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.

AI-Powered Estate visualizations

Finally, an estate plan your clients actually understand

Deliver comprehensive wealth management advice by turning dense estate planning documents into a clear picture of how your client’s estate and wealth transfer plan actually works.

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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

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Instantly summarize estate plans with V/AI™

Get hours back in your day with V/AI, Vanilla’s AI engine. V/AI will read your clients documents, summarize them, and instantly create a draft estate profile for you. All you have to do is review the output, make any adjustments, and create a branded client deliverable.

Replace dense documents with diagrams

Help your clients understand the ins and outs of their plan with simple, dynamic visualizations like Plan Snapshot.

Visualize how assets flow through the estate

See how assets 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.

Let us do the work for you

Our in-house team of experts will handle the document review for you with Vanilla Abstraction Services.

Other features for visualizing impactful 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.

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.

Beneficiary & Fiduciary Summaries

See who receives what and when

Beneficiary and fiduciary summaries help your clients understand who will administer their plan and how it will impact heirs.

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.

Integrations and Imports

A quicker way to gather client information

Integrations with performance management systems and CSV imports with popular tools like eMoney eliminate manual entry and make it easy to bring in financial account data.

“If you can really understand estate planning and the ability to mitigate estate taxes, the amount of money you could save your clients from unnecessary estate taxes … is immense. That’s why I fell in love with estate planning, and Vanilla helps me bring that value to my clients.”

Zak Gardezy, CFP
Founder & Private Wealth Advisor, Wealthstone Private Wealth Management

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Discover more ways to use Vanilla

Tax Projections & Optimization

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On-Demand Estate Plans

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Guide

Vanilla Plan Snapshot

Guide

Vanilla sample report for non-taxable estates

Guide

Vanilla sample report for taxable estates

Client material

A guide to the 2026 federal estate tax exemption sunset (for clients)

Client material

The life insurance calculator, a guide for clients

Client material

Estate Planning Document Checklist

Frequently Asked Questions

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 invite them to consider using Vanilla Document Builder to create core documents (revocable trust, pour-over will, health care directives, and power of attorney) they may need, and that information will seamlessly integrate into Vanilla.

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. Your clients can also provide this information if you invite them to Collaborative Onboarding. Financial information includes bank accounts, stock portfolios, real estate, brokerage accounts, personal property (i.e. art and car collections), and retirement accounts. With this information, Vanilla will be able to create the dynamic visualizations of the estate plan.

If your company does not have an estate strategist in-house, you can use Vanilla Abstraction Services to abstract your clients’ documents…”clients’ documents and transform them into the key pieces of data that become the Client Profile.

Vanilla abstracts data directly from estate documents submitted by an advisor and enters it into Vanilla to visualize the key aspects of the client(s)’ planning. This includes document names, date of execution, governing law, specifically named parties (beneficiaries, fiduciaries, etc.), planning structure at death of client and spouse (if applicable), key trust provisions, and opportunities for additional planning. Vanilla Abstraction Services do not include abstraction or calculations of unsupported fact patterns, provide legal advice or determinations, offer tax advice or determinations, or make qualitative assessments of the documents.

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.

Yes, Vanilla takes all of your client’s household information, financial data, and estate documents to create the dynamic visualizations of the estate plan. Our AI engine VAI automatically reads a client’s estate planning documents and suggests key information that Estate Builder uses to create the estate diagrams and visualizations.