Vanilla

May 13, 2026

Print Share

What’s New in Vanilla: Our Latest Product Update Recap

If you missed our most recent product update webinar, here’s a full rundown of everything we’ve shipped in 2026 — plus a preview of what’s coming next.

Our Product Marketing Specialist Jess walked attendees through the updates organized around the three commitments that guide everything we build: AI that elevates you, confidence in every client conversation, and getting you faster to the moments that matter.

AI That Elevates You

Tax Return Prompt for V/AI

V/AI, Vanilla’s proprietary AI, already generates comprehensive estate summaries from client documents. This year we added a dedicated tax return prompt to the Custom Prompt Library. Upload your tax document, and V/AI produces a structured summary with income sources, marginal brackets, Schedule D gains, and more. The output is consistent across clients, which means less time scanning PDFs and more time in the planning conversation.

Source Verification for V/AI Estate Summaries

When V/AI generates an estate summary, advisors can now trace any insight back to the exact page and passage it came from — in one click. Click the green sparkle icon next to any insight and the source PDF loads directly to the relevant section. No more manually hunting through documents to verify where a detail originated. It also makes it easier to keep your team aligned on the facts before a client meeting.

Confidence in Every Client Conversation

Charitable Planning in Vanilla Scenarios

Vanilla Scenarios — our planning strategy and modeling tool — now supports Charitable Lead Annuity Trusts (CLATs) and Charitable Remainder Unitrusts (CRUTs). This has been one of the most-requested additions from advisors, and it’s finally here.

When configuring a CRUT or CLAT, you can set annuity amounts and unitrust percentages, define terms and beneficiaries, fund the scenario from a balance sheet asset or a specific dollar amount, and designate a charitable beneficiary. The scenario is then contrasted against the baseline estate in Vanilla’s summary and waterfall views — projected out to the client’s life expectancy — so you can walk a client through the real financial difference charitable planning makes. You can also stack multiple strategies (add a CLAT on top of a CRUT, for example) within a single scenario. Broader strategy coverage means you can show up to more client conversations with more to offer, deepening your relationship and the value you deliver.

Balance Sheet Row Grouping

Complex estates generate dense balance sheets. To make that data easier to navigate, we added row grouping — the ability to consolidate related assets or accounts into a single collapsible line item with a custom name. Drag assets into a group, collapse it for the high-level view, expand it to see underlying detail. Running totals display when the group is collapsed; individual ownership breakdowns appear when it’s open. This enhancement helps you organize complex data with ease.

Balance Sheet Multi-Ownership

Previously, ownership options were limited to client, co-client, or joint. Now you can assign precise percentage-based splits to any account or asset across multiple owners. For the most common scenarios, it defaults to a 50/50 split for fast data entry, but you can get as granular as the actual structure requires. Each owner’s share automatically populates into their respective balance sheet column, making it easy to understand the ownership split at a glance. 

Estate Diagram Overhaul

The Estate Diagram received its biggest upgrade yet. We merged Plan Snapshot functionality into the Estate Diagram and added a meaningful set of customization options. You can now:

• Toggle display of funding amounts, tax liabilities, fiduciaries, and highlights
• Filter the view to inside or outside the taxable estate, or isolate a specific trust
• Click any entity to access provision notes and inline document viewing without leaving the diagram
• Drag and reposition nodes in editor mode
• Add custom notes and highlights on top of existing information
• Export your Estate Diagram customizations directly into the PDF report, so your client deliverable matches exactly what you have in Vanilla

When your visuals adapt to the conversation rather than forcing the conversation to adapt to them, every client meeting runs more smoothly.

Faster to the Moments That Matter

Baseline Sync for Vanilla Scenarios

When client data changes — updated balance sheet values, a new family member, revised income and expenses — you previously had to manually update each scenario strategy to reflect those changes. Now there’s a sync data button in Vanilla Scenarios that propagates all updates from the client profile into the baseline and every existing strategy at once. No rebuilding, no manual re-entry. If your firm uses a balance sheet integration, those asset value updates can now flow directly into scenarios as well. Baseline sync helps you keep every scenario accurate, so you can walk into every client conversation with the most current picture of the estate.

Revamped Client Overview Page

When a new client profile is created, the client overview page now has clear next steps front and center: generate a V/AI summary (with a prompt to upload documents), invite the client to Vanilla Document Builder, complete a profile builder questionnaire, or send an Estate Health Check survey.

For existing profiles, the overview page now displays a live AI-generated summary of what’s in the estate, a “what’s next” action panel, and a tracker that displays questionnaire progress. Getting to a meaningful first planning conversation as quickly as possible is one of the most important things you can do for a new client relationship. These updates make that easier than ever.

Integration Infrastructure Upgrades

We’re rebuilding the foundation of our integrations to be faster, more scalable, and more capable of granular data mapping. Two integrations have already moved to this new infrastructure:

• Addepar — The upgraded integration supports customizable ownership and attribute mapping, and syncs data with greater granularity than before.
• Salesforce — Released last week, this is a book of business integration that links client records across Vanilla and your CRM so both systems share one source of truth. It supports custom fields — something our previous Salesforce integration didn’t offer — and syncs family information across your entire firm when the integration is set up.

Coming Soon

A few things to keep an eye out for: new strategy types in Vanilla Scenarios, significant updates to V/AI, an overhauled PDF report builder, and additional integration upgrades.

Watch the full recording of the webinar here.