How to Automate EstateExec

Settling an estate falls to whoever agreed to it years ago

EstateExec is online software for settling an estate after somebody dies. The person using it is usually the executor named in the will, and more often than not they have never done this before: a daughter, a brother, a friend who agreed to it years ago without thinking hard about what it meant. Attorneys use it as well, and so do people organising their own estate so that whoever ends up holding the file is not starting from a shoebox.

The job itself is unlike ordinary admin. An executor takes legal responsibility for property that is not theirs, owes duties to heirs and creditors who may not agree with each other, answers to a probate court on that court's timetable, and is personally exposed if the accounting is wrong.

It also tends to run for a year or more, in the evenings, while the person doing it is grieving.

Every asset in the estate is held by somebody else

The institutions holding the money have never heard of the executor and will not take their word for anything.

The bank wants a death certificate and the letters testamentary before it will discuss the account at all. The brokerage wants a date-of-death valuation, which means a form and then a wait. Behind those sit the pension administrator, the life insurer, a credit union with a small balance nobody knew about, the mortgage servicer and the county about the house.

Each moves at its own pace, each has a portal or a phone queue, and not one of them tells the executor when something has finally happened. So the work becomes calling back, checking again, and keeping a private list of who still owes what, while the heirs ask how much longer this is going to take.

EstateExec

Deadlines set by the state, not by memory Creditor claim windows and filing dates tracked from the day letters issued, so the next one is always in front of you.

Balances checked where the money sits Bank and brokerage positions read and set beside the estate ledger, so a transfer that never landed becomes a question this week.

Heirs told before they ask The same clear position sent on a schedule: what has been collected, what is still outstanding, and what the timetable looks like now.

The plan, the state duties and the accounting are already covered

EstateExec handles the executor's own file properly, and running an estate on a legal pad instead is how these go wrong.

It creates the plan: a task list generated for that particular estate, with links through to the relevant probate forms and calculators, and it can analyse the will to work out the distributions. It explains the duties for the state the estate is being settled in, with due dates and references attached, which is exactly the part a first-time executor has no way of knowing. It simplifies the accounting, tracking income, expenses, transactions and distributions, computing executor compensation and cost basis, and preparing the accounting reports. It imports from the bank, downloading transactions directly from most banks and identifying which were distributions and which were debt payments, so the estate account reconciles. Heirs and co-executors can be given view or edit access, and the file prints to PDF or exports to CSV.

All of that is a complete, orderly picture of the estate as the executor has recorded it.

What sits outside it is every place the assets actually live: the brokerage portal, the insurer's claim page, the county recorder, the utility still billing a house nobody lives in, and the probate court's own docket.

A probate court publishes to its own page and tells no one

Give the estate file a way into those accounts and the year stops being a sequence of phone calls.

The court's docket checked each week, so the executor learns the day letters were issued or the inventory was accepted rather than a month afterwards. Creditor claim windows counted from that issue date, because the deadline that matters is the one the state set, not the one somebody remembered.

Brokerage and bank balances read and set beside what the estate ledger says, so a transfer that did not land is a question this week instead of a gap in the final accounting. Utility, phone and subscription accounts checked for what is still billing to a house that is being sold.

Heirs kept current on a schedule rather than whenever one of them calls, each sent the same position: what has been collected, what is outstanding, what the timetable now looks like. Documents owed by a bank or an insurer chased with the missing list attached.

Reading, comparing and drafting run unattended. Nothing is paid, distributed, filed with the court or sent to an heir except by the executor, and by the attorney where one is engaged.

Waiting on hold is not one of the duties

Neither is opening a docket page every Monday, or reading four statements to work out whether a transfer arrived. Those are clerical tasks with legal consequences behind them, which is the worst combination to leave to a tired person in the evening.

WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens the bank, the brokerage, the insurer's portal or the county's docket, reads what is on the screen, and sets it beside what the estate file says: what arrived, what has not, which deadline is next, what the heirs should be told.

It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, and anything that pays a creditor, distributes to an heir or goes to the court is prepared and held for you.

The workflows below are already built, and each one names the sites it opens.