Leftover balances on closed matters are a job that keeps coming back, and most of the effort in it is retrieval. The answers are already sitting in your files. Getting them assembled is the part you can hand over, so the decisions take minutes instead of an afternoon.
Every so often the list gets looked at. Small amounts sitting on matters that finished a while ago. A few pounds here, a few hundred there, each one attached to a file somebody would have to open to understand.
The task is unloved, and it is easy to see why. Nothing about it is difficult. It is just long. Each balance is a small research job in its own right: what was this money for, is the matter genuinely finished, who is owed it, what was the last thing we said to them, and what do our own rules say happens next.
That shape of work — where the answer already exists and is simply spread across several places — is where AI earns its keep.
Nothing here is beyond anyone. The time goes on assembly. For a single balance:
Five places, per balance, multiplied by however many are on the list. Then it is written up somewhere so the next person does not have to repeat it. Nobody is stuck. Everybody is just busy.
It reads. Ledger, matter file, correspondence, matter status. For each balance it produces the same short summary a person would have written after ten minutes with the file — and it produces it in the same shape every time, which is half the value.
It lists. One line per balance, grouped so the straightforward ones sit together: the ones where the person is contactable and the position is clear, the ones where contact has already failed, and the ones where something on the file needs a human eye before anything happens at all.
It drafts. The letter to the person owed. The internal note recording what was found. The file entry for whatever gets decided. All written, none sent.
A person decides. Every single one. That is the whole design, not a caveat bolted onto it.
Worth saying twice, because it is the part that matters. Pay it away, write it off, hand it over, or go back and look again: those carry consequences, and they belong to someone who can answer for having made them.
The rules on what you may do with a residual balance also vary. What you must try first, how long you must keep trying, what is permitted when nobody can be found, what has to be recorded, and whether anyone needs to be told — all of that depends on your jurisdiction, your regulator and in places on the amount involved, and it changes over time. Your own compliance lead is the authority on it. Not us, and certainly not the software.
So the tool never applies the rule. It puts the facts in front of the person who knows the rule, in a consistent format, with the gaps marked as gaps. That alone is most of the hours, because the reading was always the expensive part.
The answers are already in your files — the work is the retrieval, and the retrieval is what you can hand over.
A few limits worth knowing before you start.
It is only as good as the file. Where nobody recorded what the money was for, the summary will say so. That is genuinely useful, and it is also the point at which a person has to do the digging that was never going to be avoidable.
It will be fluent about things it has got slightly wrong. Names, dates and amounts need checking against the source, which is why every line comes back pointing at where it came from rather than asking to be believed.
It does not shrink the list. Every balance still needs a decision. What changes is that the decision takes a minute rather than a quarter of an hour, because the quarter of an hour of looking has already happened.
And it has to run somewhere you are content to put client information. That is a question about how it is set up rather than about the idea, and it is worth settling before anything is pointed at a live ledger. The same principle applies here as anywhere else in the cashroom — there is a companion piece on what AI should never do in a cashroom.
Run once, it clears the backlog. Run on a schedule, it stops the next one building, so the list stays short enough to deal with as it appears. Either way the shape is the same: the software reads and drafts, the people decide, and the job stops being something that has to have an afternoon set aside for it.
This is one example of what we build — a specific, recurring job, taken end to end. The same reading-and-drafting split applies to the central trusts record too; see Rule B6.24 for how that one works.
Nothing here is legal, regulatory or accounting advice — what you may do with a residual balance is set by your own rules and your compliance lead, and if you want to see where something like this would fit before committing to anything, that is what the audit is for.
Twenty minutes on the phone, free, no obligation. Describe how your residual balances sit at the moment and we will tell you honestly whether this is worth building for you.