August 13th, 2008 Bill Winterberg
Yesterday I responded to a question on the Financial Planning Magazine online discussion boards about running tax illustrations and comparisons using Excel.
A few years ago I came across Glenn Reeves’ Excel 1040 tool. This is a handy and fairly comprehensive tool based in Excel that does a good job performing many of the common calculations that populate Form 1040. Included are worksheets to enter W-2 income, Form 1099 distributions, Social Security, Schedule B Interest and Dividends… the list goes on and on.
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August 12th, 2008 Bill Winterberg
I wanted to address a recent article by David Drucker in August’s Financial Advisor Magazine titled Keeping the Lines Open. Here’s the important section (my emphasis added):
Also basic but often overlooked are commonly accepted rules for an effective client e-mail. Says Gregory, you maximize its effectiveness by making sure your e-mail has a compelling subject line, is tightly written and edited, is addressed and targeted to one client at a time and is designed with a lot of white space, which makes the e-mails easier to read by allowing you to compose them in a noncluttered, eye-inviting manner.
“But Bill,” you might say, “I’d love to send out personalized and targeted emails to all of my clients, but with 250 clients, it would take many hours or even a full day.” Instead, I can imagine what “targeted” emails advisers might be sending now:
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June 19th, 2008 Bill Winterberg
Previously I wrote about creating a desktop shortcut icon to open an Outlook email window to avoid opening the entire Outlook program. My instructions included a switch option ( /c ipm.note ) to invoke the message window.
The /c switch is just one of many command line options when running Outlook. I found a nice concise list of the various command line switch options to perform specific tasks using Outlook.
While most are not nearly as useful as the new message window switch, I like having a reference to this kind of information just in case I need it in the future.
Click here for the list of Outlook command line switch options (opens in new window)
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June 17th, 2008 Bill Winterberg
In my previous post today I blogged about only accessing Outlook three times during my day to reduce distractions. Then I realized that even though I want to keep the program closed, I want to be able to send messages to clients and coworkers.
On a side note, let me say that I try to keep the messages I send to others concise and relevant for the recipients. Nevertheless, my role and responsibilities require that I send out confirmations and notifications on internal matters such as security transactions, fund receipts and disbursements, and the occasional status update.
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May 21st, 2008 Bill Winterberg
Schwab Institutional recently announced updates to its online Portfolio Rebalancer utility. In response to feedback from advisers, Schwab added several new features to the rebalancing tool.
Holding Information View
The first feature added is the ability to view holding information for a client either by account or in aggregate from the primary step. This option saves a few clicks so the user can quickly identify the relevant holdings for any given client.
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May 16th, 2008 Bill Winterberg
Lifehacker.com recently announced Mint.com has added investment tracking to its list of features. A highly requested and attractive feature, investment tracking should dramatically increase this service provider’s already rapid adoption in the market.
Mint.com is a free online personal finance management application that users can configure to track expenses by aggregating transactions from checking, savings, and credit card accounts. Now that investment accounts have been added, Mint.com is getting closer to a complete personal finance product to compete with the likes of computer-based (as opposed to web-based) Quicken and Microsoft Money. Note that Quicken does have an ASP-based product of Quicken Online, free for 30 days, then $2.99/month thereafter.
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May 12th, 2008 Bill Winterberg
At the end of April, Charles Schwab and Texas Tech University announced the creation of a Schwab Technology Complex on the University’s campus, and also named Danielle Winchester as the first Schwab Research Scholar.
Click the link to view the Charles Schwab and Texas Tech University press release.
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April 15th, 2008 Bill Winterberg
During the production of our quarterly reports earlier this month, I discovered an interesting property of our portfolio management software (PMS), dbCAMS+. The reports delivered to clients include a variety of information including a report showing the time weighted rate of return (TWR) for asset classes and the portfolio as a whole.
TWR Primer
Essentially a TWR report eliminates the effect of cash flows into and out of an investment and simply identifies the return of the underlying asset. Since cash flow is negated, TWR has become a useful measure when comparing investment managers’ performance, as they cannot control the inflow and outflow of cash within their managed assets.
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February 11th, 2008 Bill Winterberg
Coming from the software industry, I had a mandatory introduction to the world of version control software (VCS). Essentially, version control is the concept of securing and archiving many versions of the same file in a multi-user work environment. However, version control shouldn’t exist solely in the domain of software engineers. In fact, financial planning firms can benefit tremendously from implementing a form of version control.
How it works.
First and foremost, VCS provides the ability to manage multiple versions of the same piece of information. Software engineers use it extensively as bugs are corrected in source code and new comments are added that describe functionality or identify subroutine procedures.
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February 8th, 2008 Bill Winterberg
Several weeks ago I spotted the Microsoft Across America RV in the parking lot of our building. There was no way I was going to let a free opportunity to see some of the new technology Microsoft is selling go by. After a quick lunch, I headed out to their setup.
Inside their demonstration RV, they were featuring a few kinds of business technology, namely their LiveOffice website tools (complete with free domain names, web site, and email accounts) and the quick-scan business card reader. Although what impressed me the most was their demonstration of OneNote.
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