Ai Ideas for Accountants #1 – Trust Deed Summary Bot

Ever since the Bamford High Court decision in 2010, Australian accountants have required specific knowledge of client trust Deeds to help Trustees with year-end income resolutions. Deed summaries for the permanent file became a popular alternative to the yearly drudge of poring through Deeds for trust income definitions, yet this summary step itself remains a time-consuming task even for a professional adept at trust Deed analysis.

The good news is Ai can now produce a Trust Deed Summary in under 30 seconds. Here’s how we built the a Trust Deed Summary Tool. It's one of the most popular Tools in the Elfworks.ai toolbox and it doesn't lead to a breach of privacy over client data.

What to include in the Summary?

At a minimum, any good trust Deed summary needs:

-              Trust name

-              Date of settlement

-              Name of Settlor

-              Settled Sum

-              Object of purpose of trust

-              Name of Trustee(s)

-              Name of appointor(s)

-              Named beneficiaries, income and/or capital

-              Secondary beneficiaries

-              Tertiary beneficiaries

-              Vesting date

-              Jurisdiction

-              Definition of trust income

-              Trustee discretion to determine income?

-              Default beneficiary(ies)

-              Ability to stream capital gains?

-              Ability to stream franked dividends?

That’s a lot of detail to extract and link to the relevant clause or Deed section, especially when you’re dealing with a raft of various older Deeds written in Ye Olde English, seemingly crafted in an age when full stops were rationed.

For the Deed Summary Tool, we set the prompt to extract all the above detail and link back to the relevant clause or Deed section where the detail can be found. We also included a “Significance of Feature/Comments” column to the Summary that explains the significance of the Deed details (very useful for junior staff reading Deeds for the first time). For example, the section of the Summary regarding Appointor(s) will read:

General Trust Deed Feature	Deed Feature	Relevant Clause or Section	Significance of Feature/Comments
Name of appointor(s)	David McLeary	Schedule 1	The role of appointor allows the Appointor(s) to remove the trustee of the trust, thereby taking control of the day-to-day operations of the trust. Often joint appointors can help to de-centralise true control of a trust, and having a succession plan for the appointor role(s) is prudent.

 Which Ai model to use?

Grok? Gemini? ChatGPT? Claude? Mistral? Testing, testing and more testing of various prompts is the only way. As usual, testing these models on a specific problem at hand throws up surprises. For this Tool there was a clear winner, both on technical accuracy and the format quality of the output. The winner was…Gemini! Gemini 2.5 to be precise.

Chat GPT 4.1 and Claude 4.0 both came in third place after Grok3. Of course, when there’s new release of any of the major Ai models we test this against the current Tool champ; no resting on laurels in the Ai space.

How long does the Summary Tool take?

Assuming there is a readable trust Deed in PDF format, the time taken to produce the Trust Deed Summary is less that 30 seconds. Compare this to 30-45 mins and you have a compelling proposition.

If the document you have is an image of the Deed pages, add another 30-60 seconds to save the file into a readable format.

Data Privacy:

As we use the latest enterprise versions of all the Ai models and we opt-out of training and storage, the Ai model works with the information provided (e.g. the client trust Deed) and then deletes it.

If you would like full, free, no obligation trial of an Ai platform designed for Australian accountants from the bottom-up with a Trust Deed Summary bot (and dozens of others), please contact us at info@elfworks.ai or phone me on 0418 902 440.

Thank you for reading. Next blog I’ll take a look at Ai Idea for Accountants #2 – Intra-Group Transaction Bot.

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