So you’ve been named trustee, now what? Part 4

Step Three: Organize your data.

Now that you’ve read the trust instrument, and obtained counsel, it’s time to get your systems in place to manage your data and keep it organized. As trustee, you’re responsible for tracking all income and expenses pertaining to trust assets as well as making the assets “productive”. PROB § 16007 - “The trustee has a duty to make the trust property productive under the circumstances and in furtherance of the purposes of the trust.” In addition to hiring an attorney, you will want to consider hiring financial planners or wealth managers, but we’ll dive into that in a future article.

The sooner you can set up a system for organizing your data, the better off you’ll be. We tend to approach this in terms of what is the most effective for accounting, but getting on this early will assist in all areas of your administration.

• Create online access for all bank and investment accounts - you’ll want to have quick and easy access rather than having to call the bank and verify your personal details every time you need information.

• Download monthly statements for all accounts - monthly statements provide the most details in terms of dividends, reinvestments, commissions and fees.

• Condense assets to as few accounts as possible - the fewer accounts you have to manage, the fewer accounts you’ll have to obtain statements for.

• Create a naming system and file structure - maintain this system for every. single. document. the more consistent you can be, the easier it will be to find your data when you need it. We recommend year.month.institutionxlast4. For example: 2025.02.Merrillx1234.

• Buy yourself a decent multi document scanner - you will get paper documents, no matter how hard you try to avoid it. However, if you digitize your documents it will be able to store your documents all in the same place so that they’re easy to find. We use the SnapScan ix1600, we have no affiliation with SnapScan, we just like their products.