10 Simple Best Practices: Capture Your Client's Unique Current Plan

In my twenty plus years in the industry, I’ve worked with just about every type of advisor and institution on how to get the most out of their planning software. This gives me a unique perspective of the wants and needs of clients and advisors for their digital planning experience. I have put together a series of best practices for maximizing the benefits of financial planning software. These steps are simple and time tested. I am presenting them in the order of the planning process, not in order of importance.

2. Capture your Clients Unique Current Plan

The current financial plan is an often undervalued part of the financial planning process. It is often treated as simply a box that must be checked off before moving forward, but approaching it with this attitude is a huge mistake. Most financial planning processes could be greatly improved by paying attention to the specifics of the Current Plan and how it should emulate the life of the client to the best of the software’s ability.?Sadly, traditional FPS has mostly been built as an investments repository, so it is not equipped to capture this level of real life detail. The Current Plan is an art and requires expertise.?With the right approach and the right software, the details of the client’s unique current plan will offer massive opportunities in engaging the client and demonstrating value.?

Financial Planning Software has always used scenarios as its operational foundation.?The client's existing financial situation is modeled and then compared to an alternative with one or more recommendations. Though it is often overlooked as such, the current plan is probably the most powerful scenario an advisor will explore with a client. The current plan represents the client’s life right now, so the opportunity for a high level of emotional engagement is at its peak. Furthermore, the current plan shows what the client is doing for themself,?without?expert help, so it provides a baseline to demonstrate the value of any advice the advisor offers for the duration of the plan.?

In terms of the future, the focus should be based on the unique details of the client’ s life. Advisors often spend too much time working on building hypothetical investment portfolios when they could be focusing on the client’s individual needs, goals, and expectations. Again, the design of traditional software is partly the reason for this. PlantechHub, however, accounts for the many things that can change in a person’s life in the next 25 years. Data input issues that come standard with the traditional planning experience are usually very limited on their future assumptions:?How much income do the client and co-client bring in annually???Most technologies assume it never changes, which is completely unrealistic in the world we live in today.?Do you hope to leave your current career and start a business???This would simply be impossible to add to a plan in traditional FPS.?Will you be moving in the future??One typically can only assume once and that's at retirement.?That won’t work in a post-covid time when so many jobs can be done from anywhere. The list goes on and on. At the end of the day, potential changes in location and income are the kinds of things that make a plan come to life and will keep a client engaged in the process long term. PlantechHub is currently the only software on the market that can account for the true complexity of real life financial planning.

The current plan carries enormous weight in the mind of the client and in our planning process because it represents the success of advisors’ advice.?Capturing the details of clients that make their lives unique will provide an increase in scenarios to provide advice. Ultimately, the advice given and/or implemented will be housed in the Current Plan. The more the plan resembles the client’s real life, the more engaging it will be. Engaging the client long term must be the goal for sustained success, but it will require advisors who want to give more advice and a software that is powerful enough to accommodate them.