Getting oriented

Heirwise helps you, the executor of an estate, work through the Pennsylvania probate process step by step. You upload the estate's documents; Heirwise reads them, organizes what it finds, tracks the estate's finances, tells you what to do next, and prepares the Pennsylvania court forms you need.

The reason it's built this way is that probate is mostly the same handful of facts repeated across dozens of forms. The decedent's full legal name, date of death, county, your name and address as executor, the case number — you would otherwise write these out by hand again and again, and a typo on form six contradicts form two. Heirwise captures each fact once and reuses it everywhere.

The five things it gives you

• A sequence. Probate has an order, and steps genuinely block on each other — you cannot notify a bank before you have Letters, and you cannot get Letters before the will is filed. Heirwise encodes that order so you don't have to hold it in your head.
• A financial picture. Every asset and debt goes into one ledger that continuously answers the question that matters most: does this estate have enough to cover what it owes?
• Filled forms. It auto-fills Pennsylvania probate forms from facts already on file and assembles multi-document packets in the right order.
• A place for everything. Documents live in an encrypted vault, and the information extracted from them is filed against the decedent, the asset, or the debt it describes.
• Answers. Elin, the in-app assistant, answers plain-English questions about your own documents and looks up public court information.

That distinction is not boilerplate — it shapes how the product behaves. Heirwise will organize facts, do arithmetic, fill forms, and tell you what the next step in the sequence is. It will not tell you which of two competing creditors to pay first, how to read an ambiguous clause in the will, whether a particular asset is really part of the probate estate in a contested situation, or how to minimize the estate's tax exposure. Those are judgment calls that need a licensed Pennsylvania attorney, and Heirwise is built to hand them off rather than guess.

You'll notice this most clearly in two places. Elin refuses questions it classifies as legal advice or tax planning, says so plainly, and points you toward an attorney. And for higher-risk documents — a family settlement agreement, the RW-09 inventory — Heirwise assembles an information packet for your attorney to draft from rather than producing a signature-ready document itself.

Where you still need a professional

Heirwise has two kinds of user, and they see very different things.

One person holds an estate in Heirwise — there is currently no way to give a second person executor-level access. If you are serving alongside a co-executor, one of you keeps the estate and shares exports with the other. Beneficiaries are invited individually and each gets their own scoped view.

Names that appear in your documents — a funeral director, an attorney, a bank contact — are attached to whatever they relate to rather than kept as their own contact records. The funeral home becomes the creditor on the funeral bill. If you need someone's number to hand, keep it outside Heirwise.

You do not need everything before you begin, and you should not wait until you do. Two documents get Phase 1 moving; everything else can arrive as you find it. But knowing the whole list up front saves you several trips.

Start with these two

Then, as you find them

• Financial statements — the most recent statement for every bank, credit union, and brokerage account. These become the asset side of the ledger.
• Property records — deeds for real estate, titles for vehicles, and any stock certificates held on paper.
• Insurance and retirement paperwork — life insurance policies and retirement account statements. Note that these often pass outside probate; see the assets section.
• Bills and invoices — the funeral bill, credit cards, medical bills, utilities, the mortgage, legal invoices, and any tax bills. These become the liability side.
• Loans owed to the decedent — promissory notes where the decedent was the lender are assets, not debts.
• Recent tax returns — helpful context for the final personal return and for spotting accounts you didn't know existed.

Five surfaces, and everything lives in one of them. If you're lost, this is the map.

The balance sheet is worth calling out because it has several front doors. You can reach the same Estate Balance Sheet from the inventory Summary tab, from your dashboard, from the Phase 2 screen, from the Phase 3 snapshot card, and from the priority worksheet. They all land on the same page — there is only one balance sheet.

Heirwise currently holds one estate per account. Everything you see — documents, ledger, checklist, and what Elin can read — belongs to that estate.

If you want a concrete place to begin, do these in order. They put the foundations of the estate in place, and everything else builds on them.

1. 1Create your account. Use a strong password you don't reuse, and turn on two-factor authentication if your sign-in method offers it — estate records contain Social Security numbers and account numbers.
2. 2Create the estate. You'll name it and it becomes the container for everything else.
3. 3Upload the death certificate. Heirwise reads the date of death and the county, which sets your jurisdiction and starts the clock on deadlines.
4. 4Upload the will, and any codicils. Codicils are amendments and get probated together with the original — upload them too, even if they look minor.
5. 5Review what Heirwise extracted and confirm it. Nothing reaches the estate until you do — so this step isn't optional, and it's far easier now, with the documents in front of you.