And when they make that decision of I can't afford this, that's really rough.

It's a sad balance because it's somebody else's money.

Yeah.

Those rules were put in place because you're handling other people's money. You cannot spend it ahead of it.

Yeah.

And you have to know who it belongs to. And that's half the problem is they don't know who it belongs to because they had bad bookkeeping or whatever that just didn't keep track of it. And they know this, but they also get very busy working and they hired, they paid somebody.

They paid somebody.

It was okay. So you could see it from their perspective too. Sure. Need somebody to make sure that these records are right, and they weren't competent enough to do it. And then it is still— the responsibility still falls on their shoulders. We all love rolling up our sleeves and fixing it. I mean, that's something that we do, right? That's fun. That's fun to us. But it's time-consuming, and it's not—

It's scary to a lot of people.

Yeah. I mean, we love it.

But it is, in the end, it's someone's money, and you have to identify it. But Like you said, Linda, we've seen some really bad— I don't want to say it's our profession, just individuals who don't understand this workflow, do bad bookkeeping, don't understand the software they're working in. That's number one, understand what you're working in. Don't understand how to find the data or how to collect it. And then you've got bad on bad on bad, and then you move and you move and you move software, software, software, gets worse.

And if you're working in this field and you don't even know what your fee to your client goes in what bucket, what category, you should not be doing this work.

Oh, yeah, that's enough.

That's what I discovered this weekend with a client. Their past bookkeeper didn't have the bookkeeping fee in the right account. And I was like, oh, what? Not all of them. Some were, but, but there were some that were not. So sloppiness. If you're going to be doing this work with attorneys, you cannot be sloppy. You have to love perfection. You just have to love perfection. That's— sorry to tell you, it can't be good enough. Just can't round up.

I like that, Linda.

You can't round up in accounting for lawyers. There's no rounding up, rounding down. No, it's particular numbers.

We look for the pennies. We follow the money.

We have to follow the money. We look for the penny.

That we do. And it's true. I mean—

You know, Sarah, you and I came from the hotel business. We've talked about this so much before. And during my years as a night auditor the hotel business back in the old days. We— they would keep us there. My shift ended at 7 AM.

Didn't matter.

If we were off by 3 cents, they would pay us an hourly wage to stay till noon to find 3 cents. It had to balance to zero. And I've carried that with me all these years. You've got to balance to the penny.

Yep.

You have to not— and, and, and this, this ties into conflicts and ethics, you guys. I'm getting really passionate now. It's like, you've got to— it's not just posting the work and putting it in the books. Stop and look at what you just did and check it.

Oh, thank you, Steve.

Please double-check it against that balance sheet and make sure you debit and credit in the right direction.

Pull up your check register, make sure it's in the right place.

Or just even open up the bank feed in QuickBooks Balance and the bank balance are Drastically different, there's something wrong. That's—

and it takes less time to double-check it than it does to clean it up 4 months down the line.

Yep.

Absolutely. I mean, there are people out there that, you know, want active accounts inactivated as soon as they're done. That's not important. What's important in the first forefront is where the data goes and ensuring that the data goes to the right places.

Yeah, just stop and take a second and look.

This, yeah, this set of books, because you make one mistake from that trust liability side and you record it wrong, it's a very detrimental thing. And we've seen some pretty, uh, unfortunate egregious things have been done in other sets of books, whether it was intentional or not.

And it's— Oh yeah, forcing things. You know, it's funny, I did a cleanup this weekend just cleaning up records and reclassing stuff, and it was balanced. And I went back in, and I was, like, cleaning all this stuff up and making sure things were in the right place. And then I get done, I said, let me just check one more time. And I went into the account reconciliation, and the trust account was off. Something I moved ruined something, something, and it just needed to be reconciled. But I was like, you know, when you're all done and you're like, I should just check one more time. And I'm like, I'm done.

It's always at the end, too, isn't it?

Always at the end. It's either that or it's unbalanced, and you have to figure out where it went awry.

You maybe put something in the wrong Or you have that big journal entry and you're looking at it going, why can't I see where this 20—

I know.

Then you come back the next day and you see the numbers transposed like that, but you can't see it when you're deep in it and you've been in it for hours. You just have to walk away and come back.

Yeah, we've done it multiple times last week. Quite a bit.

Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, well, this was good. Now we can—

it was—

now we're balanced.

Now we can It's safe to go out again. Sarah, please take care of your, your injury from your accident today.

Thank you. I know it's— it is.

Yeah.

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Well, thank you.

Thank you. I don't know what you do, what additional thing you do for burn, but I'll go figure that out.

Before we close out, you can do an ad for your, your stuff.

Oh, my—

Ice, Ice Baby. That's what you need to do for your burn. I know. Yeah.

And my Biafine that I Biafine.

I love that.

But that's a Europe thing. You can't, you can't get that.

Well, you can, you can get it. Um, uh, this is from when our travels in Europe, uh, just this last one. We bought 2 because we love it so much. Um, and it works really well, but it's, yeah, it's definitely red and steamy right now on my arm.

So, oh, oh well. Careful.

I'll see you all next week, everybody.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.