Trust Transactions

Trust transactions track money moving through your firm’s trust accounts. Every dollar in, every dollar out, with a clear record of who authorized what and when. If you manage trust funds, this is one of the most important parts of Laminar to understand.

Two Types of Transactions

Receipts are money coming in: a client deposits closing funds, a lender wires mortgage proceeds. The sender field records who the money came from.

Expenditures are money going out: land transfer tax, a disbursement to a vendor, proceeds to a seller. The payee field records who the money is going to.

Every transaction has an amount, a title, a description, and a trust account it flows through. Transactions belong to matters, and each matter has a trust ledger summarizing them.

The Trust Transaction Lifecycle

Trust transactions move through their own short workflow, independent of the matter’s. The default stages:

Planning is where transactions begin. Details are being prepared, fields are editable, and nothing has been submitted yet.

Confirmed means the transaction has been submitted for processing. A designated team (typically accounting or trust administration) is working it, and the details are locked because that team is relying on those exact figures.

Completed means the transaction has been processed and finalized. It’s part of the permanent record.

For most users this is one-directional: prepare, submit, done. Administrators can move a transaction backward when something genuinely needs correcting, but that’s uncommon.

Approval: The Expenditure Safeguard

Receipts don’t require approval; money coming in is generally straightforward.

Expenditures do. Before an expenditure can be submitted for processing, the matter’s Responsible Lawyer (or one of their approval delegates) must approve it. This is a financial control: the lawyer is signing off that this specific amount goes to this specific payee for this specific purpose.

The moment an expenditure is approved, its details are frozen: amount, payee, title, description, trust account, and associated matter. This holds even before submission. The approval is a statement that “these exact values are correct,” and they stay that way until someone removes the approval.

For who can approve and how delegation works, see Assignment & Accountability.

When Fields Become Locked

This is the part that affects your daily workflow, so it’s worth being precise. Transaction details become read-only under two independent conditions:

Condition 1: The transaction is approved. Expenditures only, since receipts skip approval. Changing values after a lawyer signed off on them would undermine the approval.

Condition 2: The transaction has left the Planning stage. Both types. Once submitted, the processing team is working with those exact figures.

The conditions stack. An approved expenditure still in Planning is locked by approval alone. A submitted receipt is locked by workflow alone. An approved, submitted expenditure is locked by both. The only fully editable state is a transaction that’s unapproved (or a receipt) and still in Planning.

Non-financial details like scheduling stay editable throughout.

Unlocking Fields

If locked by approval: remove the approval first. The Responsible Lawyer, a delegate, or an administrator can unapprove. Fix the details, then get it re-approved.

If locked by workflow: an administrator can move the transaction back to Planning. If it was also approved, the approval has to be removed separately.

In practice, most corrections happen before submission: catch the error, unapprove, fix, re-approve. Corrections after submission are rare and go through your administrator.

The Trust Ledger

Every matter has a ledger view listing its trust transactions, with totals for receipts, expenditures, and the resulting balance. It’s read-only oversight: at a glance, how much trust money is on this matter, where it came from, where it went. To change a transaction, click through to its detail view.

How This Connects to Everything Else

Matters contain trust transactions; each transaction belongs to exactly one matter. Workflows govern their progression, same concept as matter workflows but shorter. Assignment determines who’s responsible; on submission, the transaction is automatically reassigned to the fulfillment team. Activity logs everything: creation, edits, approval, submission, status changes. That’s your audit trail for trust compliance.