Jessica Lantz

Feb 28, 2025

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What’s New in February: Advanced Calculators, Streamlined Document Creation, and More

February brings exciting enhancements to the Vanilla platform, with new features designed to support advanced planning techniques and make document creation easier than ever. Here’s what you can expect:

Make starting the estate conversation easier than ever 

The latest evolution of Estate Health Check arrives with an improved advisor landing page to help enable clients and prospects access Estate Health Check more easily. This comprehensive update revolutionizes how advisors engage with prospects and clients and identify planning opportunities, featuring:

• Facilitate conversations with personalized discussion topics based on client inputs
• Branded public links for seamless prospect and client outreach
• An enhanced advisor dashboard for tracking submissions and results
• Automated results delivery without requiring account creation

Simplify tax planning with new CLAT & CRUT calculators

Our newest addition to the Vanilla Calculator suite transforms how advisors explain charitable trusts to clients. The new Charitable Lead Annuity Trust (CLAT) and Charitable Remainder Unitrust (CRUT) calculators turn complex planning concepts into clear, actionable insights. These powerful new features enable advisors to: 

• Dynamically model both CLATs and CRUTs
  • CLAT – Charity first, family later
  • CRUT – Family first, charity later 
• Calculate tax benefits and long-term charitable impact 
• Analyze wealth transfer opportunities across multiple scenarios 
• Present clear visualizations of charitable and family benefits

Simplify the document creation process with Vanilla Document Builder updates

We’ve made several improvements to streamline the document creation process, and make it easier to find your next step:

Enhanced Invite Status Tracking

• No more lost invites – now see your client’s last activity right from the All Clients list
• When you click Invite to Document Builder, we’ll surface the last activity for more visibility

Letter of Wishes

• Clients creating trust packages will now be prompted whether they want to create a Letter of Wishes as an add-on to their revocable trust
• A Letter of Wishes is an optional, nonbinding document that can give trustees more detail about how trust funds should be distributed
• Learn more about Letters of Wishes here

Abstract estates automatically through Vanilla Document Builder

• We’ve moved where you find auto-abstraction for your clients’ plans 
• Once your client’s documents have been delivered, you can trigger auto-abstraction right from Documents in Progress

Looking Forward 

We’re building the future of estate planning, one feature at a time. Everything we build aims to help you work smarter and grow faster. We’re excited to see how these tools transform your practice in 2025.

Ready to explore these new features? Contact your customer success manager to learn more about how these tools can transform your practice, or get a demo.