Review Process
From Planipedia
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In our industry, probably one of the greatest dilemmas advisors face is being able to provide interesting, compelling and motivating reviews that clients actually look forward to. In the past, doing a review normally just meant that you re-did the plan itself and presented the revised document to your client, highlighting any adjustments in the client’s strategy.
While this was important in order to keep the clients on target to achieve their goals, it often was repetitive and perhaps even boring for both the advisor and the client.
Our new Review and Accountability process has stepped up to the plate to address all of these challenges when it comes to doing a review for your client. An additional benefit is that we also recognize the fact that both the client and the advisor have areas of accountability where they are responsible to make sure things happen as planned. Let’s take a look at some of the highlights of the new Review Process!
When doing a plan for a client, you are creating a “picture” or “snapshot” of that client’s financial situation at that point in time. Ideally you would then want to measure the client’s progress between that point in time and the next review.
That is precisely what the new Review And Accountability Process is designed to do. When you create a plan for your client, you'll have the ability to save the data as of that date to use for comparison purposes when doing future reviews. This is done by going to the “Review Benchmarks” screen where you'll see your “Today” data presented in summary form on the “Snapshots” tab and in more detail on the individual tabs for Net Worth, Cash Flow, Savings, etc.
When you go to each individual tab you’ll have the ability to make observations in the “Notes” field and these notes or observations will become part of your review document.
You also can expand out the “Planning Scorecard” section if you would like to provide your client with some feedback on how well they have done since their last review.
When looking at the example above you’ll note that we have three sets of data available for comparison. Since we can’t create a snapshot of data from previous years after the fact, we have also provided an “Add Manual Snapshot” screen where you can enter some key data about the client’s previous reviews in summary form.
Here’s an example of our “Manual Snapshot” screen. You’ll note that the first tab allows you to capture the date of the review. In the example we saw above, we actually saved data from the 2009 and 2010 plans that were done for the client.
The Net Worth tab allows you to capture all of the key information about the client’s assets, liabilities and savings.
And on the cash flow screen you can capture information about the client’s income and taxes.
By entering information from previous plans done for the client, you effectively can start using the review process right away with your clients. You don’t have to wait a whole year to get a second snapshot for comparison purposes. Just use the current data for the client and put in summary details from their past plans and you can start to see progress and trends right away. You might even have done your previous review using some other software tool since the manual snapshot captures information that can typically be gleaned from any financial planning tool you might have used in the past.
Also, some of the tabs such as the Savings, Debt Management and Investments also allow you to do an accountability analysis where you can see how the clients have progressed when compared with what their plan called for. Did they save what they were supposed to save? Did they pay down the debt they were supposed to or perhaps take on more debt? What about their investments, did they grow as much as was called for in the plan? All of these areas have aspects of accountability that your clients are responsible for and some where you, as their advisor, have some accountability.
