How to Automate AbstractorPro

A title search lives its whole life as a work order

AbstractorPro is web-based software for the title research industry, and the unit it runs on is the work order. A client wants to know what is on record against a property, so an order arrives carrying the address, the county, the product and the date it was promised for. Everything after that is one row moving: assigned, searched, returned, checked, delivered, invoiced.

The firms running those rows are not alike. One is a sole practitioner who covers a single county and knows the recorder's counter by sight. Another places orders with searchers across a dozen states and has not been inside a courthouse in years.

Behind the order sit the client, vendor and contact databases, with fees set per product and per county so the same search prices correctly wherever it lands. Vendors send their fee sheets in through the Vendor Portal. The invoice and the receivable follow from the same row.

Reading the deed is the quickest thing all day

Pulling a chain of title on one parcel takes an experienced searcher minutes. The day goes somewhere else.

It goes on opening four client ordering portals to see whether anything came in overnight, and keying what did into a new work order. It goes on emailing a vendor who is two days past the promised date, then emailing them again. It goes on answering a client who wants to know where their file is, which means finding the row, reading the status and typing it back out as a sentence. It goes on checking whether the county has posted the documents recorded last week, because until it has, the search cannot close.

Each of those is three minutes. None is worth building a system for on its own, which is exactly why they are all still done by hand at half past seven in the morning.

AbstractorPro

The overdue list, already checked Every order past its promised date, oldest first, with the vendor's name and whether the county has posted the documents the search is waiting on.

Orders lifted off client portals Work that lands in a client's own ordering system overnight, read and entered as a work order with the property, county and product filled in.

Nothing delivered and unbilled Finished searches matched against what has actually been invoiced, so a report does not leave the office without a line on somebody's bill.

The system tracks the order, it does not visit the county

AbstractorPro does more with a work order than the spreadsheet it replaced, and it is worth knowing how far that reaches before paying for anything else. Work orders are tracked in real time through the process, so the state of every open job is one screen rather than four phone calls. Vendors have their own portal for submitting fee sheets, and a five-star grading system records who came back clean and who came back late. Finished work turns into property reports, and into reports on any client for any period, with statistic charts for accounts receivable and gross income. Instructions emailed by a vendor become PDFs on their own, and anything can go out to Excel, QuickBooks, CSV or PDF.

All of that describes work already reported in. The record itself is somewhere else.

It is on the county recorder's site, the clerk's index, the tax collector's parcel lookup and the court docket, each with its own login, its own search form and its own habit of going down on a Tuesday. The new orders are in the client's ordering system, not in yours. No tracking screen can go and look at any of it, and no amount of tracking makes the looking shorter.

Open orders that come with the county already read

Reverse the direction, and the list stops being a record of what has already happened.

The overdue orders can be waiting when you open the tab: everything past its promised date, oldest first, with the vendor's name, how long it has sat, and whether the county has actually posted the documents the search is waiting on. The client portals can be read overnight, so an order placed at eleven at night is a work order with property, county and product filled in by the time anyone arrives.

It works outward too. A property report finished yesterday can be uploaded to the client's own system in the format that system insists on, or attached to a draft email addressed to the person who ordered it. Delivered orders can be matched against what has actually been invoiced. A parcel can be checked on the tax collector's site for a delinquency that changes what the report has to say.

None of that needs an API, a developer, or a client willing to build something at your end. The recorder's site has no API. The client's portal will not open one for a firm your size. The work does not require either.

An agent can make the rounds, not the call

An abstractor is paid for what they notice in the records. Whether a 1978 easement still runs with the land is the work, and it stays exactly where it is.

WebRun takes the other half. It signs into AbstractorPro, the county sites and your clients' portals in a real browser, under your own logins, on whatever schedule the county deserves. It reads what is there and writes it back against the right work order. Anything leaving the office, an email to a client, an upload, an invoice, is drafted and left for a person to send.

The cards below are the jobs around a work order that already run this way.