For bankruptcy trustees
Find what the estate can recover
An estate arrives as a stack of PDFs and the debtor’s word for what is in them. Upload the production and CounselPro reads every account it touches, rolls the payments up by who received them, and keeps the statement page behind every figure.
| Estate | Flagged |
|---|---|
| Ferndale Restaurant Group LLCCh. 7 | $584,000 |
| Whitcombe Builders LLCCh. 11 | $212,000 |
| Bexley Freight Inc.Ch. 7 | $77,400 |
| R. CallowayCh. 13 | $18,900 |
| Marsh Dental PCCh. 7 | $0 |
Ferndale was headed for a no-asset report. The read came back with $584,000 paid out of the estate’s accounts in the year before the filing, across thirty-six payments to six recipients. (····4102, p. 214).
What a trustee has to establish
Which accounts the estate actually has
Every statement in the production is resolved to an account and the entity that holds it, and the months you hold are counted against the months you asked for, so a gap comes back as an account and a date range you can put in a document demand.
Whether the months add up
A cycle is checked against the beginning and ending totals the bank printed on the page, and one that comes up short is read again against the page image until every figure matches what the statement prints.
What left the accounts before the filing
The windows counted back from the petition, the payments inside each one and the transfers that went to insiders are laid out payment by payment on the bankruptcy page, with the days before the filing on every row.
Who received the money
Payees come off the checks and counterparties off the transfer descriptions, and you can ask what left an account in a period and get the transfers that make up the sum printed beside the answer.
What counsel gets to work from
A forensic report written for the estate: transfers out, related parties and the sequence around the filing, each finding cited to the page it was read from.
Who has the estate’s money
Payees come off the checks and counterparties off the transfer descriptions, and every payment out of the estate’s accounts is rolled up by who received it. Amber is a recipient the production knows only from these payments.
- Delta Provision Co.$186,400Food supplier9 payments · Jun 2024 to Apr 2025Trade payments since 2021····4102
- Ardmore Holdings LLC$164,000Shares a member with the debtor4 payments · Aug 2024 to Mar 2025Only these payments····4102
- K. Ardmore$92,500Managing member6 payments · Jul 2024 to May 2025Payroll and draws since 2019····4110
- Cascade Equipment Leasing$71,800Kitchen and refrigeration12 payments · May 2024 to May 2025Lease payments since 2019····4102
- Anders Family Trust$48,000Payee on two checks2 payments · Jan 2025 to Feb 2025Only these payments····4102
- Sound Ridge Landscaping$21,300Grounds and snow removal3 payments · Oct 2024 to Feb 2025Vendor since 2022····4102
- Thirty-six payments, six recipients$584,000
A related entity, paid four times
Ardmore Holdings shares a member with the debtor and appears in four years of records only in these four payments, all of them after August (····4102, p. 88).
A trust the records name twice
Two checks five weeks apart, both cleared in the ninety days, both to a payee the production knows nowhere else (····4102, p. 101).
The vendors that hold up
Delta, Cascade and Sound Ridge were paid off the same accounts for years, so the pattern reads as trade and the roster says so (····4102, p. 70).
Forensic review on every estate
Reading a production used to start with an engagement letter, and the quote arrived before anyone had read a page. So the estates that got read were the ones large enough to carry the cost, and the rest were administered on what the debtor wrote down. A single project is a flat fee the estate can absorb, and it is the same read either way.
$10,000 to $30,000
What an engagement with a forensic accountant runs, quoted before anyone has read a page
$499
One estate, read end to end, billed to the estate the way a records request is
Every estate
Mid-size and no-asset estates get a real read, which is the part that is new
What a trustee does next
A read comes back as names, amounts and the pages behind them. Each of those lands somewhere that is already on the calendar.
- You walk in with the payments already listed by who received them, so every question you ask comes straight off the records.
- The recipients the production knows only from these payments are the ones to examine, and the accounts behind them are the ones to ask for by number.
- Every payment carries the statement page it was read from, so a demand names the date, the amount and the page it sits on.
- The forensic report writes up the transfers out, the related parties and the sequence around the filing, each finding cited section by section.
- An estate the records show nothing in gets closed on the records, and the file says which account-months were read to get there.
Every figure opens its statement page
A payment in the roster opens the page it was read off, at the line it was read from. Ask the agent what left an account over a period and it prints the transfers that make up the sum beside the answer. Threads are shared across the firm, so the paralegal who loaded the production and the trustee taking the 341 are reading the same one.
What trustees ask first
- How much does it cost to run on one bankruptcy estate?
- A single project is $499, flat, however many accounts and years the production holds. A small estate costs the same as a large one, so the decision to read an estate stops being a decision about its size.
- How long does it take to read an estate’s bank statements?
- Minutes, in the background, for an ordinary production. A four-year, nine-account estate takes longer, and the app streams the status while it works, so you can upload on the day the records land and come back to it.
- What documents can a trustee upload?
- Bank statements, credit card statements, check images, and investment and retirement statements, from virtually any US institution including regional banks and credit unions. Scans and photographs are read as well as bank-generated PDFs.
- Can it show which account-months the debtor never produced?
- Yes. Coverage is counted account by account and month by month, so a gap comes back as an account number and a date range you can put in a document demand.
- Can it tell me the account balance on the petition date?
- The figures are money moving: deposits, payments and transfers, each with a date, an amount and the statement page it was read from. A balance on a given day is not one of the numbers it reports.
Send the estate’s production
The four years of statements that arrived as one PDF is the thing worth testing this on.
Bank, credit card, check and investment statements