Trust Books is a product that was developed by a CPA. He worked with a lot of law firms and attorneys, and he realizes that many of them were keeping their records on Excel spreadsheets or even worse on pen and paper. He knew he needed a simple program for them to use to track the trust accounting. It’s so important that the attorneys remain compliant, if they don’t, it could lead them to loss of license or sanctions.Below you will find a list of pluses and minuses of the product.  Even in their advertising, they admit this is a simple, very basic product.This product is my opinion only, and I have not been paid for this review.  To see a review of Practice Panther, click here.

Trust Books

“Simplify your trust accounting”

Pros

• It’s web-based and accessible from all devices. 
• The dashboard has all the features accessible from it.
• You can import from Clio to Trust Books. If you’re in the Clio product and find it overwhelming, because it is a practice management tool, and you want simplicity, moving to trust books is easy.
• There’s an option for an attorney who doesn’t want to handle this that a CPA will reconcile and help you fix your messages. It comes out of the price of $129 per month. I am not sure if that $129 includes the detangling. It’s been my experience working with many attorneys that this could be a very time-consuming forensic part of my job.
• The three-way reconciliation form is good. Very similar to reconciling in QuickBooks. Little or no instruction needed.
• It syncs with LawPay.

Cons

• Trust Books does not connect to QuickBooks. Because it doesn’t connect to your accounting software, it creates a redundant process of reconciling the trust account into places.
• At this price, when it’s not affordable for the midsize firm. I can see this working for the solo law practice.
• It doesn’t do much. There’s no calendaring, no docketing storage, and it’s nothing more than a tool to reconcile your trust accounting.
• You can create your reports, but reports are not that great. But that is because there is not much to report. After all, the product is only a trust tracking product.

Conclusion:​

To sum it up, I always compare it an app like this to Lean Law.   Trust Books is the same price point, but will cause you to have to do things twice (redundancy–reconciling the trust bank account) and it segments the trust outside the accounting platform. You also lose in the report department. LeanLaw has so many more reports, even in its Core offering. 

I think if this product were $10 or $15 a month, it would make a lot of sense for what it is. Then I would give it five stars. It would be an excellent replacement for an attorney using excel or writing it out on at paper sheet, especially for the solo law practice.

Dashboard View of Trust Books

Trust Books Bank Reconciliation Screen and Reports

Trust Books- Summary

App Integrations

Not the type of program for that. Basic product. It does integrate with Clio

Easy to Use

Very very easy to use.  Especially for an attorney or non-accountant type user.

Cost

Expensive for what it does. Too expensive.

Overall rating :  2 / 5

This product fails because of the price point and lack of integrations.

Well, that’s my review in a nutshell. There’s not a lot to review on because the product is so scarce. But it does the job and has a purpose. If you’re looking for simplicity, trust books will be your product.  There is absolutely no learning curve to it.

If your attorney needs help with your books and maybe untangling a mess in your trust accounting, call us. It’s one of our specialties. If you’re on a product that you’re unhappy with and would like to migrate to new software, that’s another one of our fun tasks to do! We love moving clients off of old software and onto our preferred workflow.

If you have any questions or comments or you’re an accountant or bookkeeper who needs more support, please join our Facebook group QB Community Live!