Transactions

The Transactions section is the money ledger for a case or lead. It records four kinds of movements:

• Payments (money in): funding a trust, paying from a trust to operating, or a client paying operating directly.
• Withdrawals (money out): refunding a trust or operating back to the client, or disbursing trust funds to someone else (a vendor, an expert).
• Transfers: moving money between trusts belonging to the same client.
• Adjustments: manual corrections, opening trust amounts, or a starting balance when a case migrates in from another system.

How Outlaw Thinks About Trust Money

Your IOLTA is one bank account holding many clients’ money. Inside it, Outlaw tracks a general trust per client and a trust per case, and their balances always sum to the IOLTA. Money can move between trusts of the same client (from the client’s general trust into one of their case trusts, or between two of their case trusts) and from trust to operating once it’s earned. (True escrow held in a separate trust account is supported as well.)

Recording a Transaction

The add menu offers the four kinds (Payment, Withdrawal, Transfer, Adjustment) and a fifth option: Help Me Decide, which walks you to the right type when you’re not sure what a movement should be called. (Getting the type right is what keeps the trust ledger trustworthy, so when in doubt, use it.) On a lead, and for clients in the portal, the only type offered is a client payment.

Funding a Trust

The most common payment you’ll record is funding a trust. Open the Case, find the Transactions section, click Payment, and choose Fund a Trust. The new-transaction form opens with much of the work already done for you:

• Payer: usually the client, but sometimes a benefactor. If a benefactor is set on the case, they appear first in the dropdown, followed by the client, then every other contact alphabetically.
• Amount and destination: enter the amount, then choose where it lands. There’s one entry per client trust (one per client on the case) plus the case trust, so you can apply the funds to a specific trust.
• Payment method and reference: pick the method and record any reference number that goes with it, such as a check number or a card verification number.
• Processing and availability dates (optional): note when the funds will process and when they’ll be available. If a check is later refused or voided, you can mark it here, and it drops out of the balances.
• Notes: anything you add here shows up on the invoice for this transaction.

The same payment can be recorded from a few other places, and the form behaves identically once it knows the client and case: while invoicing (the usual path for evergreen-retainer payments) and from the firm-wide Financials > Transactions window, where you can add any type of transaction to any case.

Two Views: Account and Trust

A dropdown switches the ledger:

• The account view shows invoices and the payments against them: the quickest answer to “what’s the balance?” Trust-to-trust movements stay out of this view.
• The trust view shows every transaction touching a trust, with a column per trust, each client’s general trust plus the case trust (coded like 2022-A-0001), and a balance summing them.

Each entry shows its payment method and, where it pays an invoice, the invoice number. Failed payments (voided or refused transactions) are hidden by default and excluded from every balance; a toggle reveals them when you need the full history.

The Client File

Trust transactions are the client’s money, and the client is entitled to a full accounting of it. Treat this ledger as part of what the client can always see: the client portal shows clients the transactions on their cases.

Where You’ll See It

Transactions appears on a case and a lead (a lead can take money: a consult fee or an early retainer deposit). You can also import historical transactions from LawPay.