Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the firm,
Not a loss was un-harvested, not even long-term.
Reports were uploaded to portals with care,
Right next to newsletters with good news to share.

The clients were pleased with their tax assessments,
With visions of goals and model investments.
My partner and I, after giving a greeting,
Had just settled in to a new client meeting.

When out in the hall there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from my chair to see what was the matter.
Away to my netbook I flew like a flash,
Double-clicked on Google Chrome, fearing a crash.

The browser popped up and loaded GMail,
The subject said “Open for tools that will scale.”
When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But cutting-edge technology, with Morningstar and G-Sphere.

I questioned if loading was seamless and quick,
I’ve tried this before, they just don’t do the trick.
“Yes,” the message read, “all your problems we’ll tame,”
It listed CRM tools and called them by name!

“Now Redtail! now, Salesforce! now, Zoho and Junxure!
On, Ebix! on, Goldmine! On eMoney and ProTracker!
To document notes! to provide instant recall!
Now aggregate! Aggregate! Aggregate all!”

Aggregation tools provide data to feed,
No more manual entry, meeting my need!
And into PortfolioCenter it flew,
CashEdge, Advisor Exchange, ByAllAccounts, too.

And Advent, Principia CAMS, are those unknown?
“No,” it read, “we also support Cornerstone!”
As I sat back in my chair, and was turning around,
Through my door came a consultant with a bound.

“I’ll streamline your practice, grow profits,” he vowed,
“I’ll even move documents out to the cloud.”
A bundle of web apps like none I had seen,
NetDocuments, Docupace; no paper means green!

“What if I want something locally hosted?”
“No problem, my friend, I’ll get to it,” he boasted.
“Installed on your server, where speed is the key,
Try Laserfiche, Sharepoint, or CabinetNG.”

“Rebalancing with spreadsheets leads to a mess,
Have you tried TRX or Rebalance Express?
Over thousands of trades you’ll surely corral,
Use TradeWarrior, Tamarac, or iRebal.”

I asked about Twitter, LinkedIn and social tools,
“Aren’t they just time-wasters and only for fools?”
“Not entirely,” he said, “but be cautious,
Satisfying compliance can make you nauseous.”

“Rules on Web 2.0 compliance are harsh,
so backup your tweets with Arkovi or Smarsh.
While they’re tools you can use to market for free,
don’t run afoul of FINRA or SEC.”

“For true backup, use offsite storage for files,
when you lose a hard drive, you’ll still be all smiles.
Egnyte, Mozy, Dropbox, EVault, Carbonite,
help avoid business continuity fright.”

Before I could thank him, he left through the door,
Even with so many tips, I still yearned for more.
He left no trace but for this note on my website,
“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night!”

---

Hope you enjoyed the poem. Merry Christmas from my family to yours.

Enjoy FPPad.com? Get FPPad updates via RSS or get updates by Email

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009 at 4:40 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.