GC-400 software: what it has to do, and what to ask before you buy.

The job the software is actually doing

A conservatorship accounting on the GC-400 series is four distinct pieces of work stacked on top of each other, and tools tend to be good at the first and bad at the rest:

1. Extraction. Turning one to two years of bank and brokerage statement PDFs into a list of dated transactions with amounts. Twenty-four monthly statements across three accounts is a normal period; two to three thousand transactions is a normal count.
2. Classification. Deciding which schedule each transaction belongs on — a receipt, a disbursement, a transfer between the conservatee's own accounts (which must not be counted as both), a gain or loss on a sale, a distribution.
3. Arithmetic and cross-footing. Every schedule totals, every total carries forward, and the whole thing has to satisfy the accounting equation: property on hand at the start plus receipts equals disbursements plus property on hand at the end.
4. Assembly. Filling the actual Judicial Council forms, ordering the schedules and attachments, paginating, and producing something a clerk will accept and an examiner can follow.

A spreadsheet does step 3 well, step 2 badly, and steps 1 and 4 not at all. General probate practice-management suites usually do step 4 and leave you to do 1 through 3 by hand. The expensive gap is extraction plus cross-footing together — because that's where the ten to twenty hours and the arithmetic risk both live.

Eight questions worth asking any vendor

1. Does it read my bank's PDFs, or do I re-type? Ask for the specific institutions. "Imports transactions" often means "imports a CSV you have to obtain yourself", which for a two-year-old closed account is not always possible.
2. What happens to a statement it can't read? The honest answer is "you can enter those by hand and keep going." A tool that stops is a tool that will fail you on the one account that matters.
3. Does it cross-foot, or does it just add? Ask to see what happens when the totals disagree. The right behaviour is to name the discrepancy and refuse to export.
4. Can it produce the §2620(c) attachments? The statutory attachments are part of the filing, and assembling them by hand afterwards eats much of the time the software just saved.
5. Where does my client's financial data go? Ask this one bluntly, then ask them to prove it. See the section below.
6. What does an amended accounting cost? Examiners raise questions. If regenerating a corrected packet costs another licence, that's a tax on being careful.
7. Can I get my data out? A CSV of the working papers and a portable project file. If the answer is "export a PDF", your work lives inside their subscription.
8. Does it file for me? If a vendor says yes, understand exactly what they mean. Preparing documents is not practising law; filing on your behalf and advising you about content are different activities with different licensing implications.

The question most buyers skip: where does the data go?

A conservatee's complete financial history is about as sensitive as records get — every deposit, every medical payment, every account number, attached to a person who by definition could not consent. When that lands in a vendor's cloud, it becomes something that can be breached, subpoenaed, retained after you cancel, or transferred to whoever buys the company.

"Encrypted in transit and at rest" is the standard answer and it is not the same as "we never have it". Encryption at rest means the vendor holds the data and also holds the key. It is a real control against one threat model — a stolen disk — and no protection at all against the ones fiduciaries actually worry about.

There is a stronger architecture available: process the statements in the browser and never transmit them. It is testable in ninety seconds from a demo, by anyone, with no technical background — open DevTools, watch the Network tab while the tool works, and see whether anything moves. We wrote out the steps, and they work on any vendor's product, not only ours.

When a spreadsheet is still fine

Honestly: a small estate, one checking account, a few dozen transactions a year, and a template you already trust. If your accounting fits on two screens and takes an afternoon, buying software for it is a waste of the estate's money. The break-even arrives with volume — multiple accounts, a two-year biennial period, a brokerage statement with dividends and sales, or a caseload where the same work repeats every month for a different conservatee.

Where FiduKit sits

FiduKit does exactly the four steps above and nothing else. It parses the statement PDFs in your browser, categorizes what it can and queues what needs judgment, cross-foots continuously and refuses to export an accounting that doesn't balance, and assembles the GC-400 packet with the §2620(c) attachments. It costs $199 per accounting with no subscription, and re-running that accounting — a correction, an amended version, a fresh export — never costs more.

It is not a practice-management system, it does not track billable time, and it does not prepare anything other than California conservatorship accountings. That narrowness is the point.