Form 706 estate tax return preparation support

An asset schedule organized by the specific Form 706 schedule each item belongs on, real estate, stock and bonds, mortgages and notes, insurance, jointly held property, and the others the form calls for. We gather and file valuation support against each schedule, coordinate with the appraiser the executor engages for anything that needs a professional valuation, and organize deduction documentation for debts, administration expenses, and charitable or marital bequests. The deliverable is a complete draft return with every schedule populated and supported, ready for a credentialed signer's review, plus a deadline tracker showing the nine-month filing date and any extension already filed.

We start with a full asset inventory as of the date of death, pulled from the fiduciary accounting ledger where one exists or built from the executor's records where it does not. Each asset is sorted onto its correct schedule, then valuation requests go out, to an appraiser for real estate or a closely held business, to a brokerage or transfer agent for securities, to the insurer for policy proceeds. As valuations come back, we file them against the schedule and start building the deduction schedules in parallel. The complete draft, all schedules populated, goes to the credentialed signer for review, with enough runway before the nine-month deadline to accommodate their questions.

Executors of an estate large enough to be near or above the current filing threshold, and their attorneys, who need the accounting side of the return handled while the attorney manages probate and the appraiser handles valuations. It also fits estates that are below the threshold but where the executor wants to file anyway to elect portability for a surviving spouse, since that election has its own filing deadline separate from whether tax is actually owed. Accounting firms preparing 706s for their own clients also use this for the asset-schedule and workpaper-assembly capacity during a busy season.

Executors sometimes assume no return is needed because the estate seems modest, without checking adjusted taxable gifts made during the decedent's lifetime, which count toward the threshold too; we run that calculation before ruling a filing out. A second common problem is valuation support arriving in pieces, an appraisal here, a brokerage statement there, with nothing tying it to the specific schedule it supports; we build the schedule structure first so every valuation has a home the moment it arrives. A third is missing the portability election entirely on a below-threshold estate, which permanently forfeits the unused exclusion for the surviving spouse; we flag that election early, not after the deadline has passed.

The asset inventory and supporting schedules are built in Excel, structured to mirror the form's own schedule lettering so nothing has to be re-sorted when the credentialed signer's tax software imports it. The return itself is prepared in Drake Tax or UltraTax CS by the signer's practice, and we hand off workpapers formatted to load directly into whichever software they use. Where fiduciary accounting already exists in QuickBooks Online or Xero, we pull the underlying ledger data straight from there rather than re-entering figures by hand.

Form 706 support is scoped individually because the amount of work depends heavily on how many assets need valuation, how many schedules apply, and whether the estate includes a closely held business or out-of-state real property. See the published rate card for the tiers most estate work falls under; larger or more complex estates typically move to the custom-quote Scale tier. Your exact fee is confirmed in writing before the engagement starts, and the appraiser's own fee for any professional valuation is separate and billed directly by the appraiser.

Every schedule has to tie to a source document, a valuation letter, a brokerage statement, a deed, not to an estimate. We reconcile the total gross estate figure against the fiduciary accounting ledger before the draft goes to the signer, so any gap between what the books show and what the return reports gets caught before review rather than during it. We also check the threshold calculation, including adjusted taxable gifts, at the start of every engagement and again before filing, since the applicable exclusion amount and the gift figures that count against it can both change between when scoping happens and when the return is actually due.

The nine-month clock starts on the date of death, not when an executor gets around to gathering records, so we start the asset inventory as early as possible even before probate is fully underway. Valuations, particularly for real estate or a closely held business, often take four to eight weeks to come back from an appraiser, so we flag any asset needing one in the first two weeks of the engagement. If the timeline is tight, we prepare the Form 4768 extension request early rather than waiting to see whether the deadline will actually be missed.