2 February 2026
Family trusts and cashflow visibility
Trusts make accountants necessary and review meetings longer. They also make household maps dishonest if you treat distributions as wages. This note is about visibility in a planning practice, not about how to draft a deed.
Two piles, labelled in the room
Pile A is what the household spent and received in personal names. Pile B is what moved through the trust. If you merge them on one colourful chart, someone will plan a holiday on money that is not theirs to spend yet. In studios we keep two columns and a single bridging line: ‘expected distribution this year, not yet banked’.
What belongs on the one-pager
For a review, the one-pager should show personal cash, known trust distributions that have actually landed, and a grey box for amounts the accountant has not confirmed. It should not show a reconstructed profit that the bookkeeper has not signed. Practices that skip the grey box look precise and then spend April apologising.
Language that keeps you out of legal theatre
Say ‘visibility’, not ‘we restructured’. Siteflowgrid will not design vesting, appointors, or streaming. If a household needs that, they need a lawyer and a tax agent. Our job is to stop the advice office from drawing a household budget that quietly assumes a distribution pattern last year’s minutes do not support.
A small artefact
A dated line: last distribution received, amount, account it hit, and who in the office is allowed to guess the next one. Guesses are labelled as guesses. That single habit has saved more review time in Queensland studios than a new diagram library.