Part II
Getting information in
Your account and the estate, the 23 document types Heirwise recognizes, how extraction and review work, the vault, and managing the people involved.
Your account and signing in
Sign-in is handled by Clerk, an authentication provider. Whichever sign-in method you choose, it's the same account afterward.
Use a strong password you don't use anywhere else, and turn on two-factor authentication if your sign-in method offers it. An estate file contains Social Security numbers, full account numbers, and the decedent's complete financial position — among the most sensitive collections of documents you will ever be responsible for.
If you were invited as a beneficiary
A beneficiary invitation arrives as a link. Following it walks you through creating an account and gives you access to the portal for that specific estate. You don't need to be invited again for the same estate.
Creating the estate
An estate is the container for everything: documents, the ledger, workflow progress, the people involved, and your conversation with Elin. Heirwise holds one estate per account, so creating it is a one-time step.
When you create an estate, Heirwise sets it up with the three-phase structure and the full probate checklist. The phase structure is fixed to your estate at that point; the checklist itself is the current standard one, so an improvement to the standard task list can show up in an estate already underway.
If figures look wrong, check for duplicates before anything else — the same statement uploaded twice, or an asset both extracted from a document and entered by hand, is the most common cause.
The one value you set by hand
One estate-level value comes from you rather than from a document: the creditor period end date, the date the Pennsylvania creditor-claim window closes. Set it once you've placed the creditor advertisement — a Phase 3 check tests it directly and cannot pass until that date is in the past. You'll find it in the creditor period section of the Estate Balance Sheet, not in a settings screen.
The 23 document types
Heirwise recognizes 23 kinds of probate document. You tell it which kind you're uploading, and all but one have their own extraction profile — a distinct set of fields it looks for and its own place to file them. The exception is the IRS EIN letter, which is stored for you to keep and include in packets, but isn't read for data.
Foundational and court documents
| Document | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Will | Establishes the executor and the distribution scheme. Required before petition generation unlocks. |
| Codicil | An amendment to the will. Probated together with the original — upload every one you have. |
| Death certificate | Date of death and county of domicile. Anchors deadlines and jurisdiction. |
| Court letters (Letters Testamentary) | Your proof of authority, issued by the Register of Wills. What you show third parties before they will deal with you. |
| Renunciation form | Signed by an heir declining to serve as executor. Needed when someone with a prior claim to the role steps aside. |
Assets
| Document | What it adds |
|---|---|
| Bank statement | Checking and savings accounts, with balances. |
| Brokerage statement | Investment accounts and their holdings. |
| Asset statement | General-purpose statement for accounts that aren't clearly bank or brokerage. |
| Stock certificate | Directly-held shares represented on paper. |
| Real estate deed | Real property, including how title was held — which determines whether it's part of the probate estate at all. |
| Vehicle title | Cars, boats, and other titled property. |
| Life insurance policy | Recorded, but usually excluded from the probate estate when there's a named beneficiary. |
| Promissory note | Money owed to the decedent. An asset of the estate, not a debt. |
Debts and expenses
| Document | What it adds |
|---|---|
| Funeral bill | A claim against the estate whose priority class matters — classify it carefully when you record it. |
| Invoice | General unpaid bills owed by the estate. |
| Legal invoice | Attorney fees. These are costs of administering the estate, which is a distinct priority class from the decedent's own debts. |
| Medical bill | Final medical and care expenses. |
| Utility bill | Ongoing utilities on the decedent's property. |
| Credit card statement | Outstanding card balances. |
| Mortgage statement | The secured balance on real property. |
| Tax bill | Property and other taxes owed. |
Tax and administration
| Document | What it adds |
|---|---|
| PA REV-1500 | The Pennsylvania inheritance tax return. Upload it if you filed outside Heirwise. |
| IRS EIN letter | The CP-575 or 147C confirming the estate's tax ID. Goes into the packet you show banks. |
How reading and review work
Uploading a document starts a pipeline rather than just storing a file. Understanding roughly what happens makes the review step much less mysterious.
- The file is encrypted and stored. It shows in the vault immediately.
- Heirwise reads it for the fields that matter for the type you chose — a will gets read for the executor's name, the will's date, and the number of codicils; a bank statement gets read for the institution, account number, and balance.
- It shows you everything it found, with an indication of how confident it is in each value.
- You confirm or correct those values.
- Only then is anything written into the estate.
While this runs, the document shows as analyzing, then as having data extracted. It's a background job — you can navigate away and come back, and larger documents legitimately take longer.
The review step
This is the part worth doing carefully, and it is not optional. Nothing an upload produces reaches your estate until you confirm it — high confidence included. Heirwise never silently commits a reading, because a misread account balance quietly corrupts the solvency calculation and a misread name propagates onto court forms.
You'll see the field, what Heirwise thinks it says, and the option to accept or change it. Correcting a value is not a failure of the system — scanned probate documents are frequently faint, handwritten, or stamped over, and your eyes on the original are the authority.
Pay closest attention to numbers and dates. A balance that's off by a decimal place, or a date of death off by a year, can quietly change whether the estate looks solvent and whether a waiting period appears satisfied.
When you confirm the death certificate, check two fields against the document in front of you. The decedent's name must match it exactly, including middle names and suffixes, because that is the name that appears on your court filings. And the county of domicile decides which Register of Wills has jurisdiction — get it wrong and you will prepare your petition for the wrong courthouse.
Domicile means where the decedent legally lived, which is not always where they died or where they owned the most property. Someone who lived in Bucks County and died in a Philadelphia hospital is a Bucks County estate. If domicile is genuinely unclear — a recent move, two residences — that is an attorney question rather than a data-entry one.
When a document can't be read
- Too blurry or too dark — you may get an error asking for a clearer document, but a poor scan can also come back with simply nothing found. If the fields are empty, assume legibility and re-photograph it flat, in even light, with the whole page in frame.
- Handwritten — older wills in particular. Expect to enter more by hand; Heirwise will still store and file the document.
- A document that doesn't fit any of the 23 types — pick the closest one and expect to correct more than usual, or record the facts by hand and keep the document as a record.
- Nothing to extract — some documents are worth keeping as proof without containing structured data.
You are never blocked by extraction. Every asset, liability, expense, and person can be added by hand, and manual entry is an equal citizen in the ledger — not a second-class fallback.
The document vault
The vault holds the documents you uploaded. It is the answer to "where did I put that".
- Browse the full list, with each document's type and processing status.
- Preview in the browser for formats that support it, so you don't have to download to check something.
- Download the original file at any time — the exact bytes you uploaded.
Files are encrypted in storage, and previewing or downloading one is authorized per request against your access to the estate.
Documents Heirwise generates for you are not in the vault — you download them from the task screen that produced them, and regenerate them there if you need another copy. When you close the estate, the records archive bundles your uploads and the generated forms together into a single download for your permanent files.
The people involved
Heirwise tracks two kinds of person on the estate.
- Executor
- You — full access to the estate. Upload documents, edit the ledger, generate forms, and control who else can see anything. There is currently no way to give a second person this level of access.
- Beneficiary
- Someone entitled to a share. Record them whether or not you invite them to the portal, because the distribution plan needs them in order to allocate anything.
Other people who appear in your documents — a funeral director, an attorney, a bank contact — aren't tracked as their own records. Where a name matters, it's attached to the thing it relates to: the funeral home becomes the creditor on the funeral bill, for instance. If you need someone's phone number to hand, keep it outside Heirwise.
Inviting a beneficiary
Recording a beneficiary and inviting them are separate acts. You can — and generally should — record everyone early so the distribution plan has people to allocate to, then invite them to the portal when you're ready for them to be looking.
Inviting sends an email with a link that walks them through creating an account and gives them portal access to your estate. What they can see is governed by the estate's phase and solvency, not by the invitation, so inviting someone early doesn't expose figures that aren't ready.
Inviting beneficiaries early tends to reduce how often they call you. The portal answers "what phase are we in" and "is there a problem" on its own, and it gives them a written channel for questions instead of the phone.
Revoking access
Beneficiary access can be closed. They lose portal access immediately, but stay visible to you in the roster — deliberately, so the record of who had access and when survives for audit purposes.
Assigning shares lives with the distribution plan, and Heirwise checks that each asset's allocations total 100%. But revoking access is not purely an access change — a revoked beneficiary is treated as no longer entitled to a distribution and drops out of the plan. If someone is still due a share, don't revoke them.