Memory of the person is not a record of the money
After a death, people remember the habits. They do not remember the March transfer, the card that was paid from the wrong account, or which brokerage lot was sold. If you are the fiduciary, the personal representative, or the person the family asked to "figure out the finances," you need the statements. You do not need a cleaner version of the stories.
Estate and trust accounting starts there. We rebuild what the bank, the brokerage, and the card statements support. A licensed CPA reviews the file before it comes back to you. What the statements do not support is listed, not invented.
This is the same rule as any other rebuild. Reconstructing books from bank statements says it for a living business. A decedent's affairs are harder only because the person who knew the passwords and the purpose of each payment is gone.
What to gather before anyone categorizes
Collect every statement you can find, even if the set is incomplete. Checking, savings, brokerage, cards, loans, and the business accounts if the person ran one. A partial year is still useful. A missing month is a fact, not a failure on your part.
Add what you already have in the file: a prior return, a handwritten register, emails about a sale of property. Those are clues. They are not a substitute for the statement. If the register and the bank disagree, the bank is the source. The register is a question.
You do not need to sort this into accounting categories yourself. You need it in one place, with the dates visible. Scattered is normal. Hidden is the problem. If a statement is in a drawer nobody has opened, the books cannot include it.
What the written diagnostic is for
You should see, in writing, what can be reconstructed and what cannot. That is the diagnostic. It is $499, it is read-only, and it credits toward the reconstruction if you approve a fixed quote. You are not committing to a full accounting before you know which years the paper covers.
The findings should name dollar amounts. An unsupported transfer. A property sale with no closing statement. A business account mixed with household bills. You can take that list to the attorney and decide what the estate actually needs, instead of paying to "do all the years" when two of them have no statements.
If a month cannot be supported, it belongs on a gap list. Missing records and gap reports is how we treat holes: we do not estimate the month into a tidier story. For a decedent, an estimated month is worse, because nobody can later explain a guess the person cannot confirm.
The accounting still has to fit the matter
Once the records exist, someone has to put them in the form the estate or trust requires. That form is local. We publish sample formats, with fictitious figures, so you can see what a finished sample looks like. The California sample and the Wisconsin sample are two of them. They are samples. They are not your estate.
Tell us the format your attorney specified. If you do not have one yet, ask the attorney or the court before the accounting is prepared. We will not invent a filing requirement, and we will not speak to the court for you.
What you should have in hand at the end
You should have books that tie to the statements you provided. You should have a written reason for the decisions that are not obvious. You should have an exceptions list for anything that could not be substantiated. And you should have an accounting in the format you asked for, reviewed by a licensed CPA.
You should not have a narrative that depends on what the family thinks the person "would have meant." Meaning is not a transaction. The statement is. When you are ready to scope that work, start at estate and trust accounting.