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You can use the View | Reports menu to generate estate reports in PDF format, which you can print or share with others (you can also grant online access to anyone you choose).

Inventory Report

The Inventory Report lists information about estate assets and debts. You may want this report for your own records, for a lawyer with whom you're working, or for working on submissions to a probate court.

Example first page of sample estate inventory report

Report Options

You can choose from several options when generating an Inventory report:

  • Estate As Of: Choose the date the estate inventory should reflect... see more ↓
    You can generate an inventory report as of death, as of now, or for any date you want. If you choose a custom date, EstateExec will derive the estate inventory by processing all associated transactions up to and including the requested date.
    For advanced users: Note that since you can manually change a debt's amount owed (as opposed to simply recording a debt payment transaction), and there is no dated transaction associated with such a change, EstateExec will report the combined effects of such changes as of the last date of any explicit transactions (i.e., payments or forgiveness) associated with that debt. This can sometimes be a little confusing. For example, if you run a report as of death, and then run the same report as of that date, you may get different results. Obviously, if there were transactions on the date of death, the results would be different. But they would also differ if you had undated changes to a debt's amount owed now, and no other transactions associated with that debt, so that EstateExec would have no choice but to include the changes as of the first day of the reporting period.
  • Only Probate items: Include only items subject to probate?
    (Hint: You can manually override which items are considered subject to probate)
  • Real Estate Addresses: Include any defined location address for real property assets?
  • Account Numbers: Include any defined item account numbers (see Account ID)?
  • Notes: Include any defined item notes?
  • New Page: Start each table on a new page?
  • Include Unused: Include tables even if they have no content?

Accounting Report

The Accounting Report documents the high-level financials of the estate settlement, summarizing initial estate inventory, changes to that inventory over time, estate income received, expenditures, and ultimately distributions. You may want to generate this report as you complete the settlement process, for your own records, and for working on final submissions to a probate court.

Example first page of Final Accounting report for estate probate settlement

Report Options

You can choose from several options when generating an Accounting report, for example:

  • Date Range: Choose the time period the report should cover (see Report Details below for important cautions)
  • Only Probate items: Include only items subject to probate?
    (Hint: You can manually override which items are considered subject to probate)
  • Real Estate Addresses: Include any defined location address for real property assets?
  • Account Numbers: Include any defined item account numbers (see Account ID)?
  • Notes: Include any defined item notes?
  • New Page: Start each table on a new page?
  • Include Unused: Include tables even if they have no content?

Report Details

The Accounting Report is split into several sections: assets at death, debts at death, changes to asset value, income, and so on (you can download an example in PDF format from the Sample Estate). For the most part, the sections are fairly straightforward and easy to understand. That being said, certain parts of the report can be a bit more complex, especially for people unfamiliar with estate accounting... see more ↓

Asset Changes

The Asset Changes section of the Accounting Report is intended to convey changes to asset values during the course of estate administration (for example, the value of a piece of real estate increasing, or the value of a stock decreasing). For your information,

  • When you transfer holdings of one asset to another, the value of the source asset decreases, while the value of the receiving asset increases by the same amount, with the combined effect of $0 change to the estate.
  • When you distribute an asset, its value does not drop to $0 – the purpose of this section is to report changes in inherent asset value, and if the asset retains its reported value at death, then no change in value has occurred.
  • Similarly, when you sell an asset, its value does not inherently drop to $0 – its final value becomes the sales price, and any change from the value at death will be reported here.

EstateExec sometimes adds bookkeeping entries (in blue) into this section in order to keep the report as a whole consistent. For example,

  • Remove Sold Assets: If you sell an asset and deposit the proceeds into another asset, this section will not report the sold asset as having lost value (for reasons as described above), but it will report the receiving asset as having gained value (because it has!). To balance the overall section so that such sales do not erroneously give the impression of overall estate value increase, EstateExec creates a corresponding bookkeeping entry in this section.
  • Remove Net Income & Expenditures: If you deposit income into an asset, or use an asset (such as checking account) to pay estate expenses, the value of the asset will necessarily change. But since income and expenses are reported in separate sections of the Accounting report, we don't want to double-count those items when looking at the overall estate. For example, we should not report interest earned in a savings account as both an asset change in value and interest earned by the estate. Since interest must be reported in its own report section, EstateExec creates a bookkeeping entry in this section to reflect the fact that the net effect of the interest is reported elsewhere.
  • And More: There are other such circumstances that require similar bookkeeping entries, but now that you understand the basic principles (i.e., this section should report net asset value changes, and some changes must be reported primarily in other report sections), any such bookkeeping entries should be easier to understand.

Date Range

You can generate an accounting report for the entire period of estate settlement (select "Since Death"), or for any date range you want (select "Custom"). To make things convenient, we also provide shortcuts for commonly desired periods: year-to-date ("YTD"), and last calendar year ("Last Year").

While you can use EstateExec to generate reports for historical periods, it is best practice to generate such reports contemporaneously (i.e., if you need a report for 2023, generate it soon after the end of 2023).

The reason for this practice is that if you subsequently make changes to the estate, a report generated later may not match the report you would have generated at the time. For example, if you subsequently delete items from the estate, generating an historical report will not know that those items used to exist. On a related note, refunds are considered to be part of an estate's value at death... even if you didn't know about them at the time. So for example, depositing a refund in 2024 will impact a subsequently generated report for 2023, as the refund amount will be included in the estate's Value at Death. Similarly, if you manually change a Debt's Amount Owed, since there is no transaction associated with such a change, EstateExec will not know exactly when to report such a change. Accordingly, EstateExec will report the combined effect of any such changes in the last period for which you recorded actual transactions (i.e., payments or forgiveness) for that debt.

Address Book

You can generate an Address Book containing contact information for the estate via the "Address Book PDF" button at the top right of the Contacts table on the Executor tab. You can choose to include various elements when generating an Address Book, including email addresses, general contact notes, and more.

Including Only Certain Entries

If desired, you can choose to include only a subset of your contacts in an Address Book, using one or both of the following methods:

  • Filter the contacts table to show just the entries you want to include, then press the "Address Book PDF" button to create the PDF
  • Or, select the entries you want to include via the checkmarks in the far left table column, then choose "Only Selected Contacts" in the Address Book Options dialog that appears when you press the "Address Book PDF" button

For example, if you just want to include Heirs, select "Heirs" in the Type field of the table header row, and then press the "Address Book PDF" button.

Estate Tables

If you want more details than the above reports provide, you can export any EstateExec table into a PDF document by selecting an export option (see below) from the menu in the top right of the table. The PDF report will normally open in a new tab from which you can print the document or download it to your computer (although some browsers will instead simply automatically download the file).

Example estate asset table PDF

Table Export Options

There are 3 variants of PDF table exports:

  • "Visible Data" — Exports all data currently in the table (as sorted), even if some rows are scrolled off-screen, but excludes any rows you have filtered out, or columns that you have hidden.
  • "Selected Data" — Same as "Visible Data", but uses the default sort order and only includes rows that have been selected (via the checkmark in the leftmost column).
  • "All Data" — Exports "all" data in the table in the default order, whether or not you have modified what visibly shows (but see Note below).

Note: All variants export only the data to which the browser table currently has access. If there are older items that reside only on the server, the "Include Older Items" button below the table will be active. If you want to export ALL data ever known to the system, repeatedly press the "Include Older Items" button, until it indicates that there are no more, then do the export.

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