Can I Run a Report Showing One Client's Trust Activity — Money In, Money Out, and Balance?

A defensible per-client trust report shows three things across every matter: each deposit, each disbursement and what it paid, and the balance after every transaction, tied to the bank rather than estimated. If your system can’t produce that in one document, the gap is in reporting, not bookkeeping.

What a client’s trust ledger actually has to show

A client who asks “what happened to the $5,000 I gave you” is asking for a single document, not three. That document needs the date and amount of every deposit and its source, the date, amount, payee, and purpose of every disbursement, and a running balance after each entry that matches what your trust liability account actually holds for that client. A current-balance snapshot alone leaves out the history a client, or a bar examiner, is actually asking about.

The test: pull this for one client right now

Pick any active client with more than a handful of transactions and try to produce that document without opening a second report, exporting to a spreadsheet, or reconciling two numbers by hand. If you can generate one ledger, for one client, across every matter they have open, showing deposits, disbursements, and the running balance tied to the bank — that’s a defensible report. If you’re stitching together a general ledger export and a separate matter-by-matter balance list, the report doesn’t exist yet; only the raw data does.

Per-client isn’t always the same as per-matter

A client with two open matters may have trust funds the firm tracks as one pool or as two separate balances, depending on how the firm’s chart of accounts is built and how the client agreement is written. Which level of detail a given bar’s recordkeeping rule actually requires is a jurisdiction question, not a software one, and it’s worth confirming for your own jurisdiction rather than assuming your setup already matches it.

Say a client has $5,000 on deposit across two matters. Matter A draws $1,200 for a filing fee; Matter B receives a $500 additional retainer from the same client. A report at the client level shows both transactions against the correct matter and a combined balance of $4,300, reconciled to the trust bank balance that day. A report that only shows current balance, with no transaction history, can’t answer where that $4,300 came from.

LeanLaw keeps that ledger at the client level from the same trust activity that already syncs to QuickBooks Online, so pulling it doesn’t mean assembling a new record after the fact. What it doesn’t do is confirm that the level of detail matches your specific bar’s rule — that’s still a firm-side check, and applying trust funds to an invoice is the other half of the same ledger worth understanding.

What this depends on

• Which recordkeeping rule your jurisdiction imposes for client trust ledgers.
• Whether trust funds are tracked per client, per matter, or both, and how the chart of accounts reflects that split.
• Who reconciles trust to the bank, and how often that reconciliation happens.
• Whether the firm runs one operating model or mixes hourly, flat fee, and contingent work with different trust patterns.

The next time a client asks what happened to their retainer, the real test is how many reports you have to open to answer, not whether you can answer at all.

Related questions

“I need to see for one client all the money that came in and all the money going out.” That’s a per-client trust activity report: every deposit and disbursement for that client, in one place, with the balance after each entry.

“Could you run that trust activity report whenever a client asks what happened to funds they gave you?” Yes — it reflects the same trust ledger the firm already reconciles, not a separate record built after the fact.

“Is per-client trust tracking something I can produce if the bar asks questions?” You can produce the ledger; whether its level of detail satisfies your bar’s specific documentation rule is worth confirming, since that requirement varies by jurisdiction.