Clients and Matters Update Explained

We recently updated how we manage clients and matters inside of TrustBooks. The new architecture allows you to create a client and assign multiple matters to it. In order to make this change, we had to update your existing data. We used the following logic when doing the update.

If the Matter Name and the Client Name matched exactly (had to be an exact match), then a Client was created without any Matters associated with it. All activity was assigned at the Client level. If the Matter Name and the Client Name were not an exact match (even off by one character), then a Client was created and a separate Matter was created and assigned to the Client. All activity was assigned at the Matter level.

You can tell in this view that the client Lewis Thompson has only clients funds as there is not an expand arrow for seeing matters. Lisa Kudrow has the expand arrow and a matter assigned (called Trust matter). The Client Only section is where you would track funds assigned to the client, but not associated with a particular matter.

You may have had the same client listed multiple times with different matters. We did not merge all of those into a single client. We couldn't assume that two records with the same name were always the same person. You can manually combine clients by reassign the matters to a different client by following these steps:

How to Move Matters Between Clients - TrustBooks Knowledge Base

You also have the ability to move transactions between clients and matters. Here are those steps:

How to Move Transactions Between Clients and Matters - TrustBooks Knowledge Base