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In Acumin, the accounting of time entries is handled at the transactional level through a comprehensive audit trail available in the entry history table. This approach allows for full visibility into the lifecycle of time entries—including billed amounts, write-offs, special rates, and other adjustments—without requiring individual journal entries for each transaction.
The reason why Acumin does not journalize unbilled time entries is that doing so would not provide significant additional value from a financial reporting perspective. Individually journaling each time entry would considerably increase the size of the database as users continue to transact, without offering meaningful improvements in reporting accuracy or insight.
Unlike some systems—such as Legal Vision—that summarize data into accounting buckets (which may cause discrepancies between summary data and actual transactions), Acumin retains all transactional data in full detail. This ensures that every transaction is complete, historically accurate, and directly linked to its corresponding objects. As a result, users benefit from consistent and reliable drill-through capabilities across the system.
Time entries are the only financial object treated this way in Acumin due to their high transaction volume and minimal reporting benefit when journalized individually. All other accounting events generate journal entries as expected, since they involve significantly fewer records and have a direct impact on financial statements.
To address WIP (work-in-progress) reporting requirements, many of our law firm clients opt to journalize WIP using a reversing journal entry. This entry is typically reversed on the same day it is created. Depending on internal reporting cycles, firms may choose to execute this process annually, quarterly, or monthly.
This approach provides a strong balance between performance, data integrity, and financial reporting needs.
RELATED DOCUMENTS:
General Ledger - Month-End and Year-End - Journalizing Unbilled Time