Trust Sweep

You’ve finalized a billing period’s invoices and sent them out. Some of the money you just billed is already sitting in your trust (IOLTA) account, earned now, but still in the client’s account until you move it. A Trust Sweep is how you close that loop: it gathers the period’s invoices, works out exactly how much may move from trust to operating, tracks the housekeeping (was each invoice sent? does any trust need topping up?), and gives you one number to take to the bank.

Why You Should Sweep First

Money in your trust account belongs to your clients until the moment you’ve earned it, and not a dollar more than you’ve earned. When you transfer from your IOLTA account to your operating account at your real-world bank, that transfer has to be defensible: the right amount, tied to specific invoices, reproducible months later when someone asks.

There’s a second, quieter reason: the sweep splits every transfer into Expenses and Labor. Labor is taxed; expense reimbursements are not. Keeping them as separate entries in your ledger is exactly what your accountant wants from you at tax time.

What a Sweep Tracks

For every finalized invoice in the period, the sweep answers, in columns grouped under these headings:

• Invoice Info: which invoice, client, and case this row settles.
• Trust Accounting: the trust Minimum the engagement requires (your evergreen retainer), the current Balance, Trust Payments already made, the amount Needed to bring the trust back to its minimum (you can adjust it when a trial is coming, or when a case is winding down), and the Replenish? / Replenished? checkboxes that track asking the client for a top-up and receiving it.
• Invoice Amounts: the Previous Balance carried in, what this period Added, what’s Due, and Direct Payments the client made straight to operating (card or cash payments on the invoice, not trust money).
• Amounts to Transfer: the heart of the sweep, this invoice’s trust-payable Expenses and Labor, capped by what the client’s trust actually holds.
• Invoice Sent: the date and method (email or mail) each invoice went out, so an unsent invoice can’t slip through the period unnoticed.

Creating a Sweep

1. In Financials, open the Trust Sweep section.
2. Add a sweep and set End On to the end of your billing period. You can usually leave Start On empty: the sweep then picks up every finalized invoice up to the end date that isn’t already in another sweep.
3. Press Refresh. Outlaw pulls the matching invoices in, one row each, computes their trust balances as of the invoice period, and fills every column above. Changing the dates and refreshing adds or removes rows while preserving your edits on the rows that stay.
4. Work the checklist: confirm each invoice went out, adjust Needed where an engagement calls for it, and review the transfer amounts.

Making the Transfer

The sweep shows the period’s totals: the Expenses and Labor sums across every invoice in it. Together they are the one transfer to make from your trust account to your operating account at your bank.

When the money has moved, record the date in Transfer On. That single date marks the sweep complete: it disappears from the working list (the Hide Completed toggle controls this), and the sweep becomes a sealed record of the period. Outlaw warns you if you try to Refresh a completed sweep, because recomputing would overwrite the values you transferred against. Leave completed sweeps alone; they are your audit trail.

Deleting invoices and sweeps is restricted to your firm’s administrator tier (administrators, owners, attorneys, and office managers); see Roles & Permissions.

Where the Money Shows Up

Trust activity recorded along the way (payments from trust, deposits, transfers) lives with each client and case in Transactions, and your trust and operating accounts themselves are defined in Banking in Settings. The sweep sits on top of both: it doesn’t move any money itself, it tells you exactly what to move, and remembers that you did.

How This Connects

• Flows in. A sweep pulls the period’s finalized invoices and, for each, the client’s actual trust balance from Transactions and your Banking accounts, plus whether the invoice was sent.
• Flows out. It produces one defensible trust-to-operating transfer figure (split into labor and expenses) to take to the bank. It moves no money itself; it tells you exactly what to move.
• In time. Each sweep is a snapshot of its period. Record the Transfer On date and it seals into an audit record, reproducible to the penny months later, which is why Outlaw warns you against refreshing a completed sweep. Like every record it keeps a full Blame Log. See How Outlaw Fits Together for the loop.