Lynda ArtesaniLegal Accountant and Data Migration Specialist at The Proper Trust

Balancing Trusts - The Missteps and Misconceptions

14 Jan 2025 · 1 min

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1:13

When client trust accounts get out of balance, opening a new account won't fix it. You have to trace where the money actually went. Firms that skip this and don't hire people who understand both accounting and data end up wasting months revalidating everything.

Chapters

It's the trust that doesn't balance. I'll just get a new bank account. That'll fix the trust not being balanced. You just move all the money over, but you still don't know what was in that money. You see that a lot. I understand. Clean start is what the mindset is. It's a clean start. I'm moving the money over, but they don't think of it from our perspective as we got to get it over here to here. And how do we do that? Because we have to— we still have to, like you say, follow the money. We have to see what it is here and here. It doesn't fix the problem. It does not fix it.
It does not fix it. So much truth to what you're saying is do hire somebody with this experience. We've seen people come at this a couple of different ways, but if you are not bridging the 2 sides, meaning the data side and the accounting side, and understand a firm's workflow, this is a lose-lose situation. You might find a data person, but ultimately you're, as a firm owner or as someone on your team, is going to be spending a heck of a lot of time trying to revalidate this data. I know that for us, we— because we did the roll-up-your-sleeves kind of mentality and really did it, and I think it was as it was meant to be, we were supposed to do it in this order. It helped us because we now understood so much more, right?