Years behind on an accounting? Here's what to do.

First, the reassurance: this is the normal case

Most accountings don't arrive as a tidy spreadsheet. They arrive as a box of statements, a stack of PDFs, and a few years no one kept up with. Falling behind doesn't make you a bad trustee — it usually means you inherited a mess, stepped in mid-stream, or had a life happen while a filing deadline quietly passed. It can be reconstructed.

Why overdue accountings carry real risk

Here's the part worth taking seriously. A trustee, executor, or conservator has a duty to account, and an accounting that's missing or can't be supported is exactly where personal exposure shows up. If you can't explain where money went, a court can draw an adverse inference — and a fiduciary can be surcharged, meaning held personally responsible for amounts that can't be accounted for. The risk isn't the mess itself; it's leaving the mess unexplained. Getting current, in a format the court accepts, is what takes that risk off the table.

What "getting current" actually involves

Reconstructing a delinquent accounting is a specialized job, and it goes well beyond bookkeeping:

• Gather the records. Pull every available bank, brokerage, and credit-card statement for every account, across every year in the period — and identify what's missing.
• Reconstruct the ledger. Turn thousands of raw transactions into a clean, categorized history that ties to the actual statement balances.
• Separate principal from income. Fiduciary accounting requires splitting principal and income under the applicable rules (the Uniform Fiduciary Income and Principal Act, or UFIPA, in California and Florida) — the part generalists most often get wrong.
• Put it in court format. Present it as the schedules the court accepts, with total charges equal to total credits to the dollar.

Missing documents are normal — and manageable

Almost every overdue matter has gaps: a closed account, a year of statements no one saved, a bank that merged. Those can usually be recovered or reconstructed; they just take work. The key is to handle them transparently — know what's missing before you commit, and price the recovery up front instead of discovering it as a surprise on an hourly bill.

You don't have to do this alone

This is precisely the work we specialize in: multi-year, no-records, commingled, overdue accountings reconstructed into a clean, court-ready filing. We assess your records first, quote a flat fee, and do the reconstruction — fast, because our technology does in hours what hourly work bills for weeks. When we're done, you have a filing your attorney can take to court, plus clean financial statements and the workpapers behind every number.

This is general information, not legal or tax advice. Deadlines and the consequences of missing them vary; confirm them with your attorney or the court.