Learn how to record deposited funds for your client’s trust account.
Record deposited funds
- Open the matter that you wish to make a trust deposit for, then select the Transactions tab.
- Select the relevant trust account if there are multiple.
- Select Deposit Funds from the Trust Account view.
- From the Deposit Funds window, enter the following details:
- Date deposited – this is the date the trust monies were received.
- Account – by default, this is the trust account.
- Received from – this defaults to the client. You can change this by selecting the x and typing in the name of the party who paid.
- If the party is a contact in Smokeball, select them from the dropdown menu.
- If the party does not exist in Smokeball, select the + and save their details.
- Amount – the amount to deposit.
- Check that the amount in the Available After Deposit field matches your own records for this trust account.
- Type – select Bank Transfer, Cash, Cheque or Credit Card.
- Reference – this is the payment reference. The field will be greyed out if references are set to automatically generate.
- Reason – why the trust monies are held in the trust account.
- Internal note – further information that’s outside of the audit required reason.
- Tick Open PDF receipt now if you wish to print or save the deposit receipt immediately.
- Select Process. If you ticked Open PDF receipt now, the trust account receipt will open in your browser’s PDF reader.
Receipting a trust deposit from multiple parties
When recording a Deposit Funds trust transaction you can only select one contact card as to who the funds have been received from.
If you need to record that the funds were provided by multiple people, the simplest solution is to select one of the contacts in the Received from field and list the other party in the Reason field.
Receipting a trust deposit to multiple matters
Smokeball does not currently support receipting one deposit into multiple matters. As a workaround, you can either:
- Create a separate trust deposit with the correct amount for each relevant matter, providing the extra information in the Reason field on each deposit to denote that it forms part of one overall transaction.
- Create one trust deposit on one of the relevant matters for the full amount of the deposit, noting in the Reason field that this is for several matters. Then, create a Trust Transfer to create a trust journal, moving the correct amount of money to each subsequent matter.
View all trust account deposits
The Trust Account section in the Transactions tab of a matter will list all trust account transactions, including trust deposits.
You can also view all trust transactions across all matters by selecting the Accounts tab on the left panel of Smokeball.
Next steps
After recording cash or cheque trust deposits in Smokeball, you may wish to generate a deposit slip to easily keep records of the funds that have been presented to your bank.
Recorded a deposit by accident, or need to edit the deposit? Learn how to reverse it.