Retain the dated official fee information, the proposed participant list and each professional’s written scope and quote.
Keep the assumptions beside the numbers
Record currency, payment stage and whether a line is an estimate or a confirmed charge. Reconcile the table when family participation or sponsorship changes. Avoid combining a bank’s transfer estimate, an attorney’s fee and the government gift into an unexplained total that cannot be checked against its underlying documents.
Build the comparison so every figure can be traced back to a document, then test it by picking a line at random and asking where it came from. If the answer is a conversation, that line is not yet verified. Retain the dated official fee information, the proposed participant list and each professional written scope and quote, and record for every entry the currency, the payment stage and whether it is an estimate or a confirmed charge.
Reconcile the table whenever family participation or sponsorship changes rather than at the end. Avoid combining a bank transfer estimate, a professional fee and the gift to the Department of Commerce into a single total that cannot be checked against anything. Keep the superseded versions so a change can be explained later.
Date every version so the sequence of changes remains visible.