A GC-400 accounting, worked through end to end.

The facts

A licensed professional fiduciary is conservator of the estate of R. Alvarez. The second account covers 1 April 2023 through 31 March 2025 — a two-year biennial period. The estate holds a Wells Fargo checking account, a Charles Schwab brokerage account, and a residence that is not sold during the period.

The period produced 24 monthly statements and roughly 2,847 posted transactions. That's typical, and it's why the arithmetic is the risk: the individual entries are easy and there are thousands of them.

1. Start from the prior accounting, not from the bank

The beginning figure is property on hand at the close of the previous accounting — the ending figure the court already approved. It is not "the balance on the first statement". If the two disagree, something happened between the accountings and the examiner will want to know what.

2. Receipts — money that came in

Everything the estate received during the period that isn't a return of its own principal. Social Security, pension, dividends, interest, rent. A transfer from the estate's own Schwab account into its own checking account is not a receipt — it is the same dollars moving, and counting it inflates both sides of the accounting.

3. Disbursements — money that went out

Care costs dominate almost every conservatorship accounting. Group them so an examiner can follow the estate's spending pattern rather than reading 900 undifferentiated lines.

4. Gains and losses on sales

When an asset is sold, the accounting shows the difference between the carry value and what it actually fetched — not the whole sale proceeds as a receipt. During this period the conservator liquidated part of the brokerage position to fund care.

5. Property on hand at the end

6. The cross-foot — the check an examiner runs first

Every schedule above exists to feed one equation. Charges (what the fiduciary is accountable for) must equal credits (what they accounted for).

$539,145.39 = $539,145.39. Variance $0.00. That equality is the whole accounting: if it holds, the examiner moves on to the substance; if it is off by even a penny, the filing comes back and the substance is never reached.

7. The attachments people forget

The schedules are only part of the filing. A California conservatorship accounting also carries the statutory attachments required by Probate Code §2620(c) — the supporting statements and documentation the court expects alongside the numbers. Assembling those after the arithmetic is done is a surprisingly large share of the work, and omitting one is a common reason a packet is returned.

8. What actually gets accountings bounced

• It doesn't balance. Overwhelmingly the top cause, and almost always a transcription or double-count error rather than a conceptual one.
• Transfers double-counted as both a receipt and a disbursement, inflating both sides.
• Beginning balance taken from a statement instead of the prior approved accounting.
• A missing month. A statement never arrived, the gap was never noticed, and the period is short.
• Sale proceeds booked as a receipt instead of a gain or loss against carry value.
• Cash withdrawals with no explanation. "ATM $300" twenty-four times is a question the examiner will ask.
• Fees taken before they were allowed. A timing and authority issue, not an arithmetic one.

9. How long this takes by hand

Fiduciaries consistently report ten to twenty hours per accounting of this period size, most of it re-typing statement lines into a spreadsheet and then hunting for the reason the totals are off by $84.37. The classification and judgment parts — which are the parts that actually need a professional — are a small fraction of that time.

That ratio is the reason this product exists. See how FiduKit splits the work: it does the extraction and the arithmetic, you do the judgment.