A client with one house, one brokerage account and a 401(k) gets a plan that stays true for years. A client with four LLCs, an S-Corp, a revocable trust and a loan between two of the companies gets a plan that is accurate on the day it is signed and drifts from the first week. Somebody forms a new LLC in March and never assigns it to the trust. Somebody refinances a property and the lender re-titles it out of the trust. Somebody repays half of an intercompany note and nobody updates the schedule that was attached to the plan.
This guide is for estate planning attorneys and for the business owners they serve. It covers what changes when the client owns several entities, how to fund a trust with LLC interests without breaking the operating agreements, how to treat the loans between the client's own companies, and how to keep the plan from drifting after the signing meeting.
Three things change. The assets are not accounts; they are ownership interests in companies, each governed by its own operating agreement with its own rules about transfer. The value is not on a statement; it is in the books of each company, and those books have to exist and be current for the interests to be valued at all. And the structure moves: business owners form, merge, sell and refinance, and each event changes what the plan covers.
The result is that a multi-entity plan is less a set of documents than a system: a map of what the client owns, the documents that move each piece, and a way to notice when the map changes.
Before drafting, the plan needs a diagram: every person, trust and entity, with the ownership percentage on every line. Who owns each LLC, and in what percentage. Which LLCs own other LLCs. Which one has the S-Corp election. Where the operating properties sit. Where the loans run. Most clients cannot draw this from memory, and most CPAs have it only implicitly across a dozen returns.
The map answers the questions the plan has to solve: which interests are transferable to a trust, which have other members whose consent is needed, which are S-Corp shares with restrictions on who may hold them, and which entities exist only to hold a note from another one.
A revocable trust that is not funded is a document, not a plan. For an LLC, funding means assigning the client's membership interest to the trust and recording the trust as the member. The steps are the same for each entity, and skipping any of them is how interests end up in probate anyway.
An LLC or corporation with an S election can only have eligible shareholders, and not every trust qualifies. A grantor trust, including the usual revocable living trust, is fine while the grantor is alive. After death, the trust has a limited window (generally two years) before it must qualify as a Qualified Subchapter S Trust (QSST) or an Electing Small Business Trust (ESBT), each with its own election and its own rules about beneficiaries and distributions. Get this wrong and the S election terminates, which is a tax event for the whole company and every other shareholder.
For a multi-entity client, the map should flag every S-Corp, and the plan should say which trust will hold it and which election will be made, before the signing, not after the first death.
A loan from the client's holding company to an operating company, or from the client personally to one of the LLCs, is an asset of the lender and a liability of the borrower. It has a balance that changes with every payment, and that balance is part of the estate. The problem is that in most client books it does not exist as a balance at all; the payments were booked as transfers and the note lives in a spreadsheet, or nowhere.
For the plan, that means two things. The loan has to be documented (a promissory note, an interest rate at least at the applicable federal rate, a schedule) so that it is an enforceable asset and not an argument. And the balance has to be current, so that the estate, or a buyer, or a court, knows what is owed. Our guide to loans between LLCs covers the documentation and the entries; for the plan, the point is that a note whose balance nobody can state is an asset nobody can value.
Every plan for a multi-entity client is a snapshot, and the structure keeps moving after the picture is taken. The typical changes in the first year: a new LLC formed for a new venture and never assigned to the trust; a brokerage account opened in the client's name instead of the trust's; a property refinanced and re-titled by the lender; a company sold, with the proceeds landing in a personal account; a loan repaid, or a new one made, with no note.
None of these come back to the attorney on their own. The client does not know they matter, and the CPA sees them a year later in the tax return. The fix is a review cadence tied to the client's books rather than to the calendar: whenever an entity is added, an account is opened, or an ownership line changes, the map changes and the plan should be checked against it. Practically, that means the attorney needs a current view of the client's structure, not the diagram from the signing binder.
This is the part HaraPro was built for. The client's entities, accounts and the loans between them live in one place, with the ownership map drawn from the books rather than from memory, so a new LLC, an untitled account or an intercompany balance that stopped matching shows up as a change, not as a surprise in probate. Attorneys who work with multi-entity clients can see how the map looks on the estate attorneys page.
Yes, if the operating agreement allows the transfer or the other members consent. The client assigns the membership interest to the trustee, the LLC admits the trust as a member, and the membership schedule and books are updated. Without those steps, the interest may pass economic rights only, or nothing at all.
Every LLC interest held personally and not moved into the trust is subject to probate. Some interests are deliberately left out, for example because a buy-sell agreement handles them, but that should be a decision recorded in the plan, not an omission.
Only eligible trusts. A grantor trust qualifies during the grantor's life; after death the trust must become a QSST or an ESBT within the allowed period, or the S election terminates.
The note is an asset of the lending company and a liability of the borrowing one, and both pass with the companies. If the loan was never documented or the balance was never tracked, the estate inherits an unenforceable claim of uncertain size.
Whenever the structure changes: a new entity, a new account, a sale, a refinance, a new loan. Calendar reviews every few years miss most of these, because the events happen between meetings.