A client’s husband passed in August and his widow handed me a laptop with a password nobody knew. His books were in there. Took the family almost two months to get access, and the business still had payroll due in week one.
Got me looking at my own setup. My ledger’s plain text in git, which feels safe… but safe for me. If I’m hit by a bus tomorrow, nobody in my family could open a .beancount file and make sense of it, let alone find where the repo lives.
Do any of you keep a physical snapshot — printed balance sheet, account list, something paper an executor could actually use? What goes in it?
Ex-IRS hat on: a printed ledger does almost nothing in an audit. Retention is 3 years from filing for most records, up to 7 for property — but what examiners ask for is source documents. Receipts, statements, invoices. Your ledger is an index, not evidence. Print the index if it helps you sleep, but it’s the shoebox behind it that matters.
Your ledger is an index, not evidence.
for an auditor sure. but Bob’s case isn’t an audit, it’s a spouse who needs to know which accounts exist at all. different reader, different document, no?
We do a year-end estate packet for clients who ask, and I started doing one for myself: 14 pages. Balance sheet from bean-query, a plain list of every account and institution (no passwords — those live in the password manager with emergency access set up), and one page that just says where the ledger repo is and who to call.
It goes in the fireproof box next to the will, refreshed every January. The beancount part almost doesn’t matter. What matters is that a non-accountant can read page one and know what exists.