I have often been asked "Why did
you create the TEdec System?"
The best way for me to
explain this is to give you a little history.
When I first started practicing
law, in July of 1972, I was working for my father’s
law firm, Brooks & Dirkx in Cattaraugus, New York.
One of my first tasks was to prepare and reconcile a
fiduciary accounting for a trustee. The trustee was
a certified public accountant in a neighboring state
and the accounting was for his mother’s testamentary
trust. It was one of those tough situations where
one of the adult siblings was mentally retarded. The
mentally retarded sibling had died and now the
trustee could account and distribute. All income in
the trust during the lifetime of the mentally
retarded sibling had to be paid to the state.
Consequently, we had to file a formal accounting and
the state was an interested party.
As I recall, I started working on
this accounting in mid August 1972. The accounting
spanned a time period of over 15 years.
Unfortunately, some of the trustee’s records were
not complete and some records were just inaccurate.
We got close to reconciling the accounting a couple
of times; but, after four months and many, many
drafts, in late November 1972 we finally had to file
an accounting with the court; an accounting that
just did not balance. Of course, we entered some
adjusting entries to "balance the accounting," but
the facts did not lie, the accounting did not
balance! Fortunately, our client was not surcharged
for the inadequate accounting, but the state
representative (the Attorney General) certainly gave
him a tough time.
Having gone through that
excruciating experience, I resolved to handle trusts
and estates a better way. I started using a form my
father designed called the "Estate’s Journal" and
quickly expanded it. It worked very well — our
accountings were always in balance, right from the
start; but, it was very labor intensive, both for
myself or my legal assistants. And, when most of
ones trusts and estates are relatively small,
profits are quickly consumed with inefficiencies.
When I incorporated into my
practice a word processor (and, I was one of the
first attorneys in Cattaraugus County, NY to have
one), I migrated the paper "Estate’s Journal"
concept to the word processor; thereafter, at the
touch of a key (or two) we could prepare schedules
to the tax proceedings or an accounting.
Incorporating the Estate’s Journal into the word
processor was certainly better than writing it by
hand and then dictating the documents, but it still
took an enormous amount of time and energy to handle
my trusts and estates, although most of the work was
done by my legal staff. This certainly provided me
with better leverage, but the bottom line was that
preparing court inventories, tax proceedings and
accountings was still an expensive and costly task
for my law office.
In the early 1980's I purchased
my first computer — one that the salesman said would
last me for as long as I would live (it was a ten
megabyte hard drive with a 186 [or was it a 286]
processor -- well, we know what happened to that
machine). I immediately saw the challenge and hired
a computer programmer to take the "Estates Journal"
concept and incorporate it into a data base, where
at the push of a button I could get any Tax, Court
or Property Management report I needed to
effectively manage my trusts and estates practice. I
was very soon leveraging my staff better than ever
and making more profits in my trust and estates
practice than I ever imagined I could.
I soon became convinced that
other law offices would be interested in systemizing
their T&E departments and I started to develop the
"Estate Journal System" for general application to
professional offices handling trusts and estates.
Recognizing that my practice was not as varied as I
needed it to be to develop a software system for
general applicability, I sought out and developed an
advisory board, representing some of the best trust
and estate lawyers in New York State — from such law
firms as Hodson Russ Andrews Wood & Goodyear (now,
Hodson Russ, LLP Buffalo, NY), Phillips Lytel,
Chamberlin D’Amato, and others. In total, there were
fifteen T&E lawyers who contributed sage advice on
how to make TEdec generally applicable to law
offices not only in New York State, but also in
Pennsylvania, Florida and around the country.
At the same time I wanted to give
the company and the software itself a unique name,
yet one that was derived from our work — proper
leveraging of ones legal staff to maximize profits
in one’s T&E professional practice. We ultimately
came upon the name of TEdec, which stands for Trust
and Estate Data Entry Control which described to a
tee exactly what we were doing, i.e. controlling the
entry of data (one time entry) to generate all of
the various Tax, Court and Property Management
reports that are necessary for the most effective,
efficient and professional handling of one’s trusts
and estates practice.
So, to answer the original
question, "why did I create the TEdec System?" the
answer was that I needed it to systematize the
effective administration of trusts and estates in my law
practice, and so did other professionals!
Over time we have received many
suggestions from our user base on how to improve
TEdec — and we thank our users for each and every
suggestion. Many of these suggestions have been
incorporated into the TEdec System, and our users
have certainly contributed to making TEdec the
easiest to use and indeed the Benchmark in Fiduciary
Accounting Software — a designation we have earned
and one we intend to keep.
