Trust Transfer to General

Transfer from Trust to General

There is the ability within Wise Owl to make a transfer directly from the Trust Account into the General Account to pay for invoices that your firm has issued to the client.

This Transfer of Trust to General can be accessed by going to one of two places.

Go to the Trust Register > Choose the drop down on Transfer > Choose ‘To General’
Go to the Accounting & Finance Register > Choose Transfer from Trust

Either of these options will take you to the same Transfer screen. This screen can be used in conjunction with the ‘Invoices for Trust Transfer’ Report which can be accessed under Reports > Finance Reports > Trust Transfer List.

Please note that this report is a guide only and highlights matters with outstanding invoices and money in trust. It is the User’s Responsibility to check the Trust Funds can be correctly used for payment of your law firm’s invoice.

The Trust to General Transfer screen will have some fields pre-filled for you based on using a Cheque to make the transfer. If you have the ability to use EFT transactions in your trust account, the option will appear to change the Transfer from Cheque to EFT.

The Receipt Status sets the status for the corresponding General receipt entry that is created upon saving the Transfer. This Receipt should be set to draft until you can see the funds received into the General Bank Account on the bank statement or until you are taking the cheque to the bank to deposit.

From Account (Trust): This will default to the main Trust Account of the business and will only need to be changed if you have multiple trust accounts

To Account (General): This account will change depend on if the transactions is a Cheque or EFT transfer.

If the transaction entered is a cheque from Trust, this will need to be entered as Undeposited Funds. This will then allow the Deposit Slip to be created to deposit the cheque.

If the transaction entered is an EFT Transfer, this can be set to the Law Firm’s General Account. This will also fill in the bank details for the EFT transaction in Trust.

Pay To: As this is a transfer between Trust and General for your Law Firm, the Pay to is your Law Firm name

Memo: This explanation will show on the Trust Payment transaction and should contain enough information to ensure the trail can be followed at a later time.

Cheque # or Txn Ref: Depending on the nature of the transfer, this field will change. It will auto populate from the settings in Wise Owl and will pull the next relevant number.

Details Section

Once all the above fields have been entered, the details of the Transfer will need to be entered.

To start, enter in the matter that you are wanting to transfer funds for. Once you have entered this, the line will auto-populate with

The available trust balance for that matter
Any invoices that are outstanding (that have been confirmed)

Wise Owl will automatically apply the available Trust Balance to any Invoices that are available to be paid. It is up to the user to correctly ascertain if this is the appropriate amount to transfer.

Only one line can be put in per matter on a single transfer.

To see how Wise Owl has applied the transfer, you can click on the Details box

This will take you to a page showing the application of the amount done automatically.

You can also choose to apply the amount yourself by choosing the Custom option, applying your changes and then pressing save.

Custom Edits made to the application of funds will then show a purple edit image next to the line.

Once you have made relevant changes, the Trust After and To Pay After columns will update.

You can do multiple lines on a Trust Transfer to General or select the X at the end of a row to delete it and start that line again.

Once you have finalised all the changes you want to make for that Transfer, choose one of the Save Options at the bottom of the page.

This transaction will then record a Trust Payment and a General Receipt. It will give you a successful message and allow you to print the trust to General Transfer list.

If you have done a cheque transaction, click on the blue hyperlink connected to the Cheque number to open the Trust Cheque and you can print directly from there.