MyCase Bookkeeping Services & IOLTA Trust Accounting

MyCase handles your matters, your billing and your trust ledgers. Your firm’s general ledger lives in QuickBooks Online — and the sync between them runs in exactly one direction. Anything a bookkeeper corrects in QuickBooks never travels back, so the two systems drift apart quietly until someone reconciles them deliberately. That is the job we do for law firms every month.

One-Way Sync Means QuickBooks Is Downstream, Not Authoritative

MyCase publishes a QuickBooks Online integration and describes it plainly as a one-way sync: data flows from MyCase into QuickBooks Online, and QuickBooks data cannot be transferred back into MyCase. Invoices, payments, trust deposits and withdrawals, and credit or retainer deposits and withdrawals all cross. There is no Xero integration.

Two consequences follow, and both cause real problems. First, the direction of travel means MyCase is the source of truth for anything that syncs — a correction made in QuickBooks is invisible to MyCase and will be contradicted at the next sync. Second, the sync auto-creates service items in QuickBooks with names like MyCase Flat Fees, MyCase Discounts, MyCase Additions, MyCase Taxes, MyCase Interest and MyCase Trust Deposit, and those items need a deliberate mapping to your chart of accounts or your P&L stops meaning anything.

MyCase does get one important thing right by default: non-trust credit retainers post as a deposit into the operating bank account with a related transaction into a non-trust liability account — correctly as a liability, not as income. Unearned fees booked as revenue is the classic law firm error, and this behavior avoids it, provided nobody overrides the mapping.

The Details That Trip Firms Up

Surcharges are not automated. MyCase documents that if you charge a surcharge on credit card payments into your operating account, you have to create a surcharge service item in QuickBooks manually. Firms that skip this end up with unmapped amounts and a payments account that never quite reconciles.

Balance-forward invoice lines. MyCase publishes guidance on removing balance forwards from invoices, and for good reason — balance-forward lines synced into QuickBooks are a well-known way to double-count accounts receivable.

Payment application is a manual decision. Reconciling card payments requires choosing whether each one applies to an invoice, a trust request, or the trust account. Choose wrong and you have just recorded a client’s trust funds on the operating side — the exact error that draws bar attention.

A note on naming: MyCase’s parent rebranded from AffiniPay to 8am in August 2025, covering LawPay, MyCase, CasePeer and the rest of the group. Documentation and third-party articles still use both names.

Core MyCase Bookkeeping Functions We Manage

1. Monthly Three-Way Trust Reconciliation

A three-way reconciliation compares three balances that must agree every month: the trust bank statement balance adjusted for outstanding items, the trust account journal or control ledger, and the sum of every individual client subsidiary ledger. State bar guidance — the California State Bar’s client trust accounting handbook is a widely used example — directs attorneys to perform it monthly, for each trust account, and to keep a written record proving it was done. The governing principle is simple: what comes in for each client must equal what goes out for that client, no more and no less.

MyCase markets three-way trust reconciliation and provides trust activity and trust-by-case reporting. We perform the reconciliation, document it, and keep the written record your state bar expects.

2. QuickBooks Sync Supervision and Item Mapping

We map every auto-created MyCase service item to the correct income, liability or clearing account, build the surcharge item MyCase requires you to create manually, and review each sync rather than assuming it landed.

3. Trust and Operating Separation

Client funds kept on the trust side, earned fees transferred only when actually earned, and card processing fees kept out of the trust account entirely — because a processing fee taken from trust means client funds paid a firm expense.

4. Client Subsidiary Ledgers and Retainer Replenishment

Per-matter trust balances maintained so no client ledger goes negative, with replenishment requests triggered before a matter runs dry rather than after.

5. Operating Books, Payroll and Year End

Firm financial statements, accounts payable, payroll, partner draws and distributions, and 1099s — the parts MyCase was never meant to carry.

The MyCase Rescue: When Trust and Operating Have Been Mixed

The pattern is consistent. A card payment was applied to the wrong side. Processing fees came out of the trust account. A retainer got booked as income. Nobody has produced a documented three-way reconciliation in months, and now the firm needs one.

We rebuild the client subsidiary ledgers from source, identify every transaction that crossed between trust and operating, quantify what is owed back to the trust account, and produce a corrected, documented three-way reconciliation for each month in the affected period. Where the QuickBooks side has double-counted receivables from balance-forward lines, we unwind that too.

Corrections are made forward with a clean audit trail so your CPA and, if it comes to it, your state bar can follow exactly what happened. Start with catch-up bookkeeping if you are several months behind.

Why Outsource Your MyCase Bookkeeping to Maxim Liberty?

Trust accounting is not a place to learn on the job. We have kept US books since 2005, we are BBB A+ accredited, and we run law firm trust and operating books as a routine monthly discipline rather than an annual panic.

Plans start at $75/month; dedicated bookkeepers are $15/hour for businesses and $10/hour for CPA firms who white-label our team. Your first deposit carries a 100% money-back guarantee, so you can test the work with little to no risk. See pricing or our law firm bookkeeping and IOLTA services.