Paul W. Carlson, CPA (00:00):
Hi, this is Paul Carlson, CPA with Law Firm Velocity. In this video we're going to get into the most difficult piece of trust accounting for immigration law firms. And that is all the filing fees, and ensuring that no single client has overdrawn, and then just keeping track of all the checks that go out of the trust account. So let's jump over to CosmoLex. Okay, from CosmoLex, we're going to enter those two filing fees, and print checks for those two fees. So we go to the, matter tab, we select the matter that we're going to write the trust checks from.
(00:37):
So we go, transactions, trust transactions. It'll be for today's date. We're going to print checks. The first check amount is $800, and the check is going to USCIS. Note how I just had to type the first two characters, and the payee came up that if we had this set up, all the vendor and address information is included. The memo, it remembers the descriptions from prior checks. So here we have, USCIS biometrics fee, and we can see this is coming from the client trust account. So at this point, that's all we need to do with this fee. So we hit save and new.
(01:28):
So at the same time, let's print that additional check. So just because we'd like to test CosmoLex whenever we can, I know there's only $500 left in IOLTA for this matter. So let's try writing a check for 600. Collect the vendor. This is an additional USCIS fee, so we are going to hit save. How about that? CosmoLex tells us we don't have enough money to do this. So, we just change this to 500, which is the correct amount from the example. I just wanted to show how CosmoLex watches out for us, and we hit save.
(02:09):
So at this point we have a summary of all of the trust account activity, that we have the initial deposit, fees paid back into the firm. And we have those two filing fees, or the status of, to print. So now let's go, print these checks. To print the IOLTA draw checks, we go accounting, go to the bank tab, select our trust account, go into action, print checks. And here we have the checks we just entered. We use the voucher type checks. We're going to look at my drawer here, and see that the next check number on the check stock is check number six. And we will go ahead and hit print.
(03:02):
So it creates a PDF. This way we can preview before we mail the checks. Here we see the base outline of the checks. So here's the vendor name, here's the client name, matter name, and here's the memo from the check. So we can customize this to put whatever information you need on the checks. And here's the stubs that go out. So at this point we would just put our check stock in the printer, and hit print, and we'd be set. All right, so let's switch back to CosmoLex. So with this we showed how to safely print filing fee checks from CosmoLex. If you need any accounting help with your immigration law firm, please contact us through, lawfirmvelocity.com. Thanks. Bye-Bye.
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