Trust Accounting Compliance by State: What VIC, NSW, QLD, WA and SA Require

Australian trust accounting is not one national rulebook. NSW, Victoria and Western Australia run the Legal Profession Uniform Law; Queensland and South Australia keep their own Acts. The examination year, lodgement date and regulator change at the border. MatterFirst, a legal practice management platform for Australian law firms, ships a trust compliance review workflow covering NSW, VIC, QLD and WA.

Three regimes, not five

Most comparisons of Australian trust accounting treat every state as a separate problem. That overstates it. There are three regimes.

The Legal Profession Uniform Law applies in New South Wales and Victoria, which joined in July 2015, and in Western Australia, which joined on 1 July 2022. The operative detail sits in the Legal Profession Uniform General Rules 2015. Same rules, three different local regulatory authorities: the Law Society of NSW, the Victorian Legal Services Board and Commissioner, and the Legal Practice Board of Western Australia.

Queensland runs the Legal Profession Act 2007 (Qld) and the Legal Profession Regulation 2017 (Qld), administered by the Queensland Law Society.

South Australia runs the Legal Practitioners Act 1981 (SA) and the Legal Practitioners Regulations 2014, administered by the Law Society of South Australia.

So a firm practising only in Victoria has one rulebook to learn. A firm with offices in Brisbane and Adelaide has three.

What each jurisdiction requires

The Victorian Legal Services Board states the trust examination year runs 1 April to 31 March and that examiners must provide end of trust year documentation by 31 May. The Queensland Law Society states the examination period ends 31 March and Form 5 must be lodged within 60 days, with the requirement flowing from sections 267 and 268 of the Legal Profession Act and sections 61 and 62 of the Regulation. The Legal Practice Board of WA publishes its lodgement date each year on its external examiners page. The Law Society of NSW publishes the equivalent on its external examiners page.

The single biggest trap for a multi-state firm is South Australia. Four of the five jurisdictions above run to 31 March. South Australia runs to 30 June. A firm that builds its whole compliance calendar around the March year end will discover the SA obligation late.

What is the same everywhere

Underneath the jurisdictional differences, the substance of trust accounting is consistent. Every regime requires the same core discipline.

Money in is receipted and identified. Trust money is receipted, recorded against a named client and matter, and never mingled with office money. The trust ledger has to show whose money it is at all times.

No client ledger goes into deficit. You cannot pay out more than a client holds. Not for a day, not by accident, not to cover a shortfall on another matter. An overdrawn client ledger is the single defect an external examiner is most likely to qualify a report over.

Reconciliation is monthly and dated. Under rule 48 of the Uniform General Rules, the trust ledger balances must be reconciled with the trust account cash books and the bank statement, as at the end of each month, and prepared within 15 working days after the end of that month. Queensland and South Australia impose comparable monthly reconciliation duties under their own instruments. This is the three-way reconciliation: bank statement, cash book, client ledger listing. All three agree or something is wrong.

Records are permanent and reconstructable. Trust records are kept for a statutory retention period that outlasts the matter, the client relationship and usually the software. Queensland requires permanent written records of trust transactions and instructions.

The regulator is told about the account. Queensland requires a law practice to notify QLS within 14 days of opening a trust account, and under section 33(2) of the Legal Profession Regulation 2017 the account must be with an approved ADI, located in Queensland, and named so it identifies the practice and shows it is a law practice trust account. Equivalent notification duties apply in the Uniform Law states.

Deficiencies are reported, not fixed quietly. Every regime treats a trust deficiency as a reportable event. Discovering it and correcting it does not remove the duty to report it.

If you are choosing software, this is the list to test against. Not the brochure.

Certification is a state-level fact, not a national one

New South Wales is the only Australian jurisdiction that maintains a public register of certified trust accounting software. The Law Society of NSW list currently names 22 products with certificate numbers, including LEAP (#8), Actionstep (#9), Smokeball (#16), Clio (#21), and FilePro (#5) and LawMaster (#15), both Actionstep companies.

Other jurisdictions do not certify. Actionstep's own help articles for South Australia and Western Australia state directly that the law societies in those jurisdictions do not provide certification to software companies. That is accurate and worth knowing: in SA, WA, QLD, NT and the ACT, no vendor can hold a certificate because none is issued. A vendor claiming to be "certified in Australia" is either referring to NSW or overstating.

The practical consequence: outside NSW, the burden of proving compliance sits with the firm and its external examiner, not with the software vendor. Ask a vendor whether examiners have accepted reports produced by their system, and in which jurisdictions.

Comparison

"Not published" means the point could not be verified from that vendor's own public pages during this review. It is not a statement that the capability is absent. Sources: the Law Society of NSW certified software register, LEAP's legal accounting page, Actionstep's trust accounting page, Smokeball's certification announcement and Clio's certification announcement.

How MatterFirst handles this

MatterFirst is a legal practice management platform for Australian law firms, built by North Cape Technology, a Melbourne software company. Its trust accounting is built for Australian jurisdictions and includes a compliance review workflow covering NSW, VIC, QLD and WA. South Australia is not covered by that review workflow today. If you practise in SA, ask us about it before you buy rather than after.

MatterFirst is not on the Law Society of NSW certified software register. We would rather say that plainly than let a reader assume otherwise.

The parts of the platform that touch trust work directly: time tracking, invoicing, payment collection and real-time financial dashboards sit alongside the trust ledger, so office and trust positions are visible in one place. Automations run trigger, condition and action rules over routine operations, which is where reconciliation reminders and month-end checklists live. The client portal lets clients approve invoices, which shortens the gap between authorisation and a compliant transfer from trust. Matter management carries custom matter types, role-based contacts and calendar-synced key dates, so the trust ledger is attached to the matter rather than living in a separate accounting silo.

On residency: data and AI processing are hosted in the AWS region the firm chooses, Sydney by default for Australian firms. Inference runs in the same region as the files. The details are on the security page.

Integrations, stated precisely: Xero, Stripe, Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace are self-serve. PEXA and InfoTrack are set up with us rather than self-serve, which matters for conveyancing practices where settlement funds and trust movements have to line up. Anything else goes through a documented REST API with webhooks.

Pricing is per workspace, not per user: from $149 per month per workspace with users included. Trust accounting is listed on the pricing page as an Enterprise plan inclusion, so confirm the tier that fits your firm before committing.

Who this suits and who it does not

MatterFirst suits Australian firms of roughly two to twenty fee earners that need onshore hosting, state-based trust accounting across NSW, VIC, QLD or WA, and PEXA or InfoTrack in the conveyancing workflow. It suits firms willing to trial a newer platform and test its controls directly.

It does not suit a firm that requires a Law Society of NSW certificate number as a procurement precondition, a South Australian practice that needs the compliance review workflow today, or a firm whose policy requires SOC 2 or ISO 27001 evidence from every vendor. Those are real constraints and no amount of feature comparison changes them.

If you are running a shortlist, the evaluation checklist sets out 38 questions to put to any vendor, including us. The trust and compliance section is the one to lead with.

Frequently asked questions

Does MatterFirst handle Victorian trust accounting? Yes. Victoria is one of the four jurisdictions covered by the MatterFirst trust compliance review workflow, alongside NSW, Queensland and Western Australia. Victoria runs the Legal Profession Uniform Law, with the trust examination year ending 31 March and documentation due to the Victorian Legal Services Board by 31 May.

When is my trust account external examination due? In NSW, Victoria and Western Australia the examination period runs 1 April to 31 March. Victoria's Board requires end of trust year documentation by 31 May. In Queensland the period also ends 31 March and Form 5 is due within 60 days, so 30 May. South Australia is the exception: the year ends 30 June and the examination follows as soon as practicable after that.

Is trust accounting software required to be certified in Australia? Only New South Wales maintains a public certification register. Actionstep's own guidance confirms the law societies in South Australia and Western Australia do not certify software. Outside NSW, compliance is demonstrated by your records and your external examiner's report, not by a vendor certificate.

Can I run my trust account in Xero? Xero is general ledger accounting software and does not maintain a legal trust ledger to the standard the state rules require. MatterFirst integrates with Xero self-serve for office accounting. MYOB and QuickBooks are not MatterFirst integrations.

Does South Australia follow the same trust rules as NSW and Victoria? No. South Australia is not a Uniform Law jurisdiction. It operates under the Legal Practitioners Act 1981 (SA) and the Legal Practitioners Regulations 2014, with a financial year ending 30 June and external examiners appointed as designated persons registered with the Law Society of South Australia.

What happens if a client trust ledger goes into deficit? It is a reportable trust deficiency in every Australian jurisdiction. Correcting the balance does not discharge the obligation to notify the regulator. Software that permits an overdrawn client ledger without blocking or flagging the transaction is creating the problem rather than catching it.

We practise in three states. Do we need three trust accounts? Frequently yes, because the account location and notification rules are jurisdictional. Queensland, for instance, requires the account to be held with an approved ADI located in Queensland. Take advice on your specific structure before consolidating.

What to do next

Write down which jurisdictions you actually hold trust money in. Put the examination period and lodgement date for each into your calendar now, with the South Australian 30 June year end entered separately from the March ones. Then test any prospective system against the six universal requirements above: receipting, no deficit ledgers, monthly three-way reconciliation, permanent records, regulator notification and deficiency reporting.

If the vendor cannot show you all six in a trial, the certificate number does not matter.