Audit-book calculator

How many trust account audits do you do a year?

That one number decides what this is worth to your firm. Enter it, adjust the hours and the rate if yours differ, and see the position net of the review time your firm keeps and net of $250 per trust account per audit year.

Your audit book

How many trust account audits do you do a year?Count each trust account as one. An agency with rent and sale accounts is two.Hours of checking per audit, todayReading the reconciliations, tying the figures, drawing and tracing the sample. The default is what a Sydney partner measured on their own book.Hours you would still spend, per auditYour firm is still the auditor. Reading the review queue, checking the rows Mushin flags and signing off is work that does not go away, so it comes off the top before anything is valued. The default assumes 30 minutes.Senior charge-out rate, per hour

Hours returned per year: 140; 3.5 of 4 hours per audit, across 40 audits. 20 hours a year stay with you for review.
Charge-out capacity recovered: $28,000; Returned hours only, at $200 an hour. The review hours are never counted.
Mushin cost: $10,000; 40 × $250 per trust account per audit year, at list price. Larger audit books pay less per trust account.
Net position: $18,000; Mushin costs 36% of the capacity it returns, after review.

The margin, not the hours

Trust audits are usually fixed-fee, so the checking is a cost you carry before the job starts. At 4 hours of a senior at $200 an hour that is $800 an audit, which on most trust audit fees is close to break-even. Afterwards the same audit costs $350 — $250 of Mushin plus the 30 minutes of review you keep. That gap is what changes the margin on every audit in the book, and the hours come back in the quarter you need them most.

Start with one audit

Your 40 audits a year carry through to the start form.

Hours returned, net

Audits a year multiplied by the checking hours that actually come back. The default of 4 hours of manual checking is what the partner at a Sydney firm measured on their own audits.

The hours you keep

Mushin does the mechanical pass. Your firm remains the auditor, so reading the review queue, checking the flagged rows and signing off stays with you. Those hours are subtracted before anything is valued, not counted as a saving.

Capacity, not payroll

The returned hours are valued at the senior charge-out rate, because for a principal who bills time the saving is not a salary line. It is work that can be billed, in the quarter the audits land.

Net of the price

Mushin's cost is the published price times the number of trust accounts, and it is subtracted before the result is shown. There is no setup fee and no subscription to add back.