Deliverables are collaborative documents you build inside ELLA, either internally or for your clients. They’re the plans, summaries, and assessments that take shape over the course of an engagement. Today, a deliverable is best understood as a working draft and a shared space to develop that draft, not a finished, formatted document you hand off at the end. It is where a plan starts to come together and where you, your team, and the client can work on it in one place.
This article explains what deliverables are, how they fit into the rest of your work in ELLA, and the ideas worth understanding before you create your first one.
ELLA is built around three capabilities that work together: Fact Finding, Sensemaking, and Deliverables. They are not separate stages you complete in order and leave behind. You move between them as the engagement calls for it.
In practice, that means you can be drafting a deliverable, realize you need to check something, ask a question against the client's full context, and pull the answer directly into the document you were working on. The draft and the thinking behind it stay in the same place, so you are not moving an insight out of one tool and into another, which is where detail and accuracy tend to get lost.
Because a deliverable draws on the context already in the workspace, the work you did during fact finding and sensemaking carries forward instead of being redone.
It helps to set expectations about what a deliverable is right now. ELLA is not producing a final, polished, presentation-ready document. What you get is a draft that starts from the real facts and context in the workspace rather than a blank page, and a place to shape that draft as your thinking develops.
The value at this stage is in having the document and the reasoning behind it live together, connected to the client's actual situation, where you and your team can build on it directly. Turning a strong draft into a finished, formatted document is still your work to do, and formatting and polish are areas we are actively developing.
You remain in control of the content throughout. ELLA helps you get to a working draft faster, but the judgment about what to include, how to frame it, and what to recommend stays with you.
Every deliverable starts from a structure. ELLA provides a set of built-in starting points so you are not beginning from nothing, and each one is a starting point rather than a fixed form.
You can use a default as-is, adjust it for a particular client, or build your own. If your practice has a way of laying out a valuation summary or a value-acceleration plan that works for your clients, you can shape a template to match it and reuse it across engagements. Templates you create belong to you and your team, and you can refine them over time as you learn what works.
Exit engagements usually involve more than one advisor. A CPA may handle the tax analysis, an attorney may review a buy-sell agreement, and a financial advisor may stress-test retirement projections. In ELLA, these collaborators work inside the same client workspace, so a draft can reflect the whole team's input without documents being emailed back and forth.
Each workspace is sandboxed, and permissions are customizable, so the people you invite see what they need to and nothing from other clients or engagements. When you finish one client and move to the next, there is no bleed of confidential information between them.
The business owner is often a participant in the work, not only the recipient of it. Because a deliverable is a shared draft rather than a finished handoff, owners can review it as the engagement progresses and contribute the context that only they have. Involving them while the plan is still taking shape tends to produce a better result and a more engaged client.
You decide what an owner can see and when, using the same permission controls that apply to the rest of the team.
