Put A Name On Every Dollar They Leave Behind.
The Beneficiary Report rolls up every designation across every account and policy onto one page — who receives, in dollars, not percentages — and shows the accounts where no one is named at all. Five minutes of a review. Occasionally the most valuable five minutes of the year.
Built and used every week by Micah Shilanski and Matthew Jarvis, the advisors behind The Perfect RIA.
“It's On File” Is Not An Answer.
Ask who inherits the accounts and most households point at the custodian. The custodian points at forms — filled out in a lobby years ago, scattered across institutions, written in percentages nobody has looked at since. Meanwhile the family kept living: weddings, births, divorces, deaths. The forms held still the whole time, and the forms are what count.
The on-file answer
“Handled.”- Designations were set the day each account opened, then never seen again.
- They live in five logins across three custodians.
- They are percentages on forms nobody prints.
- Life changed — the marriage, the birth, the falling-out. The forms did not.
- “Is it handled?” gets a shrug and a to-do that never happens.
- The will says one thing. The 401(k) says whoever filled it out in 2009.
The report answer
In dollars- “Your IRA goes to Diane: $1,672,918.”
- “Danny is contingent on that account for the same amount.”
- “And these two accounts — $2,172,073 — have no one named at all.”
- Every account and every policy, rolled up on one page.
- Blank cells sit right beside named ones. Nobody misses them.
- It gets fixed in the meeting, not filed under someday.
Figures from SurgeTK's demo household, where $2,172,073 — more than half the household — sits in accounts with no beneficiary named. Every delivered report computes from the household's actual accounts and policies.
Who Gets What, And What Has No Name On It.
Totals per person up top, account-by-account detail underneath, and nothing hidden in an appendix — drawn from the household's actual accounts and printed under your logo. Here is the heart of the page.
A simplified excerpt, using the demo household. On the delivered page, primary and contingent totals sit above this detail, header rows tint per household member, and your logo, title and disclaimer frame the page. The blank cells are the point.
- Primary beneficiaries, totaled
- A summary table of every primary beneficiary and the total dollars they receive across all accounts and policies.
- Contingent beneficiaries, totaled
- The backups get the same treatment — named, totaled, in dollars.
- Dollars, not percentages
- “Fifty percent of the trust” becomes $564,175. Numbers a client can react to are the ones that get fixed.
- Account-by-account detail
- Each household member's accounts, with every beneficiary, their type, their percentage and the exact dollars each would receive.
- The blanks stand out
- An account with no designation prints with empty cells beside its full value. No warning icon needed — the void does the work.
- Insurance included
- Life policies roll in alongside the investment accounts, with dollars computed on face amount.
- Every account that matters
- 529s, custodial accounts, inherited IRAs and plain brokerage all appear. This report exists to catch what other reports skip.
- One person, one row
- The same beneficiary synced three different ways folds into a single row with a single total, however the custodian spelled them.
- Reported as of
- Every figure carries the date the account data was reported, tied to the header's asterisk.
- Live until you freeze it
- The report recomputes when account data changes, and every delivered version is saved as a timestamped snapshot with your meeting notes.
It Finds What Everyone Assumed Was Handled.
Most households believe their beneficiaries are settled because somebody, at some point, filled something out. The report replaces that belief with a page: every designation, every dollar, every gap, reviewed in minutes once a year.
Dollars make it real
Percentages get a nod. “Your brother receives $892,574” gets a correction — today, in the meeting, while the advisor who caught it is sitting right there.
The blank cell is unmissable
You never have to say “you really should review your designations.” You slide the page across and point at the account with money and no name.
It is pure planning value
Nothing on this page depends on markets. In a flat year, it may be the clearest proof that the fee bought something an index fund never could.
Your team runs it, not you
Designations flow from the custodian sync or keyed entry, duplicate spellings fold into one person, and the page assembles itself before the packet goes out.
The Form Outranks The Will.
Estate attorneys draft, clients sign, everyone exhales — and a twenty-year-old account form can still quietly route a fortune around the entire plan, because designations transfer by contract, not by probate. They are the cheapest thing in a client's estate to fix, and the least reviewed.
Every advisor has heard the story of the account that still named the wrong person. This report exists so the story gets caught in a review, not discovered by a family.
The report rolls up designations across every account and policy, computes each person's dollars from current values, and prints the gaps exactly as they are — blank. Set your title and disclaimer once in Settings; there is nothing else to configure.
A Fixture In Their Own Surge Calendars.
The beneficiary review is one of the original Perfect RIA Value-Adds: minutes to deliver, and every so often it saves an estate. SurgeTK turns it from a good intention into a page a team produces for every household, every year, without the advisor in the loop.
It rides in the Surge Packet next to the Homework Sheet, the net-worth statement and the retirement-income one-pager — the same packet, in the same order, for every household on the calendar.
Running it annually is the point. Designations drift — new accounts, rollovers, life. A one-time cleanup decays quietly; a standing page in every packet catches the drift the year it happens.
SurgeTK is built by The Perfect RIA, the team that popularized Surge and Value-Adds and teaches them to advisors across the country.
Run It On A Household You Think Is Fine.
The Beneficiary Report is not for the messy households. It is for the ones everyone assumes are handled. The test costs one household and five minutes of a review.
Have your team enter one household by hand.
Accounts, values, and the beneficiaries on file — primary and contingent, with their percentages. Manually, just the one. Importing at scale is a conversation for later.
Open the household. The rollup is already built.
Totals per person, detail per account, blanks where blanks exist. Refresh recomputes it whenever the data changes.
Slide it across the table.
Watch where the client's finger lands. It finds the blank cell before you say a word. That conversation is the Value-Add.