Keeping client money apart, matter by matter
Money a firm holds for clients is not the firm's money. A practice system should make it impossible to spend one client's funds on another client's matter.
The Dangana team · 18 September 2026 · 2 min read
Whose money it is
A deposit towards stamp duty, the proceeds of a sale waiting to be paid out, an advance against fees not yet billed: a law firm holds money that belongs to its clients. It sits in a client account, apart from the firm's own office account, and the firm is answerable for every cedi of it.
Pooling makes the danger easy to miss. A client account can hold a healthy balance overall while one client's share of it is already spent. A payment made for one matter, drawn on funds that belong to another client, looks fine in the bank and is still wrong.
A balance for every matter
Dangana keeps client money in the ledger by matter and by client, not only as one bank balance. Every receipt into the client account is credited to the matter it was received for, and every payment out is drawn against that matter's own balance.
That is what lets the system refuse the wrong payment. When somebody records a disbursement paid from client funds, such as stamp duty on a purchase, the product checks what that matter holds for that client. If it holds less than the payment, the payment is refused, with the balance shown, and nothing is recorded. There is no override that lets a matter go into debit.
Office money and client money never meet
A fee is the firm's money only once a bill says so. Money received on account of fees before a bill is posted belongs in the client account until then. In the ledger, client money and office money sit in accounts of their own, and a payment is always drawn on one or the other, never on both.
What the firm can see
Each matter shows the client funds it holds, in each currency, beside its work in progress and what it has billed. The figures a partner reads on the matter are the same ones the accountant reads in the ledger, because they come from the same journals.
The rules a firm's client account must follow are set by the profession, not by software. What software can do is make the right thing the only thing that can be recorded.