A court accounting is the financial report a conservator, guardian, executor, or trustee files with the probate court. It shows what came into the estate, what went out, and what is left. It has a summary and a set of schedules, and it balances. It looks nothing like a business financial statement.
What does a court accounting look like?
A schedule for each category, listing every item. Property on hand at the beginning. Receipts. Gains on sales. Disbursements. Losses on sales. Property on hand at the end.
The schedules total up to a summary. Charges on one side, credits on the other, and the two match.
What does it answer?
Three questions. Were funds received accounted for. Did the money spent benefit the person the court is protecting. What does the estate hold now.
Why can’t QuickBooks produce it?
There is no income statement. The format is charges and credits, and nothing in it shows whether the estate made or lost money.
Money coming in gets sorted twice. Once by what it is, rent or a dividend or a benefit payment. Again by whether it belongs to principal or to income, because different beneficiaries can hold rights to different parts of the same estate.
Sales are entered differently. The return of an asset’s carry value is not a receipt. Only the gain or loss goes on the accounting, on its own schedule. A profit and loss statement handles a sale the opposite way, which is why a first accounting built from one does not balance.
What makes it expensive?
Whether records were kept during the period.
A fiduciary who categorized transactions as they occurred, and noted the unusual ones while the explanation was fresh, arrives with a sorting exercise. A fiduciary handing over two years of bank statements arrives with a reconstruction, and reconstruction is where the hours go.
Streamline Bookkeeping prepares court accounting s and maintains the records behind them.
More on the court accounting page.
*Bookkeeping services only. Not legal or tax advice.*
