At ten past six on a Thursday, the client account reconciliation arrives on your desk with a note asking for a signature before the cashier leaves. The adjusted bank balance reads £412,380.16, the cash book reads £412,380.16 and the total of the client ledgers reads £412,380.16 (the figures in this piece are illustrative), so you sign it in two minutes and go home.
Behind those matching numbers sit four problems. A cheque for £1,250 written to a beneficiary in February has never reached the bank. A receipt of £3,400 that nobody identified in the spring still waits on a suspense ledger. One client ledger stands £620 in debit because a disbursement went out before the funds cleared, and the total hides it because other ledgers carry more than enough credit to absorb it. Eleven closed matters each hold a small residual balance that no one has returned. The totals agree and the page still hides a breach.
The SRA Accounts Rules require a firm to reconcile its client account records at least every five weeks, and a manager or the COFA must sign off each reconciliation. The firm must investigate any difference and put it right promptly. The signature exists to show that someone with authority looked at the position. A signature placed because three totals match records something narrower, which is that the arithmetic works.
What to read before you sign
Start with the list of individual client ledger balances rather than the summary page. The summary exists to show that the books balance, and a debit balance on one client's ledger does nothing to disturb it. Read down the balances looking for any figure in debit. A client ledger in debit means one client's money has paid for another client's matter, and that needs correcting the day you find it, whatever the total says.
Next, take the unpresented cheques and the uncleared lodgements and give each one an age. Most reconciling items clear within days. Anything that has survived from the previous reconciliation deserves a question, and anything older than that deserves an answer in writing. Ask the cashier why the February cheque has not reached the bank, whether anyone has contacted the payee, and what the firm intends to do if the payee never banks it.
Treat the suspense ledger as a list of unresolved problems. A receipt the firm cannot attribute to a client is money the firm holds without knowing whose it is, and every month it stays unallocated makes the tracing harder. Closed matters come after that. A residual balance on a file that closed last year is client money the firm should have returned, and a column of such balances points to a closing procedure that does not work.
Write down what you queried. A short note on the reconciliation, naming the items you asked about and the answers you received, turns the signature into a record of review. If the SRA or a reporting accountant later asks what you did, the note answers for you.
How Bracton reads the ledger
Bracton is an agentic legal assistant that connects to the case management or accounts system the firm already runs, whether LEAP, Clio, Proclaim or another, and reads the record overnight. Where the firm's system exposes the client ledger, the assistant reads the individual ledgers before the reconciliation goes for sign off. It lists any ledger in debit, every reconciling item older than one cycle and each dormant balance on a closed matter, and sets them in front of the COFA as a short note.
That note goes to a qualified person for sign off, as does every output the assistant produces. The assistant signs nothing and does not decide whether an item amounts to a breach. The judgement stays with the COFA, who now starts from a list of the lines worth reading rather than from three matching totals.
Some systems expose the ledger thinly, and a few do not expose it at all. On those systems this work waits until the assistant can read the data. Bracton tells a firm at the proposal stage what its own system exposes, so the firm knows before it commits what the assistant will and will not see. Inside Bracton's own case management system the ledger forms part of the same record as the matter, and the assistant reads it directly.
If you want to see what your last reconciliation looked like underneath the totals, on your own matters, book a client account review.