I am in the same position / roles as you describe and managed the process as
follows ( note Canadian based);
The bank / registered / non-registered accounts held under POA were frozen by
the institutions at time of death (held until the institutions received Probate
Certificate from the courts). I retained these accounts in the GnuCash file
with existing balances.
i) during the time between when the accounts were frozen and institutions
approved the Executor request (about 10 weeks), the bank did allow for funeral
and income tax expenses to be disbursed from the frozen accounts, and pension,
government benefit cheques to be deposited. These transactions were recorded in
the existing accounts managed under the POA.
ii) also during this time, there were bank fees, investment gains, etc which
the bank transacted and I recorded against the existing accounts managed under
the POA.
Once the financial institutions were satisfied I was the appointed Executor,
they created a new Estate Account, calculated the ending balance in the
existing POA account, and transferred this amount in to the Estate Account.
Within the same GnuCash file I created a new Placeholder Account - "Estate
Accounts", and created a Bank Estate Account ( Parent Account being the
Placeholder Account - "Estate Accounts" ) for each of the financial
institutions..
i.e. Estate Accounts
- Bank A Estate Account
- Bank B Estate Account
- Bank C Estate Account
I created a transaction to transfer the Balance from the existing POA Account
to the corresponding Bank Estate Account. The POA Accounts were 'Closed' in
each of ther financial institutions. All recorded within the GnuCash file,
I selected one of the banks as the prime estate account. I then transferred the
balance of all other estate accounts into this prime estate account. All
recorded within the GnuCash file,
This has left me with one Bank Estate Account, where I record all remaining
expenses, fees, income taxes, etc. and an accurate ending balance to be
disbursed to beneficiaries.
Setting the accounts up this way, all in one file, helped in calculating
balances for Probate Fees, various Income Tax reporting, and Ontario Estate
Information amounts, helped in reporting financial information to the
government and beneficiaries, and helped in reconciling all the financial
accounts in to one manageable estate account
-- Larry --
> On Nov 18, 2025, at 4:42 PM, Bruce Griffis <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> I was the financial power of attorney for my mom for the past few years,
> and kept her finances in GnuCash. She passed away, so FPOA is no longer in
> effect. I am the executor for her estate. My thought is to duplicate her
> current GnuCash file, empty out the transactions, and start new with same
> chart of accounts and set opening balances to be what her balances were as
> of yesterday. Would that be the right way to handle this?
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