The balance on the morning of the date of death

The value of a bank account in the estate inventory is the balance on the date of death, not the balance you see on the day you draw up the list. Ask the bank for a specification as at the date of death. On that specification you check whether interest for that same day has already been credited. If that interest appears on the statement as booked on the date of death, it belongs in that day's balance. If it is not there, you leave it out. You do not add a day's interest yourself just because the account happened to bear interest. Only what the statement names on that date goes into the field value on the date of death.

Today's balance goes into a second field, value now. That field is useful because the settlement continues afterwards: a bill is paid, a benefit comes in, an account is closed. Those movements do not belong in the value on the date of death. They belong in the course of events afterwards, with date and source. That way it stays visible what stood there on the morning of the death and what has changed since. If you mix the two, the estate inventory seems to grow or shrink without anyone being able to point out why. Ervazo keeps both figures next to each other and links each to the document it came from.

Read the statement line by line around the date of death. A credit with a value date on the day of death counts if the bank has included it in the balance on that overview. A credit that becomes visible only on the next working day does not belong, with retroactive effect, in the morning balance, unless the statement for the date of death already names it. If you are unsure, you ask the bank which balance it uses as the balance as at the date of death, and you keep that reply. A screenshot of the app without a date is a weak source. Ask instead for a statement on which account number, date and balance appear together.

On the item, put the account number, the name of the holder and the currency. Copy the amount in the currency the statement names. You do not round to a neat figure and you do not drop cents because they look small. A rounded family figure you mark as an estimate, with the name of who estimated and the date, and you replace it as soon as the statement is there. The estimate and the bank's specification do not both remain as the truth. The estimate becomes the previous source, the specification the valid one. That way you later see why a figure changed, without erasing the history.

This balance is not a valuation of the estate and not tax advice. Ervazo does not calculate the interest and does not choose which balance is the right one. The source of the figure is the bank, via the statement or a written specification as at the date of death. If that document is missing, the field stays empty and there is a task with the date of your request. What the Belastingdienst does with this balance in a return, you do not infer from the estate-inventory line. That question belongs with the return, not with copying a figure.