Interest earned, of course, should be credited to an appropriate Law Society account within the banking system. Any errors along this line will be reported in the bank reconciliation and the practitioner should ensure that appropriate action has been taken to reverse the entries. As part of this procedure, a list of trust account balances must be produced at the end of each month, and for reconciling purposes completed within 21 days of the close of the month. Old accounts are investigated and appropriate action taken. The age of the matter, in some instances, can be assessed by having the file number produced alongside the name of the client as the reference.
Some computer systems can disclose the date of last transaction on the list of balances.
To ensure that there are no debit balances recorded on the ledgers. Practitioners must emphasise to staff the necessity of ensuring that funds are available for a particular client before withdrawing any funds from that account. It could also happen that while there are funds on the account, those funds have not been cleared as yet and on withdrawing a cheque, the client's cheque is subsequently dishonoured placing the account in debit. Obviously action should only be taken on cleared funds. Other instances where debit balances have arisen have been because of the transfer of costs and disbursements.