Executor Checklist Spreadsheet, Settling an Estate Records and Task Binder, Probate Inventory Tracker, Excel & Google Sheets

SETTLING AN ESTATE, TURNED INTO A DATED PLAN YOU CAN ACTUALLY WORK

Somebody has died and the job of sorting out what they left has landed on you. It is a long job — many straightforward estates run somewhere between nine months and a year and a half — and it arrives at the one time in your life you are least equipped to run a project. Nobody teaches it. The advice online is either a two-line checklist that skips the hard parts or a page of legal terms written for lawyers.

This is the file in between: a 13-tab workbook plus four guides that turns "settle the estate" into sixty dated tasks, a live countdown, and a set of records you can hand to an attorney.

Enter ONE cell — the date of death — and the whole file schedules itself.

WHAT IT ACTUALLY WORKS OUT FOR YOU

• Sixty executor tasks, already sequenced into six stages and already scheduled. Fifty-eight get a target date off the date of death, a live countdown, and a written flag — Past due, Due soon, On track, Blocked - get help — color-coded to match. (The two recurring ones read No date set rather than pretending to a date.)

• Which assets are even yours to administer. Pick how each asset is titled from a dropdown and the workbook classifies it: probate estate, passes outside probate, or ask the attorney. A 16-row reference table explains every classification. This is what trips up most first-time executors, and getting it wrong is expensive.

• The clocks that actually run. The federal filing dates are worked out from the date of death for you. The state and court periods are worked out from the number of days YOUR attorney or probate clerk gives you.

• Every creditor claim, with an answer-by date. Enter the day a claim arrived and the file dates your response window and flags it, with running totals by accept, dispute, paid, and not-yet-decided.

• An estate cash ledger with a running balance — the accounting you will eventually have to file, kept as you go instead of reconstructed from a year of bank statements.

• What each beneficiary is actually owed. Cash legacies come off first, the residue divides by each share, and a check cell tells you if the shares do not total 100%.

• A live dashboard: what is overdue, what is unclassified, what is unpaid, and how much is really in the account.

WHY IT ASSERTS NO STATE DEADLINE, AND PRINTS NO TAX FIGURES

Deliberately, and it is the honest choice. Probate is state law — creditor windows, inventory deadlines, accounting schedules, small-estate thresholds and executor commissions all differ by state and sometimes by county. The federal estate tax exclusion is indexed and resets every year. A number printed in a template is wrong for somebody almost immediately, and wrong exactly when being wrong costs them most.

So the workbook gives you look-up cells instead: get the number from your attorney or the probate clerk, type it in, and the file does the arithmetic. The four state and court period cells do ship with numbers, so you can see the arithmetic working the moment you open it — they are labeled illustrative placeholders on the tab, and every surface tells you to replace all four. The tax cells ship blank. The only dates the file asserts on its own are the statutory federal filing clocks, which do not vary by state.

WHAT YOU GET

• 01 — The workbook (.xlsx, 13 tabs) — Read Me, Stages & Progress, Estate Summary, Task & Deadline Tracker, Key Dates & Filings, Assets & Accounts, Debts & Creditor Claims, Estate Cash Ledger, Beneficiaries & Distributions, Notifications Log, Documents & Certified Copies, Contacts, Dashboard. Opens in Excel, Google Sheets, or LibreOffice Calc.

• One-click Google Sheets copy — a ready-made native version. Click "Make a copy" and every dropdown, color, and live formula is already set up and tested in Sheets. No import, no Excel needed.

• 00 — Start Here Guide (PDF): what an executor actually is, the three mistakes that cause almost all the trouble, and how to finish properly.

• 02 — What Belongs to the Estate (PDF): probate versus non-probate, the full titling table, the order in which an estate pays what it owes, and six things people believe that are not true.

• 03 — Who to Notify and How (PDF): 25 organizations grouped by why you are contacting them, what each one needs, how many certified death certificates to order, and how to talk to beneficiaries.

• 04 — Printable Estate Pages (PDF): blank task, key-dates, asset-and-titling, creditor-claim, notifications, and cash-ledger pages for the week you are working off a kitchen table.

• READ-ME-FIRST.txt

Every log tab ships pre-filled with a clearly fictional example estate so you can see the method working before you replace it with your own. (Read Me, Stages & Progress and the Dashboard are instructional or computed, so there is nothing on them to overwrite.)

INSTANT DOWNLOAD

Your files are available the moment payment clears. Nothing is mailed.

OWN IT, DON'T RENT IT

No subscription, no seats, no vendor holding a dead person's records behind a login you will have to fight for in eighteen months. You download the file and it is yours — keep it, copy it, hand it to the attorney, keep it after the estate closes.

AN ORGANIZER — NOT LEGAL, TAX, OR FINANCIAL ADVICE

Ardent Workshop is not a law firm, not a tax adviser, and not affiliated with any court or government agency. This binder helps you sort, schedule, and track the work and the records of settling an estate. It does not file anything, decide anything, or value anything, and it guarantees no result. Every date it works out is a reminder you set, never a legal deadline — the dates that bind you come from your court, your state, and the IRS. Where it describes a general rule, it is telling you which question to ask, not answering it. Verify anything that matters with your attorney, your accountant, and your court. The example estate, family, institutions, and dates are fictional.

• This is a digital product — no physical item will be mailed.
• Created with AI assistance under Ardent Workshop's creative direction, then reviewed and edited before release.
• Personal license: for you and your household. Please don't resell, share, or redistribute the documents or files.
• © Ardent Workshop. Thank you for supporting a small maker.