Managing Trust Transactions

This guide covers the day-to-day trust workflows: creating transactions, getting expenditures approved, submitting for processing, and fixing things after the fact. New to trust in Laminar? Read Trust Transactions first for the big picture.

Creating a Receipt

A receipt records money coming into trust: client deposits, lender wires, retainers.

Open the matter’s Trust Transactions section and create a new transaction with Receipt as the type. Fill in:

• Title: “Deposit from buyer for closing costs” beats “Deposit.” You’ll scan these in ledgers and logs.
• Amount.
• Sender: who the money is coming from.
• Trust Account: which of your firm’s accounts it goes into.

The receipt starts in Planning, fully editable. Receipts don’t need approval; submit for processing when ready.

Creating an Expenditure

An expenditure records money going out: land transfer tax, vendor disbursements, seller payouts. Same process, but select Expenditure and fill in the Payee instead of a sender.

The key difference: expenditures must be approved before they can be submitted. That’s the financial control protecting your firm and your clients.

Getting an Expenditure Approved

Once the details are right, the matter’s Responsible Lawyer (or one of their approval delegates, subject to any dollar limits) approves it. The approval section on the transaction shows who can approve and whether it’s been done.

The moment approval lands, the transaction’s details are locked: amount, payee, title, description, trust account, and matter. The approval means “these exact values are correct,” and nobody can change them without first removing it.

Caution

Review carefully before approving. Correcting an approved transaction means unapprove, edit, re-approve.

Submitting for Processing

When a transaction is ready (and approved, if an expenditure), submit it for fulfillment. It advances from Planning to Confirmed and is automatically reassigned to your firm’s processing team (typically accounting or trust administration).

From this point all details are locked for everyone, receipts and expenditures alike; the processing team is working with the exact figures submitted. They take it through to Completed.

When Fields Are Locked

Approved but not yet submitted. You approved an expenditure, then noticed the amount is wrong. Remove the approval (Responsible Lawyer, delegate, or administrator), edit, re-approve. This is the common correction path, and the processing team never gets involved.

Already submitted. All fields are locked by the workflow status, and only an administrator can move the transaction back to Planning. If it was also approved, the approval must be removed separately. This path is rare; details should be final before submission.

Note

Scheduling isn’t locked by either condition. You can always update scheduling on a transaction regardless of its approval or workflow state.

Checking the Trust Ledger

Every matter’s ledger lists its receipts and expenditures with totals and the resulting balance. Use it to verify the trust position before closing. The ledger is read-only; to change a transaction, click through to its detail page.

Tips

Get amounts right before approving. Unapprove-edit-reapprove works, but double-checking is faster.

Use clear titles. “Land transfer tax, 123 Main St” is what you want to see when scanning a 30-row ledger.

Submit when ready, not before. A transaction can sit in Planning as long as it needs to. After submission, changes get significantly harder.

Give your administrator context. If a submitted transaction needs correcting, explain what’s wrong and why, so the fix is quick and the activity log captures the reason.