What the template is
A free Excel workbook that serves as a trust accounting spreadsheet template for a trustee’s annual or final account and as an estate accounting template for an executor’s or administrator’s probate final account. It is laid out the way a California court accounting is organized under Probate Code §§1060–1064: a summary of charges and credits, followed by a sheet for each supporting schedule. The summary is already linked to every schedule, so its totals and the balance line update as you enter amounts.
Download the free Excel template
What is in it
- A short how-to sheet
- The summary of account: charges, credits and the balance
- Schedule A: property on hand at the beginning of the period
- Schedules B and E: receipts of principal and income received
- Schedules C and D: gains and losses on sales
- Schedules F and G: disbursements of principal and of income
- Schedule I: distributions
- Schedule H: property on hand at the end of the period
- Changes in form of assets
The work behind the template
A template supplies the format. The accounting itself requires each deposit, withdrawal, dividend, fee, purchase and sale on each statement for the period to be classified to its proper schedule; each security’s carry value to be followed, lot by lot, through purchases, sales and corporate actions; gains and losses to be calculated from carry value rather than the cost basis the brokerage reports; receipts and disbursements to be allocated between principal and income where the trust requires it; and the summary of charges and credits to balance exactly. For a trust with several accounts, that is days, weeks or even months of manual work, and an accounting that does not balance must be reconciled transaction by transaction until the discrepancy is found.
Generate the accounting with Balanced
Balanced performs that work in a fraction of the time and cost. From the trust’s PDF bank and brokerage statements, Balanced generates the accounting in this format: transactions classified to their schedules, carry values tracked lot by lot, each account reconciled to its own statements, the summary balanced to the penny, and each entry cited to the statement and page from which it was drawn, delivered as one fully editable Excel workbook. $699 per accounting.