Estate Settlement Tracker

The checklist for the first weeks after a death is a different job from the one that follows it. This is the second job: the nine to eighteen months of being an executor, when you are holding a probate file, a list of accounts nobody has valued, a creditor period you cannot shorten, and a set of beneficiaries who ask how it's going. It tracks the phases, the inventory, the dates you were given and the money you have spent out of your own pocket — and prints all of it as one accounting record. Everything stays on this device: no account, no login, nothing sent anywhere.

Why executors lose track in month four

The first fortnight after a death has a shape to it. There is a funeral, there are people in the house, and the tasks are urgent enough to organise themselves. Then the visitors go home, the estate work begins properly, and it turns out to be a project with a dozen open threads running at different speeds — a bank that wants a document you have not been granted yet, an insurer that has gone quiet, a creditor period that has to run its course whether or not you are ready.

The failure mode is not forgetting a task. It is losing the thread of which of the twelve things you are waiting on, who you last spoke to, and what they said they needed. That is why this tracker records status and references beside each item rather than just ticking things off. The question you will actually be asked, repeatedly, is "where are we with the pension?" — and the answer needs to be more specific than "in progress".

Keep the accounting as you go, not at the end

Nearly every jurisdiction expects an executor to be able to account for what came in, what went out, and what was distributed to whom. Reconstructing that a year later from a shoebox is grim work, and it is the point at which honest executors start to look careless to beneficiaries who are already suspicious of the process.

Two habits solve most of it. Record the date-of-death value of everything at the moment you learn it, because that figure — not today's value — is what most of the paperwork asks for. And log your own out-of-pocket spending on the day you spend it, with what it was for. A printed ledger of forty small entries reads as diligence; the same forty entries described from memory read as a request to be trusted.

Telling beneficiaries what is happening

Most estate disputes that end up in a solicitor's office did not start as arguments about money. They started as silence. A beneficiary who has heard nothing for three months does not conclude that the creditor period is still running; they conclude that something is being hidden from them, and by the time they ask, they are already asking in a certain tone.

A short, dull update on a fixed schedule prevents an enormous amount of this — what has completed, what is outstanding, what you are waiting on and from whom. Printing the record and sending the same page to everyone at once has the useful property of being identical for each person, which is exactly the reassurance a suspicious beneficiary is looking for.

Where the job actually stalls

In practice the delays cluster in a small number of places: a property that has to be cleared and sold, an institution that will not act without a document you can only get later in the sequence, a tax filing that has to wait for a valuation, and beneficiaries who cannot agree on what happens to something with more sentimental value than financial. None of these are solved by working harder in month two.

What helps is knowing which phase each thread is genuinely in, so the ones that are simply waiting can be left alone and the ones that are blocked on you get the attention. Marking something "claim submitted" and putting the reference beside it is a small act with a large effect on how long the whole thing takes.

Still in the first weeks rather than the settlement? The After-Loss Checklist covers what happens in the first 48 hours, the first fortnight and the first month, including who has to be told and in what order.

Doing this for yourself, in advance, so nobody has to reconstruct it? LegacyNest is the offline app version — every document, account, policy, digital legacy contact, medical directive and funeral wish in one place, printable as a single binder for whoever ends up holding this job.

Working out what a house actually contained, for probate or for insurance? The Home Inventory for Insurance builds a room-by-room record with values and a printable summary.

Created by and property of gentletools.com · 2026