Accounting Services
Accounting Services for Law Firms & Their Leaders
Welcome to Lancaster CPA, where we deliver precision accounting tailored to the legal profession. As a firm founded by Knight Lancaster, an attorney and CPA with extensive experience in small and large law firms, we understand the unique financial challenges you face. Our Accounting Services focus on trust account administration, reliable bookkeeping, and compliance oversight, ensuring your practice operates with clarity, accuracy, and ethical integrity.
Why Law Firms Need Specialized Accounting
In the legal industry, financial management goes beyond standard bookkeeping. Law firms deal with stringent trust accounting requirements, volatile cash flow from practice area concentration or contingency engagements, and the requirement to maintain audit-ready trust account records for all client engagements.
General accounting often intentionally excludes from scope or overlooks these nuances, leading to surprise cashflow constraints, compliance risks, and inefficiencies. At Lancaster CPA, our services are built for law firms, helping you avoid common pitfalls like trust account mismanagement while freeing you to focus on value-add work and client relationship management.
Our Core Accounting Services
We offer a compliance-first approach, customizing our services to fit your firm’s size and needs. Here’s a breakdown:
- Trust Account Administration: We handle attorney trust account client fund segregation with meticulous accuracy. This includes reconciliations, transparent reporting, and zero tolerance for ambiguities to ensure full compliance with IOLTA, IOLA, IOTA, & COLTAF requirements.
- Reliable Bookkeeping: Our bookkeeping integrates seamlessly with legal workflows, tracking daily transactions, client & firm expenses, and revenues. We provide customized financial reports, spending allocation reports, and are well versed in the primary legal software platforms: Clio, Smokeball, LeanLaw, MyCase, and Filevine. We also know how to integrate these platforms with QuickBooks Online, making it easy to monitor profitability and cash flow.
- Compliance Oversight: We implement proactive systems to identify and address red flags, such as uncaptured billable expenses, errors in your trust accounting software, and funds accidentally deposited into the wrong bank account. This ensures your trust accounting records align with the actual money movement, clearing out unnoticed errors and enhancing overall financial health.
Key Benefits for Your Law Firm
- Enhanced Compliance and Risk Reduction: Stay ahead of trust account mistakes by having a process that actively surfaces and remedies the errors.
- Time and Efficiency Savings: Reduce your team’s (and your) time dealing with trust accounting software, allowing more focus on clients & legal matters.
- Improved Financial Insights: Gain clear visibility into cash flows, expenses, and profitability to make informed decisions on growth, staffing, and compensation.
- Scalable Pricing: Starting at $2,500 per month for smaller firms (under $500K revenue), our services scale with you, offering flexibility without long-term commitments.
We’re transparent with our pricing.
Service Feature
- Trust Account Administration
- Reliable Bookkeeping
- Compliance Oversight
Key Benefit
- Ensures ethical compliance and audit readiness
- Real-time tracking for better cash management
- Early detection of financial red flags
Software Expertise
- Clio, Smokeball, Filevine, LeanLaw & MyCase
- Integration with legal payment processors
- Integration with QuickBooks Online
Client Testimonial
Adding Knight’s services to our operations has been tremendously helpful in streamlining our accounting, bookkeeping, and financial functions. Further, having Knight as a resource has been extremely valuable for strategic planning regarding big-picture financial outlook decisions as well as streamlining day-to-day business and accounting functions. The accuracy of Knight’s and his team’s work has been outstanding and is a huge improvement over our previous “DIY” approach. Knight has enabled us to focus more on the legal work we want to be doing and essentially outsourcing what used to be accounting and financial headaches.
Paul Zimmer
Managing Partner of Zimmer & Rens LLC (8-Attorney Firm)
What Sets Lancaster CPA Apart?
Ready to Streamline Your Firm’s Finances?
Take the first step toward financial clarity and compliance. Schedule a free consultation today to discuss how our Accounting Services can support your law firm.
Let’s talk about your practice. Start the conversation today.
Download our free guide: Law Firm Financials for Attorneys, by Attorneys for insights on common red flags and best practices.