Divorce and family-law financial schedules support

A divorce financial-schedules engagement produces an income-available-for-support calculation with every add-back documented, a business-and-personal account trace covering the period at issue, a commingled-funds tracing schedule where marital and separate property questions arise, and a full source-document index tying each figure to a bank statement, tax return, or other original record. Where a family business is part of the estate, we also build a schedule showing owner compensation, distributions, and any personal expenses run through the business, since that detail is usually central to the income calculation. Every schedule states plainly, up front, where a gap in the available records limits how far a figure can be traced.

We start with a scoping call, almost always with the retaining attorney, covering the accounts involved, the period at issue, and whether a business is part of the estate. Bank, card, and investment statements are gathered for both business and personal accounts and traced transaction by transaction over the relevant period, since income routed through unusual channels or personal spending run through a business account rarely surfaces if only one side of the picture is reviewed. Income available for support is calculated from what the records actually show, with discretionary or personal expenses added back to the reported figure where the documentation supports it. Where commingling is at issue, funds are traced using the method the applicable state's case law recognizes, and every step of that trace is documented. A senior reviewer reviews the full schedule set before it goes to counsel.

Divorce attorneys who need a neutral, source-traceable financial picture behind a support calculation or a property division dispute, most often where a business, significant investment accounts, or a claim of separate property is in play. Occasionally we are engaged jointly through a mediator where both spouses agree to a single neutral financial review rather than dueling experts. We take no position on custody, the underlying grounds for the divorce, or how the court should ultimately divide the estate; we build the schedules the attorney, the mediator, or the court then uses to reach those decisions.

A tax return that does not reflect true cash flow available to the household is the most common starting point, usually because discretionary or personal expenses have been run through a business over years without anyone tracking them separately. An inheritance or gift deposited into a joint account long before the divorce, then partially spent and partially reinvested, needs a tracing method applied carefully rather than a simple assumption that commingling erased its separate character entirely. Years of missing or incomplete statements limit how far back a trace can reliably go, and we document that limitation rather than guessing past it. And where both spouses genuinely dispute the underlying figures, presenting a schedule that traces to source documents, rather than advocating for either side, is usually what actually moves the matter toward resolution.

Business financials generally live in QuickBooks Online, Xero, or NetSuite, and we work from the business's own system to build the account trace and the owner-compensation schedule. Personal-account tracing and the commingled-funds analysis are built in Microsoft Excel, with every transaction cross-referenced to the statement it came from so the schedule can be checked line by line by opposing counsel or their own expert. Where the transaction volume across years of statements is large, we use CaseWare IDEA to organize and test the population before it feeds the trace. Finished schedules are delivered as PDF exhibits cross-referenced to the underlying Excel workpapers.

Divorce and family-law schedules are scoped and quoted individually, since a straightforward support calculation for a W-2 household and a multi-year commingled-funds trace involving a closely held business are very different amounts of work. Our US rate card covers recurring bookkeeping and advisory work; a family-law engagement is quoted the way our Scale tier is quoted, after a scoping call with the retaining attorney that pins down the accounts, the period, and the deadline, so there is a number in writing before work starts.

When marital and separate funds have mixed in one account, the court needs to know which tracing method was used and why, not just a final number. Direct tracing follows the exact dollars, useful when records are complete enough to show a specific deposit moving to a specific later use. Where funds have mixed too thoroughly for that, courts in many states will accept a pro rata approach, treating withdrawals as coming proportionally from both the marital and separate portions of the balance, or an exhaustion approach in states that presume commingled funds are spent in a particular order. Which method the presiding court's state actually recognizes is a legal question for the attorney to confirm, but the schedule itself has to show its work either way, the balance at each point in time, the source of each deposit, and the method applied to each withdrawal, so the result can be checked rather than taken on faith.