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Know which engagements make money, while they are still running

Engagement budgets tracked against real cost, expenses and procurement governed, and the firm's assets on a proper register — the operational backbone under your practice. Client money is the one thing we do not touch: there is no trust ledger here, and you need dedicated software for it.

Sound familiar?

If any of these ring true, you are exactly who this was built for.

Busy but not profitable

The firm is full of work, yet nobody can say which engagements actually made money and which quietly ran at a loss.

Client money mixed with firm money

Client and trust funds sit in the same mental space as operating cash — and an auditor or the regulator will ask you to prove they never mixed. This is the pain we do not solve, and the honest note below explains what to buy instead.

Expenses that appear at month-end

Disbursements, subscriptions, and office buying happen everywhere and reach finance only as a pile of receipts after the fact.

Assets no one tracks

Laptops, servers, and library assets bought, moved, and written off — with a register that was accurate the day IT set it up.

What runs today, and the one thing we will not sell you

Running in the product now

  • Projects per client or engagement with budgets, coded costs and disbursements, so margin is visible while the work is live.
  • Time logged against tasks with a per-entry bill rate, and invoices raised from billable hours.
  • Expense approval as its own permission, with self-approval refused outright and a rejected claim reversing its own accrual.
  • Procurement with approval thresholds, purchase orders, receiving and three-way matching.
  • Asset registers with named custodians, movement history and disposal records.
  • Customer invoices, payments, receivables ageing and reminders, plus a credit limit that can hold an invoice.
  • Full audit logging with named actors and role-based permissions on every financial surface.

The firm's own costing — on the roadmap, and commissionable now

  • No cost rate per person. An engagement's labour cost is total hours times one project-wide rate, so a partner hour and a graduate hour cost the same in every report. This is the one item in this section that is an absence rather than a position.

Client and trust money — not ours, and not later

  • We will not hold client money. No trust or client-account entity, no client-held balance, no trust ledger, no separate books for client money — and this is a decision rather than a backlog. If you hold client funds you are under a statutory obligation, and the right software for it is dedicated trust accounting, not an operations platform that grew a trust module.
  • We will not enforce segregation, because we would do it badly. Nothing here distinguishes client money from firm money. A system that half-enforces segregation is more dangerous than one that plainly does not, because it invites reliance it cannot carry.
  • No per-client balance of funds held, and therefore no client statement of that balance. Producing one from records that were never designed to be authoritative about client money would be inviting somebody to rely on it.
  • We will not produce a three-way trust reconciliation. There is no bank reconciliation here at all, and a trust reconciliation is the one place where getting it approximately right is worse than not offering it.
  • No unclaimed-funds handling and no statutory trust reporting. These are regulated filings with a professional body behind them. We are not the source, and we will not look like one.

Cost rate per person is commissionable now on the same terms as everything else here — a written specification, a timeline and a price, before any money moves. The evidence that this is a real offer rather than a sales line is Kenya, where the eTIMS transmission and the maintained statutory payroll engine were both built exactly this way. The third column is different and deliberately so: those five are not waiting on a budget, and no commissioned build will change them. Being told plainly which of the two you are looking at is the point of splitting the columns.

The split here is not a roadmap tease. Everything in the first list is real and useful to a firm today. Client money is different in kind: if you hold it, you are under a statutory obligation, and you need dedicated trust accounting software or your accounting package's trust module — not us, and not us later. We are useful for the firm's own operations alongside that, and that is the whole of the claim. If anyone shows you a version of this page that says otherwise, it is out of date.

How teams get started

1

Start with engagement costing

Budget your live engagements and route disbursements and expenses to them — the first profitability report reframes the whole book of work.

2

Bring expenses and buying under approval

Disbursements and office buying routed through approval thresholds and coded to the engagement that incurred them, so month-end is a review rather than a reconstruction.

3

Add assets and governance

IT and office registers, approval thresholds, and partner reporting — the operational backbone complete.

Questions we are asked here

Frequently asked questions

Does AWRA replace our practice-management or timesheet software?

No — and we say so plainly. Practice-management and timesheet tools handle matters, time capture, and client billing; AWRA is the operational and financial backbone underneath — engagement profitability, expenses, procurement, and assets. The two coexist, and most firms keep the practice tool they already run and add AWRA for what it does not cover.

How does AWRA keep client and trust funds separate from firm money?

It does not, and we will not soften that. There is no trust or client-account entity in the product: no client-held balance, no trust ledger, no separate books for client money, nothing that distinguishes client money from firm money and nothing that prevents the two mixing. There is also no bank reconciliation at all, let alone the three-way trust reconciliation an advocate's client account requires. If you hold client money you need dedicated trust accounting software or your accounting package's trust module, and we should not be part of that conversation. An earlier version of this page claimed the opposite; it was wrong, and the obligation is statutory, so this correction is deliberately blunt. [The full position is set out here.](/blog/client-trust-accounts-kenya)

Can we see whether an engagement is profitable before it closes?

Yes. You budget the engagement and track cost and disbursements against it as the work runs, so margin is visible while the engagement is still live — early enough to manage scope, staffing, or the client conversation, rather than discovering a loss after the final bill.

Is this suitable for a small firm, or only large practices?

Small and mid-sized firms benefit most, because they rarely have a finance function large enough to track engagement profitability, disbursements and assets manually. Start with the discipline that hurts most — usually engagement costing or expense control — and extend from there. Client-money handling is not one of the options: see the fund question above.

Bring one engagement to a demo

See engagement profitability against real cost, disbursements governed by approval, and the asset register — the backbone under your practice. Ask about client money too, and we will tell you to buy that elsewhere.