Somebody has died, and the job of sorting out what they left has landed on you.
It is a long job — most straightforward estates run somewhere between nine months and a year and a half — and it arrives at the one time in your life you are least equipped to run a project. Nobody teaches it. There is no orientation. The advice you find online is either a two-line checklist that skips the hard parts or a page of legal terms written for lawyers.
This is the file in between: a 13-tab workbook and four guides that turn “settle the estate” into sixty dated tasks, a live countdown, and a set of records you could hand to an attorney tomorrow.
Enter one cell, and the whole file schedules itself
Put the date of death in the amber cell on Estate Summary and everything else dates itself from it. Fifty-eight of the sixty get a target date — the two recurring ones say so rather than pretending to a date. Every dated task counts down against today. Every one carries a flag written in words — Past due, Due soon, On track, Blocked — get help — and colored to match, so it still reads correctly when you print it in black and white.
The tasks are not a generic list. They are sequenced into six stages, from the first days through get appointed, take control, notify and gather, pay, file and account, and finally distribute and close — and each one carries the reason it exists, so you are not ticking off instructions you don’t understand.
The part that trips up most first-time executors
Most of what people own does not pass under the will at all. Anything with a named beneficiary, anything held jointly with survivorship, anything payable or transferable on death — it goes straight to somebody, usually without you, and it is generally not available to pay the estate’s debts. Executors discover this at the worst moment, when an estate that looked comfortable turns out to be short of cash where it counts.
So the Assets & Accounts tab asks how each asset is titled before it asks what it’s worth. Pick the titling from the dropdown and the Route column classifies it — probate estate, passes outside probate, or ask the attorney — against a sixteen-rule reference table sitting at the foot of the same tab, with the reasoning printed so you can see it rather than being handed an answer. The three routes are then totalled separately, and the Dashboard keeps the unclassified figure in front of you until you’ve resolved it.
Why it prints no state deadlines and no tax figures
Deliberately, and it is the honest choice.
Probate is state law. Creditor windows, inventory deadlines, accounting schedules, small-estate thresholds and executor commissions all differ by state and sometimes by county. The federal estate tax exclusion is indexed and resets every year. A number printed in a template is wrong for somebody almost immediately — and wrong exactly when being wrong costs them most.
So Key Dates & Filings splits in two. The top block works out the federal clocks that don’t vary by state, straight from the date of death. The bottom block waits for you: get the creditor period and the inventory deadline from your attorney or the probate clerk, type the number of days, and the bar dates work themselves out. Those four period cells do ship with numbers in them — clearly labeled as illustrative placeholders on the tab itself, so the arithmetic is visible the moment you open the file and you can see exactly which four to replace. The tax cells beside them ship blank: look-ups you fill in and date, not figures that quietly go stale.
The accounting builds itself while you work
Courts that require an accounting generally ask the same three questions: what came in, what went out, and what is left. The Estate Cash Ledger answers all three with a running balance, kept line by line as things happen — which is the difference between ten minutes a month and a very bad week at the end reconstructing a year from bank statements.
From there, Beneficiaries & Distributions works out what each person is actually owed: cash legacies come off first, then the debts you’ve already accepted, and the residue divides by each share — with a check cell that tells you plainly if the shares don’t total 100%.
Own it, don’t rent it
You buy this once and you keep it. No subscription, no seats, no account, and no company holding a dead person’s records behind a login you’d have to fight for eighteen months from now. Download it, work it, hand a copy to the attorney, and keep the whole thing when the estate closes.
Honest about what it is
This is an organizer — not legal, tax, or financial advice. Ardent Workshop is not a law firm, not a tax adviser, and not affiliated with any court or government agency. It does not file anything, decide anything, or value anything, and it guarantees no result. Every date it works out is a reminder you set, never a legal deadline; the dates that bind you come from your court, your state, and the IRS. Where it describes a general rule, it is telling you which question to ask — not answering it. Verify anything that matters with your attorney, your accountant, and your court. The example estate, family, institutions, and dates in the file are fictional.
Just starting, and not ready for a workbook? The free First Two Weeks After a Death checklist is the immediate list — what to secure, who to tell, and what to gather.
