Welcome to Vanilla Academy

The estate planning learning hub for advisors, attorneys, and planners

What is Vanilla Academy?

Vanilla Academy is your trusted source for estate planning information, from basic concepts to advanced strategies.
Each course has been designed by Vanilla’s planning experts, featuring first-hand insights and practical use cases.

Not only will you expand your industry expertise, you’ll learn tangible ways to bring better,
more holistic financial planning to your clients.

Continuing Ed Courses

Free expert-led courses, from the basics to advanced strategies

Tips & Tricks

Quick hitting tutorials on Vanilla workflows and features

Downloadables

Guides, whitepapers, and checklists to reference at your convenience

Featured Courses

CE Credits

Tips & Tricks

FAQs

Estate planning software helps financial advisors, lawyers, and individuals analyze existing estate plans, identify gaps, calculate potential federal and state estate tax liabilities, and create new planning documents such as trust, wills, power of attorney, and healthcare directives. It can automate many of the manual tasks involved in estate planning, such as drafting documents, calculating taxes and waterfalls, and building visualizations to explain how the plan works.

Advisors need estate planning software because it can help them:

Provide better service to their clients by helping them create comprehensive and effective estate plans.
Understand their clients balance sheet and total net-worth.
Create a deeper connection to the client and their goals.
Retain assets by creating a connection with the second generation.

Estate planning software can help advisors educate clients about estate planning and build trust and rapport through using a modern, interactive experience.

Estate planning can be complex. The right estate planning software will simplify the process for the advisor, attorney, and client. It will streamline onboarding and turn dense documents and legalese into easy-to-understand diagrams. Estate planning software can help with estate strategy and scenario planning and even create legal documents. To better understand how to evaluate estate planning software, download our buyer’s guide.

Estate planning software should help users do four things – organize and visualize a family’s existing plan, strategize potential opportunities, offer online document creation, and create a collaborative online space for accessing current estate plans and documents. Estate planning software needs to account for complex fact patterns, multiple types of trust documents, state and federal tax laws, and have a robust reporting engine.

Estate planning software also needs to be easy to use, integrated to other financial technology systems, secure, and offer best-in-class customer service.

Vanilla’s estate planning software is available today for wealth management firms and law firms, priced based on each firm’s individual needs. Please contact sales for a custom quote.

Yes, Vanilla can help with tax planning as part of its estate planning software. It can help advisors calculate the potential federal and state estate tax implications of each client’s current estate.

Vanilla is used by many attorneys. It helps streamline client onboarding and shows clients how even complex estate plans work with easy-to-understand visualizations. The Vanilla platform also enables attorneys to play out how various legal and financial instruments will impact an estate plan in the future.