Beneficiary Reporting: A clear picture of “Who receives what and when?”

"What happens when I’m not here?"

For many clients, managing their wealth is about more than investment strategies and asset growth – it’s also about ensuring their legacy is preserved and distributed according to their wishes. At the heart of their concerns is often a desire for clarity about what will happen when they’re gone.

Beneficiary reporting is a crucial part of the estate planning process, providing clients and the next generation a clear picture of who will receive what. It can help clients understand whether their current designations align with their goals, and ensures that the people and causes they care about are taken care of according to their wishes.

Advisors lack the tools for efficient beneficiary reporting

Despite its importance, beneficiary reporting remains a challenging and time-consuming task for advisors. Estates often include a mix of trust structures, insurance policies, accounts, and assets – each with its own rules for beneficiary designations. Consolidating and analyzing this fragmented data is labor-intensive and error-prone, and advisors lack the tools to easily integrate this information into a comprehensive report. Without a purpose-built solution, advisors are left to rely on manual processes, such as inputting data into excel spreadsheets to estimate what a beneficiary has received or is expected to receive over time.

A new way to visualize and quantify beneficiary distributions

Luminary’s Beneficiary Report provides a clear and quantified view of how much each individual beneficiary or organization is expected to receive. With this new report, users can analyze how much beneficiaries are expected to receive during the grantor’s lifetime – by consolidating beneficiary data from documents, hypothetical transfers, and gift logging – and upon the grantor’s death through dispositions. This comprehensive view answers key questions your client may have, such as:

• How much are each of my children expected to receive?
• Is the amount going to charity sufficient?
• What will my spouse have access to when I die?

Two ways to report to your clients

Luminary offers advisors two report views for beneficiary information.

A comprehensive overview:

The Beneficiary Overview report consolidates all beneficiary data into an impactful visualization, providing a summary of key metrics that are important to your clients, including:

• The total amount the surviving spouse will receive at the first death.
• Total distributions to family, charity, or other entities after both deaths.
• A summarized breakdown of who benefits from the estate plan and by how much.

View by Individual Beneficiary:

Users are able to drill down into the details with the Individual Beneficiary view, which provides a granular analysis for each beneficiary. This report illustrates:

• Access to assets: A breakdown of what the beneficiary can access during the grantor’s lifetime.
• Distributions: Quantifies the amounts received at death events or via beneficiary distributions.
• Gifts and transfers: Total amounts via logged gifts on Luminary, including both hypothetical transfers and from the gift tracking tool.

Luminary AI extracts key beneficiary information for you

Creating Beneficiary Reports for your clients is seamless with Luminary. Use existing beneficiary data previously input into the platform, or let Luminary AI’s powerful data extraction handle the heavy lifting. By leveraging Luminary AI, you can eliminate manual data entry and ensure accuracy of your information.

Simply upload client documents, and Luminary AI will extract nuanced details to power beneficiary reporting, including access parameters with notes, scheduled distributions with notes, Power of Appointment with notes, and general notes for the beneficiary.

See Luminary’s Beneficiary Reporting in Action

This innovative solution enhances transparency, simplifies complex estate plans, and empowers advisors to align wealth distribution with client goals.

Contact our sales team for a personalized demo and experience the full process firsthand – from AI-powered data extraction to seamless Beneficiary Report generation – all in real time. 

FAQ

When is it best to use the beneficiary report view?

The Beneficiary report can help answer common questions advisors hear from their clients when discussing their estate plan including: how much will my surviving spouse receive or have access to after first death, what will remain for family or charity after both death events, who are all the beneficiaries in my estate plan.

How do I share the beneficiary view with my clients?

The Beneficiary Overview is automatically included in Luminary's presentation builder and can be exported into PDF format to easily share with clients as a takeaway. Furthermore, you can customize their presentations in Luminary by adding or removing any pages.

Can I use the beneficiary view to show how market conditions impact the outcomes for each of my kids?

Yes, you can include your assumptions within the estate waterfall (e.g. death year, growth rates), to see projected impact on the results in the Beneficiary view. This provides you with the tools to create more personalized presentations with just a few clicks.