“Exit Goal” is now “Engagement Goal” (and customizable)

Not every engagement is an exit. You can now customize the goal per-client with the language you think is most correct. We’ve also renamed the default goal title (previously Exit Goal) to Engagement Goal so the label fits the work you’re actually doing, whether that’s succession, readiness, growth planning, or a full exit.

You’ll see the new wording on the dashboard and in settings wherever the goal showed up before. Same field, clearer language.

Sensemaking skills that better reflect your workflows

ELLA’s Sensemaking skills got a broad refresh. Several now work more like a conversation with a colleague than a rigid checklist — especially around revenue model, customer concentration, owner goals, and readiness.

What’s new to try:

Plan information gaps — work through missing business factors with ELLA and leave with a concrete plan: who to ask, which documents to pull, what to cover in the next conversation.
Post-meeting synthesis — drop in a transcript or notes and get context-aware takeaways tied to the business, plus prompts for what to dig into next.
Pre- and post-meeting workflows — clearer paths before a meeting (including when you’re already working with an owner) and after.
Readiness, valuation prep, financial hygiene, and buy-sell review — tightened so they lean on documents and fact-finding already in the workspace, and ask when something’s missing instead of guessing.

Try asking things like: “What’s still missing before we’re ready for valuation?” or “Synthesize my last meeting against this business.”

Mid-July Bugbash

Over the past two weeks, we’ve been at work picking through ELLA with a fine-toothed comb before we get back to new feature development — over 100 individual bugfixes, tweaks, and improvements. Some of these fixes have been rolling out over the last few weeks already, while others were included in a big push today.

Sensemaking Speed and Streaming Resilience

We’ve been focusing heavily on the experience advisors feel when using sensemaking. In particular, we’ve been focusing on:

Speed — research across business factors and documents should hang less and finish sooner.
Reliability — chat send/stop/mic states are more consistent, long replies scroll more cleanly, and interrupted streams are more likely to resume cleanly if your connection hiccups.

If Sensemaking used to feel “stuck” mid-turn or the send button flickered the wrong state, this release targets that. The experience using Sensemaking continues to be a focus, so please share your feedback with how you’re using AI chat.

Sensemaking Quality Review Controls

You can now thumbs-up or thumbs-down Sensemaking replies, and optionally leave a short reason. That feedback helps us improve answer quality without training on your client content.

There’s also a workspace setting to allow manual quality review of anonymized AI responses. When it’s off, vote buttons stay disabled with a clear path to settings. When it’s on, you can rate answers in context — and the quality-review prompt no longer sits as a permanent banner once you’ve already consented.

AI inputs and outputs are never used for model training, with or without this setting.

Additional Improvements and Fixes

General UI

Migrated icons from Lucide to Phosphor across the application for visual consistency
Added truncation for breadcrumbs in the top-nav
Simplified the new client animation and removed an unused "Goal" icon from business factor cards
Fixed positioning of the trial limit banner on the Add Client button
Removed an invalid CSS rule that broke brand color styling
Page subheaders (including Fact Finding) are more consistent
Editing client business info no longer fails when industry is unset.
Client logos: higher size limit, no infinite flash on failed image lookup from our logo provider, actions hidden when there’s no logo to show.

Fact Finding

Added an "Edit" button to the template preview drawer
Added a scope filter for fact-finding templates on the templates library page
Owner-guides sidebar polish: clearer naming, add-owner-guide, better empty states
Improved performance when switching between fact-finding guide screens

Settings

Fixed a spurious "saving" indicator on load for About This Engagement in settings and standardized AI Preferences and AI Memory on the same autosave pattern

Deliverables

Advisor cursors no longer show anonymous animal names during deliverable collaboration
Multiple improvements to Deliverables editing stability

Trust & Reliability

Further hardened document storage access so workspace files are more tightly scoped in how long a download link can be accessed, and by whom
Clearer error handling when something goes wrong server-side (including support-friendly error references)

Support, Docs, & Changelog —Right where you work

We've brought support into ELLA so you don't have to leave your workspace to get help, find answers, or tell us what you’d like us to build next.

Look for four new links at the bottom of the sidebar:

Chat with us
Message the ELLA team when something's unclear or you need a hand. Conversations stay tied to your account, so we can follow up with context.

Documentation
Browse help articles without opening a new tab or hunting through email threads. Start here when you're looking for how something works.

Give feedback
Share ideas, friction, and requests as you work. Feedback goes straight to the product team and helps shape what we ship next.

Changelog
See what's new in ELLA — features, improvements, and fixes — in one place.

Modular Fact Finding: a more organized workspace

This release lays the foundation for Modular Fact Finding, a clearer way to organize evidence, guides, and review across a client workspace.

We heard from many users that trying to cram all of the questions you may have for a business owner into a single fact‑finding guide created a messy workspace and didn’t reflect an advisor’s process. With this update, you’re now able to create multiple fact‑finding guides within each client’s workspace. You can break them apart based on each owner or different phases of your process.

When you open Fact Finding, you'll now see several options in the far left sidebar:

At the top is Review, where you're able to open up document ingestion and pull facts from each of the documents you've uploaded to this client's workspace.
Below that, you see Business Identity, which is a core group of questions that are relevant for any business you're working with.
Then, you’ll see Business Guides, which is where you can create or use fact finding guides that reflect on each phase of our process or change as the business matures over time, so everything stays organized.
We’ll soon be expanding this to offer Owner Guides, which allows you to create fact-finding guides specific to each owner, reflecting the personal elements of the advisory process that apply to an individual, rather than the firm as a whole.

All Changes

What's new in Fact Finding:

Dedicated fact-finding sidebar — Browse guides, documents, and related sections from a consistent left panel within fact-finding.
Sources page — Documents and evidence now live under a dedicated Sources area, making it easier to see what information ELLA is working from.
Guide management — Add, organize, and manage fact-finding guides directly from the workspace.
Review surfaces — New review flows to work through AI suggestions and factor hints before accepting them.
Business identity — A dedicated area to capture and review owner/business identity information.
Workspace notifications — Notification preferences are now accessible per client workspace.
Collaborator roles — Clearer collaborator types so you can distinguish how different people participate in a workspace.
Auditor access — Advisors can grant time-limited auditor access when external review is needed.

Transcripts & evidence:

Upload meeting transcripts — You can now upload .vtt and .srt transcript files as source documents.
Clearer transcript highlighting — When reviewing AI suggestions backed by a transcript, ELLA highlights the specific relevant passage so you can verify evidence faster.

Playbooks available in beta—reflect your firm's unique methodology

This is a beta feature. To enable, reach out to your account manager or open a chat in support.

Advisors and org admins can now bundle how they work into reusable playbooks, a set of templates and information that can be applied consistently across client workspaces.

At launch, we’re offering three capabilities, with more to come:

Template Library

Assemble the Fact Finding and Deliverables templates you use regularly and incorporate them

Methodology References

If you’ve developed your own materials, including books, worksheets, newsletters, or other proprietary materials, Playbooks allow you to access all the information contained within as part of the Sensemaking workflow, so your chats are grounded in your organization’s truth.

Using Playbooks

Build & manage playbooks (org library)

Create playbooks from a new Library section — name them, describe your approach, and keep them organized in one place.
Link templates: Connect fact-finding guides and deliverable templates to a playbook by reference (not copy), so updates stay in sync.
Upload source materials: Add documents, transcripts, worksheets, and other reference materials. ELLA indexes them so the AI can draw on your firm's IP during conversations.
Sample prompts: Add starter prompts advisors can tap to begin a conversation in your firm's voice and methodology (or just store your most frequently used prompts for easy access).

Use playbooks in client workspaces

"Use Playbook": From fact-finding or the workspace sidebar, apply a playbook to a client workspace in one flow.
Already-applied indicator: Playbooks you've already applied are clearly marked so you don't duplicate work.
Suggested deliverables: When a playbook includes deliverable templates, they're surfaced in their own section during setup.
Playbook-aware retrieval: When a playbook is active, ELLA will search its source materials alongside workspace documents to give more methodology-specific answers in Sensemaking.

Turn documents into insights faster with Document Ingestion

Fact Finding

Insight Generation

Turn documents into insights faster with Document Ingestion

Your client conversations are now first-class evidence. Upload a meeting transcript (.vtt / .srt) and ELLA reads it the same way it reads PDFs and spreadsheets.

ELLA suggests fact-finding answers drawn from what was actually said.
Every suggestion cites the exact moment in the conversation — including who said it — and clicking it jumps you right to that point in the transcript.
Transcripts are clearly badged in your documents list so you always know your source at a glance.
Quick inline previews for transcripts, plus .md and .txt files.

Bring your meeting notes into ELLA