Emergency access · included on Family

Someone you name can open the documents you shared.

Usually this is not about dying. It is about being in a hospital bed, or in a country with no signal, or too ill to go looking for a policy number that somebody at home needs today.

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On KuduDoc Family — R99 a month for a household of up to five.

When it matters

Four ways to be unreachable

Three of them are temporary. That is the point: the person who cannot get to their own documents is usually going to be fine, and still needs someone else to find the paperwork this week.

You are in hospital

Admissions wants the medical aid number and the member certificate. You are not in a position to look either of them up, and the person standing at the desk has never seen your filing system.

You are too ill to go looking

You are at home and you are not dying, you are just not able to work through a drawer, four email accounts and an old laptop to find the policy schedule. Someone offers to help and there is nothing to hand them.

Nobody can reach you

You are on a flight, out of signal, or somewhere your phone does not work. A deadline lands anyway — a claim, a transfer, a renewal — and the document that settles it is on your phone.

You have died

The least common of the four and the one everyone thinks of first. The family is not trying to take over your affairs; they are trying to establish what existed. Which policies. Which bank. Whether there is a will and where it is kept.

Why we built it

The papers usually exist. Nobody else knows where.

476 751

Deaths registered in South Africa in 2023.

~1 in 3

Roughly the share that went on to become a formally reported estate.

The rest

Families working out what existed from whatever arrived in the post.

Most of those two-thirds are not estates that were hidden or disputed. They are small ones, where the paperwork never got as far as the Master's office because nobody could assemble it. A funeral policy nobody could name. A pension the employer had to be asked about twice. A bank account found because a statement arrived.

Almost everyone has watched some version of this. A family at a kitchen table, going through a drawer, trying to remember the name of an insurer. The documents were not lost. They were just somewhere only one person knew about, and that person is the one who is not available.

Deaths registered: Statistics South Africa, Mortality and causes of death in South Africa, 2023. The proportion reaching a formally reported estate is an approximation from Master of the High Court reporting volumes against registered deaths — it is a rough figure and we have written it as one.

What it actually is

A permissions row. We would rather say so.

Underneath, emergency access is one row that says: in this household, this is the person to go to. It took very little to build and it costs us nothing to run. That is not a reason to treat it as a small feature — it is the reason there is no excuse for not having one.

What it does is narrow on purpose. The documents you put on the household shelf stop being reachable by one person only, and one named person becomes the one everybody understands is meant to go and get them. Each time somebody opens one it is written down. Nothing more than that — and it is worth saying plainly that the row is a designation, not a lock. It records who should act. It does not stand between anyone and the documents.

The line we do not cross

An emergency contact can open the documents you choose. It does not give them authority over your estate or your affairs. It is not a will, not a power of attorney, not an executorship, and not a step towards any of them. Who deals with your affairs is decided by the law and by whatever you have arranged elsewhere. This only means that when that person needs the paperwork, somebody can find it.

How it works

You choose the person, and you choose the documents

The list is the control. What you put on the household shelf is what they can open; everything else in your shelves stays yours alone. You can change your mind, swap the person, change the list, or cancel it entirely, at any time.

1 You put the documents that would be needed on the household shelf A specific set — the life policy, the ID, the medical aid certificate — chosen one at a time. Everything else in your shelves stays yours alone, and nobody in the house can see it. Take one off the shelf and it stops being visible immediately.
2 You name the one person who should go and fetch them This records who that is. It is a designation, not a lock — the shelf is readable by your household from the moment you share something onto it, and that includes the person you named. Naming somebody is how everyone knows, later, who was meant to handle this. We do not send them a message about it; that is a conversation to have yourself.
3 They ask, and you have 24 hours to decline Naming them opens nothing. They ask from their own account. You can decline, or grant it at once. If you do neither, access opens when the 24 hours are up — so it still works if you cannot answer. Read-only, and the Vault is never included.

Your nominee can

Read the documents you put on the household shelf
Download a copy, sealed and checkable like any other
Show that copy to a hospital, an insurer or a bank

Your nominee cannot

See anything you did not share, ever
Change, delete or send anything
Sign on your behalf, or act for you in any way
Take over your account, or lock anyone else out
Reach anything in Vault — that is locked with a key we do not hold

See how you nominate someone See what the nominee sees

What to choose

The short list most people end up with

You do not have to hand over everything, and most people should not. These are the documents somebody actually gets asked for.

To get you treated

Medical aid membership certificate and number, the main member’s ID, a chronic medication list if you have one, and any advance directive you have written.

To make a claim

Life and funeral policy schedules — the schedule, not just the policy number. Short-term insurance. Gap cover. The documents that name the insurer and the sum, because the number alone is not enough to start a claim.

To prove who you are

ID or smart card, birth certificate, marriage certificate and any antenuptial contract. These are the ones a bank, an insurer and the Master’s office will each ask for separately.

To keep the house running

The lease or the bond statement, the municipal account, and the vehicle licence. Nobody thinks of these until a debit order bounces or a car has to be moved.

To find the rest

Your most recent pension or provident fund statement, and a bank statement. Not for the balance — for the name of the institution, which is the thing nobody can remember.

Where the will is

A note saying which firm or bank holds the original and under what reference. Not the will itself. A will is a legal instrument with its own rules about custody and validity, and this is not the place for it.

Questions

The ones worth asking

No, and it matters not to treat it as one. Emergency access lets somebody reach specific documents if you cannot. It appoints nobody, grants no authority over an estate or anything else, and replaces no legal arrangement. If you want to decide who handles your affairs, that is a separate thing to do properly, with somebody qualified to advise you.

Yes. Anything on the household shelf is readable by your household from the moment you put it there, and that includes the person you named. There is no request to make and no delay to wait out — and no system that could tell a real emergency from a false one, which is why we have not pretended to build one. The list is the control, so choose it that way: share the set you would be comfortable with them reading on an ordinary Tuesday, because that is exactly what they can do. Every time somebody opens one it is written to that document’s audit trail, so you can see who read what and when.

Then nothing has to happen at all. The documents you shared are already reachable, and the person you named goes and gets them. That is the case the whole thing is built around: nobody is waiting on an answer you cannot give. It is also why the list should be the short practical one above rather than everything you own — the set someone can open in your absence is the same set they can open while you are here.

No. Vault is encrypted with a key that never leaves your device, so there is nothing for emergency access to open and nothing for us to hand over. That cuts both ways and we would rather be plain about it: anything you put in Vault is unreachable by your nominee too. If a document needs to be findable in an emergency, it does not belong in there.

Name one person. Choose the documents.

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