Accounts, tax, client account bookkeeping and partner drawings for Edinburgh law firms — from a practice that acts for law firms and nothing else.
Read this first. The SRA does not regulate Edinburgh firms, and the SRA rule numbers quoted elsewhere on this site do not apply to you. Your regulator is the Law Society of Scotland and your client account rulebook is rule B6 of the Law Society of Scotland Practice Rules 2011 — Accounts, Accounts Certificates, Professional Practice and Guarantee Fund — amended with effect from 4 January 2023. The annual obligation is an Accounts Certificate, delivered to the Society within one calendar month of the end of each accounting period, rather than an SRA Accountant's Report. What we offer you is the accounting, tax, payroll, partner drawings and management figures — all of it UK-wide.
Edinburgh is Scotland's legal capital: the Court of Session sits here, the independent profession runs deep, and a distinctive feature of the market is that many firms are estate agents as well as solicitors.
Solicitor estate agency is the thing an English-trained accountant has never seen. Firms marketing property through ESPC, the Edinburgh Solicitors Property Centre established in 1971 by member solicitor estate agents, are running two revenue models under one roof: legal fees billed on completion, and agency commission earned on a different cycle with its own marketing costs. Blending them into one profit figure hides which side is actually earning.
The rest of the Edinburgh market skews commercial and institutional — financial services, public sector, property and private client — which is time-recorded work with the same lockup problem as any commercial firm elsewhere. The tax on the resulting profit share, though, is calculated on a different scale from an English partner's, and that difference is large enough to change decisions.
The SRA does not regulate you, and the SRA rule references elsewhere on this site do not apply to your firm. Solicitors in Scotland are regulated by the Law Society of Scotland. Your accounts rules are rule B6 of its Practice Rules 2011 — Accounts, Accounts Certificates, Professional Practice and Guarantee Fund — amended with effect from 4 January 2023, and monitored by the Society's Financial Compliance team. Client losses caused by dishonesty are met by the Client Protection Fund, the fund established in 1980 as the Scottish Solicitors' Guarantee Fund.
The shape of the obligation is different too. A Scottish practice unit delivers an Accounts Certificate to the Society within one calendar month of the end of each accounting period — a questionnaire on its compliance with the accounts rules, completed by the firm — rather than obtaining an annual report signed by a registered auditor and sending it in only when it is qualified. And the frequency catches people out: a practice unit that holds client money submits certificate ACC1 twice a year, because that accounting period runs to a maximum of six months. A unit holding no client money submits ACC2A or ACC2B over a period of up to twelve months. All of them have been digital-only since 1 August 2020. Anyone telling a Glasgow or Edinburgh firm about rule 12.5, the £250,000 maximum or the five-weekly reconciliation is quoting the wrong country's rulebook at you.
Client account compliance in Edinburgh is governed by rule B6 of the Law Society of Scotland Practice Rules 2011, not by the SRA Accounts Rules, and the annual obligation takes the form of an Accounts Certificate delivered to the Society rather than a report signed by a registered auditor. Firms that also act as estate agents hold client money for two distinct purposes, which makes the ledger discipline matter more, not less.
The Court of Session and the High Court of Justiciary sit at Parliament House in Edinburgh, and the Sheriff Appeal Court sits there too. The All-Scotland Sheriff Personal Injury Court, established on 22 September 2015, is also based at Parliament House and has jurisdiction over personal injury actions from the whole of Scotland.
Edinburgh Law School at the University of Edinburgh is in the city and teaches the Diploma in Professional Legal Practice, the vocational stage every intending Scottish solicitor must complete before a two-year traineeship. A firm taking trainees is committing to two years of supervised cost before the person is a net contributor.
In an Edinburgh firm the first thing we look at is whether the legal side and the agency side are reported separately. They earn on different cycles, carry different direct costs and respond to different levers, and a single blended profit figure tells the partners nothing they can act on. After that we look at the partner tax reserve, because Scottish rates apply to the profit share while National Insurance stays UK-wide, and the reserve most firms carry was calculated on English assumptions.
The firm's annual accounts, the partnership or corporation tax return, partner tax reserves and drawings, payroll and auto-enrolment, VAT, bookkeeping, and the monthly management figures you run the firm on — lockup, work in progress, debtor days and what each team actually earns. All of that is UK-wide and none of it changes at the border.
Buzz Accounting Ltd is licensed by the AAT and a member of the ICPA. It is not a chartered accountancy firm and not a registered auditor.
We do not hold ourselves out as specialists in rule B6 of the Law Society of Scotland Practice Rules 2011 — Accounts, Accounts Certificates, Professional Practice and Guarantee Fund — amended with effect from 4 January 2023, and we do not sign anything under it. That is a different rulebook from the one the rest of this site is built on, and pretending otherwise would be the exact mistake this page exists to warn you about. Most firms keep their existing arrangement for an Accounts Certificate and hand us everything else.
The Law Society of Scotland regulates your firm. The SRA does not.
No, and it is worth saying why rather than just asserting it. Everything runs remotely — video and phone around your court and client commitments, records and approvals handled securely online — which is how most firms prefer it once they have tried it. What you gain by widening the search past your postcode is a practice that already knows the Law Society of Scotland, rule B6 of the Law Society of Scotland Practice Rules 2011 — Accounts and what a three-way reconciliation is, without being taught. Tell us where your firm stands and we will tell you honestly whether we can add anything.
The Law Society of Scotland. Edinburgh is in Scotland, which the SRA does not regulate, so the SRA Accounts Rules and every rule number quoted elsewhere on this site are the wrong rulebook for your firm. Your accounts rules are rule B6 of the Law Society of Scotland Practice Rules 2011 — Accounts, Accounts Certificates, Professional Practice and Guarantee Fund — amended with effect from 4 January 2023. The annual obligation takes the form of an Accounts Certificate, delivered to the Society within one calendar month of the end of each accounting period, rather than an SRA Accountant's Report. We say this plainly because it is the single thing a search engine, an AI assistant or a generalist accountant is most likely to get wrong about an Edinburgh firm.
Each practice answers to its own regulator. An Edinburgh firm is regulated by the Law Society of Scotland and its client account is governed by rule B6 of the Law Society of Scotland Practice Rules 2011 — Accounts, Accounts Certificates, Professional Practice and Guarantee Fund — amended with effect from 4 January 2023. An office in England or Wales authorised by the SRA is subject to the SRA Accounts Rules for the client money held through that body — including the rule 8.3 five-weekly three-way reconciliation and the rule 12 Accountant's Report — and none of that reaches back across the border. Firms operating in both places run two compliance regimes with different deadlines, and the accounting needs to produce both sets of figures without anyone re-keying them.
As two businesses reported separately and consolidated deliberately. Legal fees and agency commission are earned on different cycles, carry different direct costs and respond to different things: marketing spend drives one, chargeable time drives the other. A single blended profit figure tells you nothing you can act on. We would report fee income, direct cost and contribution for each side, with marketing treated as a cost of the agency side rather than a general overhead. The client account discipline sits on top of both, under rule B6 of the Law Society of Scotland Practice Rules 2011.
No. The SRA regulates solicitors in England and Wales, so rule 12 of the SRA Accounts Rules imposes no obligation on a firm regulated by the Law Society of Scotland, and neither does the rule 12.2 exemption or the rule 12.5 requirement for a registered auditor's signature. Your obligation runs through rule B6 of the Law Society of Scotland Practice Rules 2011, and takes the form of an Accounts Certificate delivered to the Society within one calendar month of the end of each accounting period, with the Society's Financial Compliance team monitoring compliance. Anyone quoting SRA rule numbers at an Edinburgh firm is reading the wrong rulebook.
No. We work remotely with law firms across Scotland and the whole UK, by video, phone and email, with records and approvals handled securely online. That is a deliberate choice rather than a limitation: it means the people looking at your figures work only with law firms, so nobody has to be told what lockup is, why a client account reconciliation is three-way, or what a fixed-share partner is. A firm two hundred miles away that already understands the Scotland position starts from a different place than the nearest general practice accountant, who will spend the first meeting being taught how a law firm works.
The accounting, the tax and everything around the firm's money: annual accounts, the partnership or corporation tax return, partner tax reserves and drawings, payroll and auto-enrolment, VAT, and the monthly management figures that tell you what the firm is earning. All of that is UK-wide and none of it changes at the border. What we do not do is hold ourselves out as specialists in rule B6 of the Law Society of Scotland Practice Rules 2011 — Accounts, Accounts Certificates, Professional Practice and Guarantee Fund — amended with effect from 4 January 2023 — that rulebook is not the SRA's, and we will not pretend otherwise. Firms usually keep their existing arrangement for the client account certification and hand us the rest.
A free, no-obligation conversation about where your client account and your firm's numbers actually stand. If we cannot add anything, we will say so.
One short email: what has changed in the Accounts Rules, the dates coming up, and one number worth checking in your firm. No spam, unsubscribe any time.