Law Firms

Law Firms

The practice of law requires a great deal of study and long hours of hard work researching, writing, and arguing cases. Why not leave the accounting to us? Whether you work with a legal bookkeeping system or all you have is a ledger of client invoices and deposits, we can help you with your basic bookkeeping and financial statements. Whether you pay your employees directly or use a payroll service, we can provide the payroll accounting you need to provide piece of mind for you and your employees. Whether you operate as a sole proprietorship, a partnership, an LLP, or a professional corporation, our team can provide you with the tools you need to understand the financial position of your business.

Bookkeeping

Many excellent legal bookkeeping programs are available for the use of lawyers to meet their extremely specific circumstances. We recommend that you find one that is reliable, easy to use, and provides excellent customer service support. However, we can also provide bookkeeping services for you, for a reasonable and competitive price. We can keep track of your general and trust transactions and assign them to the relevant asset and liability, and revenue and expense accounts. We can create a sales journal for you based on the invoices you provide, along with your deposit books, to establish amounts receivable from your clients.

HST

Certain disbursements that lawyers charge clients on their invoices are not taxable and therefore HST cannot be charged on them. We’ll be able to help you make sure that you’re always charging the correct amount of HST to all your clients and collecting what you are required to do – and not a penny more! Further, we can help you to calculate your HST input tax credits (ITCs) and therefore the net HST payable every year, or quarter, depending on your revenues. You might even be entitled to a refund!

Payroll

Your team helps to make your law firm what it is – and they deserve to be paid their proper salaries without delay or inaccuracy. Whether or not you choose to use a payroll service provider, we can help you to determine what your employees should receive as net pay based on their gross salaries, as well as what the employee and employer deductions should be, and what needs to be remitted to the CRA on a monthly or quarterly basis. We can even send payroll remittance cheques to the CRA on your behalf.

Trust Accounting

Moneys and other assets held in trust need to be accounted for as well as moneys and other assets used for your operations, and we have extensive experience with trust accounting. We can help you keep track of all the sub-accounts in your trust account, and maintain a ledger of these subaccounts, along with deposits from and disbursements to your clients. We can even help you to complete audits of your trust accounts as required of you by the Law Society.

It's extremely important that trust balances be recorded as liabilities – this is money that is owing to your clients, and you are merely holding it for them.

In summary, here are some of the services we provide for our clients which are relevant to your needs as a lawyer:

• Assurance services (audit, review, and compilation)
• Tax services (T2s, T1s, T4s, T5s, payroll remittances, HST filing and instalments)
• Valuation (fair market value of fixed assets, investments, trust balances, etc.)
• Other consulting services