Trust accounting

How fast trust money has to reach the trust account

September 7, 2026 · 4 min read

Funds received in trust are to be deposited by the end of the next banking day. The rule is short; the difficulty is that banking days are not business days and the clock starts at receipt.

This article explains what published rules say and links to the original sources. It is not legal advice, and rules change. Your firm is responsible for its own compliance — check the linked sources for the current text.

The rule in one sentence

Once trust funds are received, they are to be deposited into a trust account by the end of the next banking day. There is no threshold below which it stops applying, and no general discretion to hold funds because it is more convenient to deposit them together on Friday.

Most firms comply most of the time without thinking about it. The exceptions cluster in predictable places, and they are all about when the clock starts and which days count.

Banking days are not business days

The count runs on banking days, which excludes weekends and statutory holidays. A cheque received on the Friday before a long weekend is not due Monday; it is due at the end of Tuesday. Getting this wrong in the cautious direction costs nothing. Getting it wrong the other way produces a late deposit.

The holiday calendar is the part worth encoding rather than remembering. Easter moves each year, and a firm reasoning from a mental list of holidays will eventually be reasoning from last year one.

The clock starts at receipt, not at processing

Receipt is when the firm gets the money, not when the person who handles the trust account sees it. A cheque that arrives Monday and sits in an unopened envelope, or in a file on a desk, or with a lawyer who is away until Thursday, was received on Monday.

Post opened late, or opened by someone who does not handle deposits.
Funds handed to a lawyer at a meeting or at court rather than to the office.
A cheque attached to correspondence and filed along with it.
Money received the day before a holiday, or before a lawyer absence.

Each of these is a routing problem rather than a bookkeeping one, which is why tightening the bookkeeping does not fix them. The fix is a single point where incoming funds are recorded on arrival, whoever physically receives them.

Recording a late deposit honestly

A deposit that misses the deadline is still recorded truthfully, on the date it actually happened. Back-dating it to the day it should have been made converts a timing lapse into a false record, which is a substantially worse problem and one the reconciliation will expose anyway.

There are circumstances in which funds are properly held before being deposited, and they are not the same thing as a late deposit. What matters is that the reason is identified at the time and recorded, rather than reconstructed afterwards to explain a gap.

Sources

Read on September 7, 2026. Each link goes to the original text, not a summary — check it for the current wording.

By-Law 9 — Financial transactions and records — the trust-accounting rulebookLaw Society of Ontario — By-Law 9
By-Law 9 (deposit timing) — Trust funds deposited by the end of the next banking day after receiptLaw Society of Ontario — By-Law 9

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