Print Reports

Standard Report

When creating an Accounting Report, you can choose either the Standard or the Carry Value approach.

Most people use the Standard report, which focuses on the estate, tracking inventory (both assets and debts) from death to estate closure (or whatever date range you specify). This report is split into several sections: assets at death, debts at death, changes to asset value, income, and so on (you can download a Standard example in PDF format generated from the Sample Estate).

Asset Changes: While most report sections are relatively simple, the Asset Changes section, which conveys changes to asset values during the course of estate administration, can be a bit more complex. 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 the Asset Changes 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.

Carry Value Approach

When creating an Accounting Report, you can choose either the Standard or the Carry Value approach.

The Carry Value approach is used somewhat rarely, although it is required for California and Virginia estates. The Carry Value approach focuses on the executor's handling of estate assets, tracking each asset from the time it comes under the executor's control until it leaves the executor's control (or whatever date range you specify). You can download a Carry Value Accounting example in PDF format generated from the Sample Estate.

Received Date: The date at which an asset comes under an executor's control is known as its Received Date, which you can specify on the Assets tab via the Edit | Receive menu. However, all assets listed in an initial Inventory submitted to the court are typically considered "received" as of death, so it is usually only necessary to enter a Received Date for assets discovered after such an Inventory.

Carry Value: This report is called the Carry Value Accounting Report because it emphasizes the "carry value" of each asset, defined as the market value of the asset when the executor receives it. From that moment on, the executor generally "carries" that asset at its original value, regardless of market value fluctuations. More specifically,

• An asset's carry value is initially defined as the asset's value at death. If you explicitly assign a received date to an asset, its carry value will be updated to equal the asset's market value as of that date (where the asset's market value is calculated using any Cashflow transactions dated prior to the received date).
• When income deposits are made to an asset (such as a bank account), the carry value of that asset increases by the amount of the deposit. Similarly, when expenses are paid from an asset, the carry value of that asset decreases by the amount of the payment.
• If an executor sells or otherwise disposes of an asset, the difference between the carry value of the asset and the proceeds of the disposal is reported as a gain or a loss to the estate.
• If an executor does not sell an asset, but transfers all or some of it into another asset (for example, moving stocks from one account to another), the corresponding carry value transfers as well.
• If an executor simply distributes an asset to heirs, the distribution is reported at its carry value (note that this has nothing to do with taxes, and the heirs should use the cost basis associated with the distribution if they later sell an asset and wish to calculate their own gain or loss on the asset).

Report Date Range

Regardless of the approach chosen above, 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. 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.