Who builds your source of wealth file: you, a firm, or software
A crypto source-of-wealth file can be built by you, by a specialist charging by the hour, or at a fixed price. What each costs, and which one your case needs.
You know what the bank is asking for. Your origin of wealth, the movements that connect it to the balance in front of them, and a file a stranger can check without you in the room.
The remaining question is who builds it.
There are three answers, and a fourth if you owe a tax declaration as well. Two of them involve paying people, one of them involves paying nobody, and which one is yours depends almost entirely on how scattered and how complex your history is.
Build it yourself
One exchange, one or two wallets, nothing exotic
Costs you time, not money. If you bought on a single platform, moved the coins to a wallet you control, and held, your file is five pages and a weekend. Two movements, each with a document on both sides, and the maths between them is arithmetic you can do with a pen.
CashoutReady publishes the method in full, including the page-by-page worked example, because the alternative is people paying somebody for a weekend of bookkeeping. If your case is that case, you should do it yourself and keep the money.
Read next: How to write a source of wealth file the bank can check
Hire a specialist
A forensic firm, a compliance consultancy, or a law firm
Typically EUR 30,000 to 50,000. They scope the case before they quote, and a small history costs less than a large one. What nobody can price in advance is how much of it has to be found before any of it can be reconciled.
You are paying for the discovery, not for the writing.
That is not a criticism of the firms. It is the correct way to price an unknown: the estimate carries a margin for what nobody has seen yet, and when the history turns out to be more scattered or more complex than it looked, the estimate is the thing that moves.
Part of the fee is the toolbox rather than the hours. Serious work of this kind is done on blockchain analytics licences that run from around EUR 10,000 to EUR 140,000 a year, and a firm carries that cost whether your case used an afternoon of it or three weeks. You are renting a share of their subscription along with their time.
Have it done for you, at a fixed price
The whole file, built end to end
EUR 1,280 plus VAT, fixed before the work starts. That is what a full CashoutReady claim costs, whatever your history turns out to contain. The platform gathers the data from your wallets and exchange accounts, reconciles the movements against each other, looks up the addresses and the historic prices you are missing, works out which wallets belong to the same person, runs the illicit-activity checks and drafts the finished report, commentary included. Around nine tenths of the work happens without anyone touching it, which is the only reason it can carry a price at all.
CashoutReady has run it across hundreds of cases, so unless yours is genuinely unusual it goes through end to end. You are not handed a login and wished luck either. You send what you have, the file comes back with the map behind it and a short list of the things only you can answer, such as whether the 2017 transfer was a loan to your brother, and a person reviews it before it goes anywhere near a bank. The remaining tenth is what the people are for.
For most histories, including plenty that look hopeless from the outside, that is the whole answer and there is nothing left to outsource.
The reason it can be priced when a specialist engagement cannot is simply that the unknown has been removed. Discovery is the part that varies, and it is the part the platform does, which is why almost no human hours are spent on the search. The screening behind your file runs on that same class of tooling, and it sits inside the fixed price rather than beside it. The tiers, what each one covers and what it costs are set out on the pricing page. Where a case needs more than the standard scope, a consultation on a high-risk flag, data that arrives in a shape nobody has seen before, or somebody alongside you while the bank asks its questions, that is quoted rather than assumed, so you do not pay for it if you do not need it.
Automate the provenance work alongside the tax work
You need a tax declaration as well as a bank file
One import, two declarations. Most people preparing a cashout owe both: a return for the tax office and a provenance file for the bank. They run on the same transaction history, so there is no reason to assemble it twice.
If your history already sits in Kryptos, connect the account and it flows into CashoutReady as it is. No re-upload, no CSV. If it sits in CoinTracking, export it or say so, and an analyst loads and checks it with you before the case starts.
The two outputs stay separate, because they answer different questions and neither substitutes for the other. What they share is the data underneath, and the figures reconcile because they came from one place.
One data set, two declarations
When you need a lawyer rather than a file
Some cases do: a tax dispute, or a criminal matter. Somebody is contesting you, and that needs judgment, argument and professional liability, none of which is a reconstruction problem.
Even there, arriving with the reconstruction already built changes the price. Their job collapses from investigation to review, and the quote follows it down.
You are not choosing between a person and a machine. You are choosing what the person spends their hours on.
If you already have an adviser
Most people reading this have an accountant or a tax lawyer already, and the unspoken worry is that engaging anyone else means a fight with somebody they pay and trust.
It does not. Where there is an adviser on your case, the platform works alongside them rather than in place of them: they keep the tax position, CashoutReady produces the provenance evidence, and you deal with one file instead of two opinions.
In practice, many of them end up using it themselves. Crypto tax advisers and lawyers are among CashoutReady’s heaviest users. They tend to be strong on the accounting and much less at home with the money laundering and illicit-activity checks, which are a different discipline altogether. They would rather have that part done than do it.
That split is not a courtesy, it is the correct division of labour. A tax adviser does not reconstruct wallets. A provenance file does not tell you what you owe. Kept apart, each one protects the other.
How to tell which route is yours
The question is not whether your history is complicated. It is whether it is still one thing you can hold in your head. If any of these is true, it is not:
- more than one origin of wealth, or an origin with a gap in it;
- wealth that was never bought at all: mined, staked, airdropped, earned as income, gifted or inherited, so there is no purchase anywhere to point at;
- an early allocation, an ICO or a presale, from before the exchange you use today existed;
- more than five or six wallets and exchange accounts, or ten years of hardware and software migrations behind them;
- thousands of transactions, or a bot, an arbitrage desk or an MEV strategy that made most of them;
- a platform that closed, an account you can no longer reach, or keys you no longer have;
- DeFi, bridges, lending or NFTs, where no institution issues you a statement at all;
- a screening flag you expect and can explain;
- a completion date or a mortgage offer you cannot move.
That last one decides it more often than complexity does. A simple history plus a deadline is still a project, because the file is now competing with a calendar rather than with your patience.
If you want that judgement made for you, the two-minute readiness check works through the same ground and comes back green, amber or red, pointing at the specific gaps a reviewer would find first. It tells you how exposed your file is rather than which route to take, but a red band and a weekend of bookkeeping rarely belong to the same case.
None of it means anything is wrong with your money. It means your story sits in places that do not talk to each other, and somebody has to gather it, reconcile it and write it down before a compliance officer starts pulling at the loose end. That is the whole job. The routes differ only in who does the gathering: you over a weekend, a firm charging for the search, or a machine that has already done it a few hundred times.
If that list describes your history, the file is a project rather than a weekend, and it is the part CashoutReady does. Fixed price, agreed before the work starts.