Templates · Family trusts

Co-trustees aligned. Beneficiaries informed.

For co-trustees running an established trust. Many tools focus on the creation phase — drafting documents, structuring entities. Fewer build for the operational phase that follows: the years of distributions, beneficiary communications, and discretionary calls after the attorney hands over the binder. EnDAO is the governance and ledger layer for the trustee team — discretionary distributions on the record, beneficiaries kept informed, the institutional memory preserved across generations.

Quick answer

EnDAO is the ongoing administration layer for established family trusts — not a trust formation or estate planning tool. Co-trustees use it to record every distribution decision with approvals and rationale, give beneficiaries a ledger view configured to their interest level, and preserve the institutional memory of the trust past any individual trustee's exit. Trustees remain the fiduciaries under the UTC; EnDAO helps them discharge the duty to inform and account without email threads or paper binders.

What this looks like

A page from one trust’s ledger.

The Jones Trust · 3 co-trustees

Q1 2026
Jan 28Quarterly income distribution · 4 beneficiaries−$24,000.00
Feb 14Discretionary distribution · grandchild tuition−$18,500.00
Feb 22Investment income · brokerage account+$42,800.00
Mar 18Trustee fees · quarterly−$3,200.00

After the attorney hands you the binder

What goes wrong in trust administration, and what the ledger fixes.

Trustees inherit a binder of legal documents, a brokerage statement, and a duty to coordinate with siblings across cities — often forever. The trust deed tells them what they can do. Nothing tells them how to do it together, or how to leave a record the next trustee, the IRS auditor, or the grandchild-beneficiary 20 years out can actually use.

What goes wrong

  • Co-trustees in different cities approving distributions over text with no audit trail
  • Discretionary distribution decisions strain family relationships when the rationale isn’t recorded
  • Beneficiaries have a legal right to information but no clean channel to receive it
  • When a trustee resigns or dies, the successor inherits a shoebox of PDFs
  • Twenty years on, a grandchild-beneficiary can’t reconstruct why the trust did what it did

What EnDAO does

  • Every distribution decision recorded with who approved, when, and why
  • Discretionary calls captured with the trustee’s rationale on the record
  • Beneficiary-visible ledger configurable per beneficiary class
  • Successor trustees inherit the full decision and distribution history
  • Append-only record that survives any individual trustee’s exit

What’s built in

The things every family trust needs, already there.

Shared ledger

Every contribution, every spend, every approval recorded once and visible to all members.

Decision thresholds

Set what fraction of members must approve before money moves. Change it any time with the same vote.

Membership records

Who is in the group, when they joined, what they contributed. Members can leave; the record remains.

Notifications

When a decision needs you, when a contribution arrives, when a transaction is approved.

Works for

All kinds of family trusts.

  • Revocable living trusts (post-settlor)
  • Irrevocable family trusts
  • Dynasty trusts
  • Special needs trusts
  • Generation-skipping trusts
  • Charitable remainder trusts (CRTs)
  • Family LLC holding-entity trusts
  • Marital and bypass trusts

Common questions

Questions trustees ask first.

Does EnDAO replace our trust attorney or CPA?
No. EnDAO does not provide legal advice, does not draft or amend trust documents, and does not file fiduciary tax returns (Form 1041). Those remain with your attorney and CPA. EnDAO records the decisions trustees make so that the attorney has clean documentation and the CPA has clean records when they need them.
Can EnDAO hold the trust’s assets?
No. Custody of the trust’s underlying assets stays with the trust’s bank, brokerage, or custodian. EnDAO records the decisions trustees make about those assets — distributions, investment direction, trustee approvals — but the assets themselves remain at your custodian.
Can beneficiaries see the trust ledger?
Configurable per beneficiary class. Income beneficiaries entitled to regular distributions can see the mandatory side without seeing discretionary deliberations among trustees; remainder beneficiaries can have a different view; trustees see everything. The defaults are set at trust setup and adjustable.
What happens when a trustee resigns or dies?
The successor trustee gains access to the full decision and distribution history — every approval, every rationale, every distribution recorded going back to setup. There is no shoebox of PDFs to reconstruct. The institutional memory of the trust outlives any individual trustee.
Is EnDAO a fiduciary or trustee service?
No. EnDAO is software. The human trustees named in the trust deed remain the fiduciaries with all the duties that attach (loyalty, prudence, impartiality, duty to inform and account). EnDAO helps them discharge those duties; it does not assume any of them.
How does this compare to WealthHub Solutions or True Link Financial?
WealthHub is a trust-officer CRM and workflow tool designed for professional corporate trustees managing many client trusts. True Link is built around the beneficiary portal — particularly for special-needs trusts and controlled-spending debit cards. EnDAO is the co-trustee coordination and decision record layer for family trustees: joint approvals, discretionary rationale on the record, beneficiary visibility configured per class. The tools serve different principal-agent configurations. Individual human trustees who need to coordinate with each other and keep beneficiaries informed are EnDAO's audience.
Does this work for charitable, perpetual-purpose, or special-needs trusts?
Yes — the substrate is the same across trust shapes (multi-trustee approvals, distribution records, beneficiary visibility, audit trail) and the governance documents differ per shape. Charitable trusts add donor-restriction enforcement; perpetual-purpose trusts (Patagonia / Holdfast Collective shape) add the mission-protection clause; special-needs trusts add beneficiary-spending controls. Reach out and we'll set up the right configuration for the trust you're running.

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