Illinois professional-services accounting that shows which work pays.

Matter and project profitability tracking (utilization, realization, WIP, fixed-fee vs hourly), IOLTA trust-account record-keeping and three-way reconciliation for law firms, partner-draw and owner-compensation tracking, and clean PPRT and PTE figures — in your own QuickBooks file across all 102 counties. Nobody on the engagement ever holds client trust funds, and your CPA files.

No — this is a firm boundary, records only. On TechBrot’s engagements, the trust ledgers and the three-way reconciliation (bank statement, client ledgers, and accounting records compared and agreed, as the ARDC’s self-audit under Illinois Rule 1.15A asks) are prepared by TechBrot’s signed trust-accounting specialist practice as a bookkeeping service, so your trust records are current when the ARDC or a client asks for them; Illinois expects those records kept for at least seven years after the representation ends. A Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor reviews every close before it reaches you. Trust (IOLTA) reconciliations are also checked by the signed trust specialist. But neither TechBrot nor the practice ever takes custody of, holds, controls, or disburses client or trust funds — those stay in the firm’s trust account under the firm’s control and its bank. The IOLTA program for Illinois lawyers is administered by the Lawyers Trust Fund of Illinois; the custody and ethics compliance stay with the firm, and the lawyer stays responsible to the ARDC.

We tie time, costs, and billing to each matter or project — tracking billable utilization, realization rates, and work in progress, and separating fixed-fee engagements from hourly ones — so you see real profitability per engagement and per client, rather than a blended firm-wide number. That surfaces which work, clients, and service lines actually make money and which quietly run at a loss, pulling from your practice-management and time-tracking tools.

Illinois has a flat 4.95% personal income tax. Even pass-throughs owe the entity-level Personal Property Replacement Tax (PPRT) — 1.5% on S-corps and partnerships, 2.5% on C-corps — which surprises owners new to the state. A partnership or S corporation can also make the Pass-Through Entity (PTE) election, separately for each taxable year, to pay a 4.95% entity-level tax as a federal SALT-cap workaround, with each partner or shareholder allowed a credit for their share; the statute (35 ILCS 5/201(p), as amended by SB 1911, Public Act 104-0453, effective December 12, 2025) sets no end year while the federal limit on individual state-and-local-tax deductions applies. The entity election and PTE decision determine the picture, so your CPA confirms how it applies. We keep the revenue and expense figures clean so the computation is straightforward; your CPA computes, elects, and files.

We track partner draws, guaranteed payments, and owner compensation across S-corps, partnerships, and PLLCs cleanly and distinctly, so distributions, capital accounts, equity, and the figures behind the PPRT and PTE are all clear. That keeps both the partners’ economics and the entity-level tax accurate, instead of tangled in a single owner-equity catch-all.

Yes — your file, your data, in QuickBooks Online or hosted Desktop, with a senior bookkeeper assigned to your file, and every close reviewed by a Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor before it reaches you, connected to your practice-management and time-tracking tools rather than proprietary software, across all 102 Illinois counties.