The Executor of an estate is expected to maintain a record of the various financial transactions and the purpose for which they were used, during the Probate process.
We envisage that this Spreadsheet is used to record the various financial activities that lead to the payment of Inheritance Tax and the completion of the Probate process.
We would strongly recommend that all paper based receipts for expenses are kept and that they are dated and clearly marked for reference. They can then be used as supporting information in any future discussions. It will also be important to identify and record all monetary amounts in terms of taxable and non-taxable Assets. i.e. gifts to charities and certain pension funds are considered non taxable.
There also are some anomalies that will need to be taken into account. i.e. a house may be sold for a different amount to that at valuation. This may result in a reclaim of Inheritance Tax. The valuation of Stocks and Shares will be at the 'date of death' and there may be no opportunity for adjustment. The final arbiter on these differences will be the Inland Revenue.

This document describes how to use the Probate, 'Excel' based, spreadsheet. It is intended for people who are reasonably familiar with 'Excel' and provides a simple guide for recording important financial information that will enable the tracking of Assets, Liabilities and expenses. It also provides the facility to record the distribution of Assets and as these events take place the calculation of Inheritance tax takes place in parallel.

The entry names can simply be altered to reflect the items that relate to your particular circumstances and the values entered in the normal manner.

Great care must be taken if more entry names are required. You will need to ensure that the integrity of automatic totalling and cross spreadsheet arithmetic is maintained.

We would strongly recommend that the spreadsheet is saved on a regular basis. The name should also be changed so that copies can be held for future reference. Suggested form: 'Name + date' using the save as function.

The Probate Spreadsheet comprises four separate Worksheets:

Stage 1 - Assets
Stage 2 - Liabilities
Stage 3 - Asset Distribution
Stage 4 - Summary + IHT (Protected Work Sheet)

Each of these Worksheets is linked, in that details of the key totals are automatically transferred to the Summary sheet in order to determine an Inheritance Tax figure and maintain a running total of the assets available for distribution.

This is by no means a definitive document but is a useful guide as to what level of detail needs to be recorded. The information is used in some simple calculations to provide the user with running totals of expenditure and asset distribution. At the same time it uses this information to obtain an indicative figure for Inheritance Tax purposes. However, the final Tax and distribution amounts when all assets and Liabilities have been input and the figures must be agreed with the appropriate Inland Revenue, Tax authority. We recommend that a printed version of the spreadsheets plus the paper based receipts be used to support the figures.