Bookkeeping for firms that bill expertise.

We keep the boundary honest, which is what your external examiner actually wants. The statutory trust ledger lives in your legal practice management software under the Legal Profession Act rules, and stays there. What we keep is everything around it: the office account reconciled, transfers between trust and office matched to invoices, and the records the examiner asks for ready rather than reconstructed. A bookkeeper who offers to run the trust ledger itself is offering to hold a risk that belongs with the practice.

It depends on whether the payment is truly made as your client's agent - filing fees and counsel's fees paid on their behalf sit differently to photocopying and searches you recharge as your own costs. Getting the split wrong quietly compounds across every matter and surfaces at BAS time. We map your common disbursement types once, code them consistently, and the question stops being a question.

Yes - it's the main reason professional firms move their books to us. Xero tracking categories carry revenue and direct costs by matter, project, team or principal, and shared overhead gets allocated on a basis agreed in advance. The month-end pack shows which work actually makes money, which is frequently not the work everyone assumed.

For legal practices, LEAP, Smokeball, Actionstep and Clio come up most; for consultancies and agencies it's usually a job or time platform feeding invoices across. Some connect to Xero directly, others need a scheduled export. As with every integration we run, the connection matters less than the discipline at the Xero end: billings land in the right place, get reconciled weekly, and the two systems are never allowed to drift apart quietly.

Money received before the work is done isn't income yet, and work done but not yet billed is invisible to a cash view - a firm reading raw bank balances will misread both. We keep retainers as unearned until they're worked off and give you a WIP view alongside the P&L, so the partners see the position, not just the bank.

Yes - salaried professionals, support staff, bonuses and allowances, with payday super on every run and clean separation between employees and the contractors or consultants the firm engages. If contractor arrangements raise payroll tax questions, that's structural and we hand it to the accountants - your file will already be consistent with whatever they find.