Estate planning coordination (accounting side)

A current asset schedule covering financial accounts, real estate, business interests and significant personal property, each with a value and cost basis where it can be traced. Ownership and titling notes against every asset, flagging anything that looks inconsistent with what the client has told the attorney. Coordination with an appraiser for real estate, closely held business interests or other hard-to-price assets, with the completed valuation filed against the schedule. A summary package handed to the estate planning attorney in the format their office works from, and a lifetime gift log where the client has made gifts that should feed into future Form 709 workpapers.

We start with an intake conversation covering what the client owns, roughly, and which accounts, properties and entities are involved. From there we pull statements, deeds, K-1s and prior tax returns to build cost basis where it exists, and flag anywhere basis has been lost to time so the client can decide whether it is worth reconstructing. Titling gets checked against account registrations and deed records, not just against what the client remembers. Once the schedule is drafted, we send it to the attorney's office for review before finalizing, since they may want additional detail on a specific asset before drafting begins.

Business owners drafting or updating a will or revocable trust, families with real estate or business interests spread across several entities, anyone revisiting a plan after a marriage, divorce, death in the family or move to a new state, and clients working with an estate planning attorney who has asked for a clean asset schedule before drafting starts. A client with a simple estate, one home, one retirement account, no business interests, may not need this level of detail and can usually work directly from account statements with their attorney.

The most common problem is cost basis that was never tracked and has to be reconstructed from old closing statements, brokerage histories or county records, sometimes for a property held decades ago. The second is titling that has drifted from what the client believes, an account added jointly years ago and forgotten, a beneficiary designation that still names a former spouse. The third is a business interest with no current valuation, so the attorney is drafting around a number nobody has actually confirmed. The fourth is a lifetime gift that was never logged anywhere, which becomes a problem the day a Form 709 needs to account for prior-year gifts against the lifetime exemption.

Most asset schedules are built and maintained in Excel or Google Sheets, since the format needs to be flexible enough for an attorney's specific request and easy to update as accounts change. QuickBooks Online tracks the underlying bookkeeping for any business interest included in the schedule. EstateWorks is used on larger, multi-entity estates where fiduciary accounting software adds real value over a spreadsheet. Valuation reports come in from the appraiser's own software or format and get filed as supporting documents against the schedule rather than re-keyed.

This work is scoped as a project rather than a monthly retainer for most clients, priced against the number of assets, entities and how much cost-basis reconstruction is involved. Where a client also has ongoing family office or trust bookkeeping with us, the asset schedule is often included or discounted against that existing engagement. Current published pricing and how it is scoped is on the rate card; a specific quote follows a short intake call once we know the number of assets and entities involved.

Every value and basis figure on the schedule traces back to a document, a statement, a deed, a K-1, an appraisal, not a client estimate carried forward without support. Titling notes are checked against the actual account registration or deed, not against what the client remembers being told years ago. Before the schedule goes to the attorney, we run a second review pass specifically for internal inconsistencies, an asset value that does not match the source document, a titling note that contradicts another note on the same account.

The federal basic exclusion amount rose to $15,000,000 per person for 2026 under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and the annual gift tax exclusion is $19,000 per recipient for 2026. That puts most of the clients we work with well under the federal estate tax threshold, which shifts the planning conversation for many families away from federal estate tax minimization and toward state estate tax exposure, where thresholds are often far lower, and toward basic organization, making sure the executor or successor trustee can actually find and value everything when the time comes. We build the asset schedule the same way regardless of which of those goals is driving the plan, since the underlying accounting need, accurate values, clean titling, traceable basis, does not change.