Estate planning is one of those areas where the presence or absence of a few key documents can dramatically change a client’s financial life.

It is also one of those areas that can be hard to keep visible in an ongoing planning process. A client may have a will, but it might be ten years old. A trust may be important for one household and unnecessary for another. Beneficiary designations may be complete, outdated, or simply unknown. And for many families, the estate planning conversation is not a single yes-or-no question. It is a set of related items that deserve a clear status.

That is why we launched Estate Status, a new Element now available in beta through Elements Labs.

Estate Status is a checklist-based Element that helps advisors evaluate a household’s estate planning readiness.

The default template includes common estate planning items:

• Will
• Revocable trust
• Durable financial power of attorney
• Healthcare directive or medical power of attorney
• Beneficiary designations
• Guardianship provisions, where relevant

Each firm can customize this template to match the way it talks with clients. You can add items, delete items, rearrange the order, and adjust the weighting for each item.

For example, your firm may decide that a will should carry more weight than a guardianship provision for a particular planning framework. You can reflect that directly in the template.

Estate Status is available in Elements Labs.

Go to Firm Settings, open Elements Labs, and turn on Estate Status. It is off by default, so firms will not see Estate Status until they choose to enable it.

Once it is turned on, you will see Estate Status Templates in firm settings. From there, you can review the default template, adjust item weights, and set the firm’s target score.

Estate Status is designed to be flexible at the household level.

For each household, an advisor can mark each item as:

• Yes
• No
• Not applicable

Only applicable items count toward the score. Items marked not applicable are excluded from the denominator, which makes the Element more useful across different household situations.

Here is a simple example.

If a firm’s template assigns 25% weight to a will, 10% to a healthcare directive, 20% to durable financial power of attorney, and 20% to beneficiary designations, then those applicable items represent 75% of the possible template weight. If the household only has the will completed, the household earns 25% out of the 75% applicable weight. That produces an Estate Status score of 33%.

In other words, Estate Status is not asking every client to fit the exact same estate planning checklist. It gives advisors a shared framework while still allowing judgment for each household.

For each Estate Status item, advisors can add helpful context beyond a yes-or-no answer.

You can record notes, attach supporting documents, and set the last reviewed date. That means Estate Status can help answer practical questions like:

• Does the household have this document or decision in place?
• When was it last reviewed?
• Is there a copy or supporting file attached?
• Does this item apply to this household?
• What still needs follow-up?

Estate Status is not a substitute for legal advice or attorney review. It is a way to make estate planning readiness easier to see, discuss, and monitor inside the Elements planning workflow.

In this beta release, Estate Status appears in the main scorecard areas advisors use today, including the household view, full-screen scorecard, and website widget.

Because this is a beta release, it is not yet as feature-rich as some other Elements. We wanted to get the core workflow into advisors’ hands now so firms can start using it, test the template structure, and tell us what would make it more useful.

Over the next couple of weeks, we plan to add Estate Status to additional areas, including the One Page Plan, sorting, and filtering.

Estate planning conversations are often important, but easy to defer. Estate Status gives advisors a visible place to track the conversation and quickly see what is missing, complete, outdated, or not applicable.

For firms already using Elements to monitor a client’s financial health, Estate Status adds another practical layer: not just what a household owns, earns, spends, saves, and owes, but whether some of the key estate planning pieces are in place.

To try it, go to Firm Settings, open Elements Labs, and turn on Estate Status.

Then customize your template and start reviewing it with a household.