What estate planning documents are required to create a client profile on Vanilla?

At a minimum, we recommend that you onboard clients who have dispositive documents (revocable trust and/or will). If your clients do not have these documents, you can use Vanilla’s document service to create the basic documents (revocable trust, pour-over will, health care directives, and power of attorney) they may need and that information will seamlessly integrate into the Vanilla platform.

Do I need an estate strategist in-house for a document review?

If your company does not have an estate strategist in-house, the Vanilla Estate Abstractions Services team will review your clients’ documents and transform them into the key pieces of data that become the Client Profile.

Do I need to manually enter all my client’s information into the Vanilla platform?

No, we currently have integrations with Black Diamond, Orion and Addepar so you can pull in your clients’ account information. Additionally, we have a CSV upload so you can pull information from a portfolio management system, financial planning tool or CRM and upload it to Vanilla.

Interactive estate visualizations

Q: Besides estate planning documents, what other information is required to onboard a client?

In order to create the most robust profile that provides a complete picture of your client’s estate, you need to provide the family information, financial data, and estate planning documents. Financial information includes bank accounts, stock portfolios, real estate, brokerage accounts, personal property (i.e. art and car collections), and retirement and accounts. With this information, Vanilla will be able to create the dynamic visualizations of the estate

Wow clients with interactive estate planning diagrams

Deliver comprehensive wealth management advice by turning dense estate planning documents into clear and dynamic visualizations

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“Vanilla provides our team with a complete estate planning solution. The visualizations make it easy to identify gaps and recommend areas for improvement.”

Jason Newcomer
Co-Founder at Dogwood Wealth Management

Replace dense documents with diagrams

Help your clients actually understand their plan with simple, dynamic visualizations like Plan Snapshot.

See who receives what and when

Beneficiary and fiduciary summaries help your clients ensure their planning matches their legacy goals.

Visualize how assets flow through the estate

See how asset distribute at the death of either spouse, estate tax estimates, and model future wealth with the Waterfall diagram.

Delight clients with a customized, brandable report

Build personalized reports for your clients that highlight the information that matters most.

Other features for visualizing estate plans

Estate Plan Diagrams

Share a comprehensive picture of your client’s estate plan

With estate planning flowcharts, advisors can have ongoing, differentiated estate planning conversations with their clients. Simple, dynamic visualizations update in real-time as the plan changes. View the details of trusts by assets, provisions, and fiduciaries, and see an estimated federal and state estate tax calculation.

Milestones

Create lasting relationships

Track past, present, and future milestones to show the journey of what you’ve accomplished and the roadmap of what needs to be done throughout the years. Continually add milestones by category and year to ensure ongoing estate planning conversations.

Balance Sheet

Unlock your clients’ entire financial picture

Build a summary of your client’s total wealth, specific details about assets by ownership, what’s inside versus outside the taxable estate, what’s liquid vs illiquid, detailed estate plan diagrams and the total estimated estate tax.

Educational Content

Educate your clients on important estate planning topics

With in-app help material, educational slides in the PDF report, and valuable workshops in Vanilla Academy, you can learn the ins and outs of estate planning and help your clients understand important planning concepts.

Family Tree

Capture the most important people to your clients

Show your clients a helpful flow chart of family members to ensure their planning matches their legacy goals.

“I’ve got a lot of very smart clients who are good at what they do, but there’s still a lot of education to do when it comes to things like trusts. Vanilla helps me show them how their entire estate looks today, and where their opportunities are in a way that they can more easily understand.”

Brian Adamek, CFP, CPWA, CVA, CEXP
Founder & President, E-Wealth Partners

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Frequently Asked Questions

Vanilla’s vision is to empower everyone to create a meaningful legacy. We do this by making it easy for advisors to have ongoing estate planning conversations with their clients with simplified, dynamic visualizations of the estate plan that can be updated as life events occur such as the birth of a child, marriage, divorce, etc.

Instead of interpreting legal documents and turning them into PowerPoint presentations or Excel spreadsheets, advisors can save time and reduce errors from manual work by inputting all of their client information into Vanilla. This data becomes the Client Profile and ultimately represents the estate plan. Many elements of the client profile are dynamic, so the effect of many changes can be seen in the estate plan.

Vanilla takes all of your client’s household information, financial data, and estate documents to create the dynamic visualizations of the estate plan. Financial information includes bank accounts, stock portfolios, real estate, brokerage accounts, personal property (i.e. art and car collections), and retirement accounts.

Advisors can create an on-demand, custom branded PDF report that they can share with their clients with all the information about their estate plans.