For Lawyers
Flow Estate is estate administration software for New Zealand law firms. Each estate has one record that feeds the plan, the deadlines, the High Court forms, the notices and the accounts, and the executor works on the same record.
What your firm gets
From the first meeting to the final distribution
Set up and intake
- Create an estate with the deceased’s details, will status and Matter ID, and upload the death certificate and will.
- Invite the executor by email. Send them an intake form for property, accounts, insurance, shares, vehicles, firearms, digital assets, debts and IRD details.
- Review the executor’s answers item by item and import the ones you have checked into the estate.
Assets and discovery
- An asset register by type: property, bank accounts, KiwiSaver and shares, vehicles, insurance, firearms and other items. Firearms are flagged as controlled items with a task to report and dispose of them.
- A checklist of the deceased’s online accounts and what is happening to each.
- An NZ asset discovery checklist (IRD, KiwiSaver, banks, insurers, ACC, MSD, LINZ titles, PPSR, Companies Office, insolvency register, unclaimed money, crypto) with links to the public registers and draft letters.
- Liabilities, and property and liability check results (LINZ, PPSR, Companies Office, insolvency) on the estate.
Plan, tasks and deadlines
- An estate plan of tasks chosen from the estate’s facts and dated from its key dates: the date of death, lodging and grant. Change a date and the plan re-dates itself.
- Statutory deadlines for each estate, and across all your estates on the dashboard, each with its Act and section: the creditor notice claim deadline (Trusts Act 2019 s 79), distribution protection period, Family Protection Act and Testamentary Promises Act periods, the PRA election, and the final tax return.
- Assign tasks to lawyers, legal staff and executors, with due dates and status.
Court forms, notices and letters
- High Court forms PR1AA, PR1 and PR7, filled from the estate record and generated as PDFs.
- A probate pack: pre-filing checks against the estate’s forms and documents, then one PDF with the forms, numbered exhibits and exhibit notes in filing order.
- Creditor notices: prepare and approve the notice, send it to Stuff and NZME, download the Gazette pack, and upload proofs of publication.
- Bank notifications: a formal notice emailed from your firm’s name with the death certificate attached, and a record of each one sent.
Money
- A ledger of income and expenses, paid and unpaid, exportable as CSV and PDF.
- A balance sheet at a date, as a PDF statement or CSV.
- Distributions by equal shares, percentages or fixed amounts, worked out from one distributable figure that the ledger, balance sheet and distributions all share, with payments recorded.
Your firm
- Firm views across all your estates: estate inventory, valuations, controlled items, tax, High Court applications, document sharing and analytics (estates by stage, overdue tasks, time per stage).
- Reports to download as CSV: the estate register, asset inventory, overdue tasks and tax summary.
- An audit log of activity on the firm’s estates, for the firm owner.
- Firm team: the firm owner invites the firm’s lawyers and adds the firm’s logo.
People and access
- Roles per estate: one person can be the executor on one estate and a beneficiary on another, and sees only what each role allows.
- Legal staff roles (preparer, notifier) for the parts of an estate their job needs.
- Notifications in the app and by email, with a morning email for tasks due or overdue. Each person can turn emails off.
- A Help Centre with a guide for each feature, and a glossary of estate terms.
The screens you'll use
Captured from the product with a made-up estate and firm.
Coming soon: AI document intake
Upload the will, death certificate and institution letters, and Flow Estate suggests the estate's details for you to check. Nothing is saved until a lawyer accepts it. It is in pilot and not yet switched on for firms.
Connecting your other systems
A read-only Cases API and a Zapier connection are available on request. There is no direct connection to practice management software yet.