This month I tackle the issue of the constant back-and-forth messaging in which advisors often engage to schedule meetings with clients and colleagues. There is a better way!

Click here to read “A Simpler Way to Schedule Meetings” at Morningstar Advisor.

Earlier today I received an alert that Fiserv, Inc., a financial services technology solution provider, announced its acquisition of AdviceAmerica and will add the company to its Investment Services unit.

Click here to read the press release from Fiserv.

Overall, I liked ClientVision for its simpler user interface and easy learning curve. After all, ClientVision integrated inside Microsoft Outlook, so if advisors know how to navigate Outlook, they can navigate ClientVision.

The press release didn’t mention ClientVision specifically, but I assume that the CRM will continue to be supported under Fiserv’s management.

Let’s hope that the folks managing ClientVision can throw in that global search feature that I talked about in my review. That combined with the low price point would make a capable entry-level CRM for many advisers.

Moulton Strategic Partners was one of the first companies to customize Salesforce, the popular SaaS CRM tool, and offer it to advisors under the XLR8 label.

I haven’t yet found a website for Concenter Services, LLC, but its CEO, Mary Ferguson, maintains a profile on LinkedIn. Click here to view it.

Below is the full text of the announcement from Concenter:

Concenter Services has purchased assets of Moulton Strategic Partners including XLR8, a dynamic, customizable CRM designed for Financial Advisors and Wealth Management professionals.  The team at Concenter Services is dedicated to providing unparalleled service to ensure that you can provide even more value to your clients.

XLR8 was introduced more than 4 years ago and is a successful and well-respected CRM.  Concenter Services is committed to making XLR8 the most effective and cutting edge CRM tool on the market, while strengthening our affiliation with Salesforce.com, as well as our current and prospective Business Partners.

Look at our recent XLR8 integrations as well as some exciting upcoming enhancements:

NEW INTEGRATIONS

• Now fully integrated with Finance Logix
• Now fully integrated with Advisor Products’ Personal Clients Portal®
• Plans for even more Financial Planning and Portfolio Management Softwareintegrations!

UPCOMING 2010 ENHANCEMENTS

• XLR8 2010.1 release (2nd quarter) – Numerous enhancements include: new Custom Tabs (Insurance Coverage, Security Records, Suggestions), Entity/Contact and Asset/Liability improvements, new Report Library and Dashboard, and integrated Work Flow
• Improved Pricing structure
• Additional third-party integrations
• Document Management consulting services
• Even more Customizable Features
• More Consulting solutions

Your XLR8 team is here to support you and will strive to deliver products and services that keep you focused on delivering value to your clients.

Mary Ferguson
CEO

I could spend a few paragraphs explaining how to install the bookmarklet and how it makes reading stuff on the Internet easier, but allow me to let the pictures tell the story.

So, out of the two identical articles below, which one do you want to read?

This?

Or this?

Enough said. Now go get Readability.

Here’s one recent example.

December’s Financial Advisor magazine features a write-up of PaperPort Professional v12.0, reviewed by Joel Bruckenstein. In the review he says:

…its ease of use, low cost and robust features make it an attractive option for smaller advisory firms with limited technology and training budgets.

and…

For the price, PaperPort provides a great deal of functionality.

Sounds fairly promising. For $199, advisers can get an entry-level document management and scanning solution that provides some of the basic functionality needed to implement a paperless office. What’s not to like?

Turn over to Amazon.com to buy the product, and right off the bat PaperPort Professional v12.0 is marked down 30% to $139.99. But wait a minute: Customer reviews of 2 out of 5 stars is troubling. So what gives?

Some of the highlights from Amazon.com reviews include these gems:

The OCR [Optical Character Recognition] is not improved since 11.2 … It still does not OCR accurately when it is a pdf document.

Over all, IMO, the “improvements” to PaperPort 12 aren’t. The pretty new face is nice, but that’s not enough of a reason to get the program.

However, potential purchasers of Paperport 11 or 12 need to know that there is a copy protection Docucom Watermark that may intermittently show up on your pdf files made with Paperport – making them unusable.

So the OCR engine is unimproved and buggy, version 12 seems improved only cosmetically, and there’s a Docucom watermark on scanned images? In my experience, accurate OCR and watermark-free images are essential in any document management solution worth its salt.

These drawbacks definitely seal the deal for me: I don’t recommend advisers look to PaperPort Professional v12.0 as a potential document management solution.

Make no mistake: I’m not bashing Joel’s review in Financial Advisor magazine. PaperPort does facilitate scanning, it offers a file manager, and it’s cheap compared to other solutions on the market.

But unfortunately, with the low price comes some significant shortcomings that I believe fail to meet most adviser’s expectations in a quality document management solution.

I finally got around to reading the October edition of Forbes magazine and saw Lee Gomes’ Digital Tools column.

Click here to read Forget Disruption. Dive Deep Instead on Forbes.com.

The point of the column is how Dropbox programmers worked extremely hard to tackle some very difficult code, yet the result is a simple and elegant program that just works. Once you “get” the concept of Dropbox and start using it, you wonder how you ever lived without it.

The beauty of Dropbox is there’s nothing to think about. You don’t need to read a manual. Dropbox just runs in the background, synchronizing files, backing them up, and even tracking revision changes, all without requiring user intervention. When something bad happens to files stored on Dropbox, you’re happy it’s there to rescue you (often from your own stupidity after “accidentally” deleting your latest market commentary newsletter).

How does this apply to financial planning and wealth management? Think of the many systems involved in an adviser’s practice, all with varying levels of complexity. I receive many questions about which program is the best for CRM, document management, or any of the other core adviser systems, and I often gravitate to the same answer.

The best program is the one that just works, where advisers don’t have to think to get work done or capture information. The best tools have extensive programming under the covers, but feature an elegant, simple, and easy to use interface.

Think about this when contacting vendors and VARs about the latest and greatest adviser tool. Does the program “work?” Or are you required to follow a myriad of cascading tabs, nested menus, and button clicks to access what should be core functionality?

One of the tools I recommend in my productivity presentation is a service from Dropbox. Dropbox is a utility that synchronizes all files stored in the Dropbox folder on a computer with any of your other computers where the software is installed. It also has a web interface to browse, view, and download the files stored in the folder. The first 2GB of data stored on Dropbox is free; additional storage is available for a nominal fee.

When I checked in a few minutes before presenting my productivity session, I had a problem. The staff couldn’t find my slide materials on the presentation laptop. I did bring my laptop to the event, but it was in my hotel room at the opposite end of the facility, requiring a round-trip of at least 10 minutes.*

Instead, I pointed the laptop’s browser to the Dropbox website and logged in to my account. I selected my presentations folder and downloaded the latest version of my presentation, as Dropbox is always keeping my files synchronized across my computers.

In less than a minute, I went from crisis mode to crisis averted, and started the presentation right on time. It’s one thing to say how useful Dropbox can be to advisers, but providing real-world examples really drives the concept home.

*Yes, I could have carried a USB thumb drive with my slides, but thumb drives get lost and it takes extra time to make sure files on the drive are up to date.

Isn’t Junxure on version 8 now?

Full coverage of the releases is provided by Davis Janowski at Investment News.

ProTracker Advantage is a CRM system originally developed by Warren J. Mackensen, a fee-only planner in Hampton, N.H., for use in financial planning and wealth management firms.

In my opinion, ProTracker is a suitable CRM solution for advisers who seek a system with a lower learning curve than competitors and one that is not hosted over the Internet (and subject to service interruptions and less-than-realtime performance). Although one drawback of locally-installed programs is that someone must perform the update to the latest version!

Read the full press release on the Ebix Inc. website and read E-Z Data’s statement to SmartOffice customers on its website.

Today, Tamarac Inc., best known for their SaaS rebalancing solution, announced the release of its Tamarac Advisor® 9 platform (coverage from InvestmentNews). This platform expands on the company’s rebalancing offering to include the following technologies:

• Advisor Rebalancing & Trading™ – the latest version of the flagship rebalancing application
• Advisor Performance Reporting™ – a new custom reporting application that can use data from Schwab Performance Technologies® PortfolioCenter® and ByAllAccounts to generate a variety of client reports.
• Advisor CRM™ – a new CRM built on Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM and tailored for financial services, all with the look and feel (and easy learning curve!) of Microsoft Outlook.

In addition to these built-in applications, Advisor 9 offers direct integration with PortfolioCenter and MoneyGuidePro’s financial planning software for those advisers who license the programs.

Tamarac Spins Off Outsource Group

For firms who wish to outsource such tasks like daily account reconciliation or quarterly billing, Tamarac is also unveiling a new service group called Tamarac AdvisorServices™.  AdvisorServices can perform many of the routine tasks of portfolio management that can suck up a day’s worth of time from employees, such as trade reconciliation, allocation tolerance monitoring, and generating ad-hoc performance reports.

The really cool thing about AdvisorServices is that for those advisers who use PortfolioCenter, AdvisorServices converts the desktop-based application into one that is hosted on the web. As a result, advisers will be able to view portfolio data in PortfolioCenter wherever they have Internet access, without having to deal with VPN or remote connections (e.g. GoToMyPC and others) to office systems.

So makers of other integrated solutions like Fidelity’s WealthCentral, Adhesion’s WealthADV, and Interactive Advisory Software should pay close attention to Tamarac. In my opinion, Tamarac is poised to quickly conquer the competition and become the industry standard in integrated software for independent registered investment advisers.

CagedTweets is another utility that captures and archives comments posted on Twitter. Customers have three options of service depending on the number of Twitter accounts to be archived. Archiving of one account runs $50 and covers 3 years of service (I think), ten accounts runs $100, and firm-wide archiving runs $500.

Unfortunately their website does not have a demonstration of how the service works, nor is a free trial offered to test the service. Yet I have to hand it to the folks behind CagedTweets; they are offering this service through rapid development after being inspired by an April 27 Wall Street Journal article on compliance requirements involving social media.

Still, I’m inclined to endorse LifestremBackup over CagedTweets for two main reasons. First, the former tool features connections to other social media services in addition to Twitter, and second, the service is offered for a very similar price as CagedTweets.

However, according to their website, users who sign up for CagedTweets before the end of July will receive free archiving for all social media applications added to the service.

Check out CagedTweets through this link.

(Hat tip to @jrueckert for mentioning CagedTweets to me)

If you’re in the local vicinity, I encourage you to sign up for what I hope will be a very informative presentation.

Click here to visit the FPA of Mid-Oregon meeting page.  Cost is just $55 for FPA members, $65 for all others.

Pre-registration (at least 24 hours in advance) is strongly advised for all chapter meetings. To pre-register contact the Chapter Executive Director, Linda Barba at (541) 284-9855. Please leave your name, membership status, sessions attending, and number of guests.

This is my first in-depth review of an application targeted for financial advisers.  Please post your comments on things like image quality, layout, and descriptions to help me improve the review process.

After exchanging several tweets with Bradd Delmuto (@bdelmuto), I attended a demonstration of AdviceAmerica, Inc.’s new ClientVision CRM utility.  Bradd was very helpful in coordinating a live demo with Gary Kinghorn, director of product management for AdviceAmerica.  Gary walked me through many of the features of this new program that I’ll share with you below.

First, some background.  AdviceAmerica has been around since 1999 and financial advisers may recognize the company for its AdvisorVision product, a web-based financial planning software tool now in its 7th major release.  For more on the company’s AdvisorVision offering, read Joel Bruckenstein’s review in the November 2006 edition of Financial Advisor Magazine.

Update: AdvisorVision 7.0 was reviewed in July 2009 by Joel Bruckenstein in this Morningstar Advisor article.

Do Advisers Need Another CRM?

ClientVision is certainly not the first adviser-targeted CRM solution, but it is the first to be tightly integrated into Microsoft’s Outlook 2007.  This is a clever integration strategy by the company.  Since Outlook is so ubiquitous in the PC world, a large number of advisers already use the program for much of their client’s basic information management (see more about Financial Planning’s 2008 software survey), despite its significant shortcomings.  What ClientVision aims to do is enhance the functionality of Outlook by incorporating some smarter CRM-style features that are easy to use.

ClientVision Basics

ClientVision is a web-based CRM product, so all data entered into the system is stored, maintained, and backed up by AdviceAmerica’s network of servers.  However, unlike most popular web-based CRMs, ClientVision isn’t used through a standard web browser.  It is integrated into the Outlook 2007 Contacts utility.

To enter ClientVision’s interface, users must first open an existing contact record in Outlook.

Then the ”CV” icon in the toolbar can be clicked to retrieve the contact information stored over the Internet from the ClientVision system.  This opens the ClientVision Personal Information screen where much of the same contact details are displayed, although ClientVision supports more data than Outlook’s main window.  For example, ClientVision accepts the client’s date of birth, employment status, Social Security Number, tax filing status, and also equivalent spouse or co-client information.

How are the contact details kept in sync between Outlook Contacts and ClientVision?  Good question.  ClientVision supports both a manual and an automatic synchronization routine.  At any time data can be manually synced between the programs, or users can specify an automatic synchronization in any increment of minutes.

What I didn’t verify is which system takes precedence for data.  I suspect ClientVision data takes precedence, so if a client phone number changes, it should be updated in ClientVision and then synchronized to Outlook Contacts, not the other way around.

ClientVision Financials

ClientVision menu holds a whole host of items that expand the functionality of the program

Buttons are defined to display data such as risk assessments, liabilities, expenses, goals, income, assets, and life insurance.

The asset information is particularly useful as it can be used to quickly display the client’s security holdings and show stock and mutual fund details.

New positions can be added directly from the assets window or through one of the supported custodian interfaces through ClientVision’s “data adapters” to avoid manual entry.  There are around 5 such adapters with popular custodians/data aggregators including Pershing, Albridge, and DST FANMail.  While useful for quick snapshots of asset information, advisers are likely to continue to use separate Portfolio Management Software systems to maintain detailed cost basis and investment return information, so I don’t imagine ClientVision will take the place of other PMS systems anytime soon.

Activity History

Probably the most useful feature enhanced by ClientVision is the ability to log activity history for a client.  Activity history can be used to record information regarding activities such as phone calls, meetings, emails, etc.  Emails are easily saved to a client’s record by using the ”Send to CV” icon in the Outlook toolbar.

Other client activity information can be added directly within the activity view.

In addition to activity history, ClientVision also supports electronic document storage.  Most standard file types are supported and are easily uploaded to ClientVision.  Uploaded documents are identified by predefined categories of Will, Financial Plan, Insurance Policy, Trust Document, Power of Attorney, Account Application, Beneficiary Designation, Tax Document, or Other.

Currently there is no defined storage limit to documents uploaded to ClientVision, but I imagine as more users begin to use the storage feature with large files, AdviceAmerica may revisit its policies on storage limits in the future.

Miscellaneous Features

ClientVision also integrates with the Outlook Tasks interface, so it provides a way to view all tasks associated with a client and also view to whom the tasks are assigned.  Outlook task categories can be used to replicate some of this functionality, but anyone that has tried to standardize category naming conventions in a practice knows this is a difficult proposition.  Note that current functionality stops at simple tasks and does not extend to workflow management, so if an adviser’s new client intake process consists of 14 separate tasks, they must all be entered manually in ClientVision.  Still, ClientVision’s interface makes task management much more, well, manageable.

ClientVision also offers an array of built-in client reports.  These reports include Portfolio Holdings, Cash Flow, Current Asset Mix, Financial Overview, and Net Worth.  Client-formatted reports can also be generated by the system.

Lastly, as the program is web-based, ClientVision offers access to all data contained in the system through the use of a web browser.  Advisers can securely access any information stored within ClientVision by signing in to the program over the Internet.

Cost

Pricing for ClientVision is very straightforward.  At the time of this post’s publication, AdviceAmerica charges $399 per year for the standalone application (note: users must also have Outlook 2007 installed).  Advisers who currently use AdviceAmerica’s AdvisorVision can purchase the ClientVision upgrade for $199 per year.

Feature Requests

ClientVision certainly expands the existing Outlook Contacts functionality into a more CRM-like application.  But there are several features not currently present that may leave advisers wanting more.

First, an integrated client appointment and calendar interface would be extremely useful.  Many adviser offices currently use the Outlook Calendar to schedule client meetings, staff meetings, and professional events since it can be easily shared among all staff through the Microsoft Exchange platform.  ClientVision could enhance the use of the calendar by showing all upcoming meetings specific to each client over the next, say, 12 months, and keep those meetings synchronized with the main shared calendar.

Next, ClientVision does not provide the ability to search through the client activity history entered into the system.  Adding a search tool would greatly enhance usability, both from a relationship management and a compliance perspective.  Advisers often need to retrieve notes from an archived phone conversation or client meeting for compliance purposes.  Other times its important to quickly identify quality touch-point information, such as which universities the client’s children attend or the client’s favorite domestic microbrewery.

Finally, as mentioned earlier, ClientVision does not offer robust workflow definition and monitoring.  Workflow management is present in much more expensive applications (e.g. Triggered Action Sequences in Junxure), but it is often overkill for a sole practitioner or small office to go through the process of defining and maintaining workflow processes.  Mileage varies considerably in the use of workflow, so think about this as it applies to your office environment.

Summary

ClientVision is a slick web-based utility that adds CRM functionality to the existing framework of Outlook 2007.  If you’re like most advisers out there with considerable contact information already stored in Outlook, ClientVision provides an inexpensive way to segue into several more advanced ways to improve relationship management without having to learn a completely new interface.

ClientVision isn’t as robust as other CRM tools with document management and workflow processing, but for the price, advisers are hard-pressed to find other programs that offer such easy navigation through client data.  Also, adding those other features means advisers progress significantly up the cost scale for more powerful applications.

ClientVision Demo

Gary Kinghorn just posted an eight-minute screencast to YouTube that I’m including below. If you’re reading this in an RSS reader or by email subscription, click here to go to YouTube.

Related Posts:

• Streamline Your Practice in a Recession
• Get the Financial Planning 2008 Software Survey
• Has Laborious Client Data Entry Met Its Match?

PC World: Facebook Owns Your Business Data
CNN: Expert: Social networkers risk ‘losing control’ of privacy
AP: Facebook backtracks on terms of use after protests

There’s a lesson in this story for financial advisers.  Yes, you can prevent client backlash by polling them ahead of implementing new policies.  This principle also applies to vendors to the financial services industry.

Case in point: dbCAMS and its recent rollout of Morningstar compatibility changes.  Without warning, Morningstar released an upgrade to dbCAMS that altered the system font used for all records displayed on the screen.

Here’s what the screen looked like before the change:

And here’s what the same screen looked like after the change:

The new font is intended to match the display of Morningstar’s Principia line of products.  Needless to say, users of dbCAMS were upset. Many found the font very difficult to read (its spacing is very tight), and some hated it altogether.  Disgruntled customers let dbCAMS customer support know how they felt about the “improvement.”

Within a few days, Morningstar released a new update for dbCAMS that added the option for users to select between the Default (Principia-style) or Legacy font to be displayed in all of the grids.

All of this could have easily been prevented by a simple poll of active users.  Something like

Dear Bill,

We are considering implementing changes to the font used to display information in the dbCAMS grid layout.  Please visit the following website to view the proposed screen layouts and place your vote on which one you like the most.

Your feedback is important to us as we continue to incorporate enhancements to dbCAMS and integrate it with Morningstar’s product line.

Sincerely,

The dbCAMS team

Now isn’t that a nice piece of customer communication?  The letter empowers users to preview the proposed changes and give feedback on what they like the best.  Before rolling out any new surprises, Morningstar could have proactively identified changes that would be well-received versus those that could incite backlash.

Interested in polling your clients?  The leader in simple online polling is SurveyMonkey.  You can also try PollDaddy for polls that can be embedded directly on your website.

Related Posts:

• Is the FPA Ready for Taleb? (features an embedded PollDaddy poll)
• What are Morningstar’s Plans for dbCAMS?
• Morningstar Announces FCSI Acquisition

Update 2/3/09: The website is back online. Try registering again.

I found out about this deal from LifeHacker.com where they have this to say about the disk image backup solution:

True Image does offer backup archive validation, a recovery disk creator, a startup interrupter that can re-apply a backup image, and other tools for those shaking their fists at the Windows gods.

See the full LifeHacker.com write-up by clicking here.  Advisers need to think about full disk imaging solutions in disaster recovery and business continuity plans.  When (not if) your main server’s hard drive fails, what will you do?  Dig up yesterday’s backup tape and run a full restore?  How long will that take?

Enter Acronis. Acronis will take full images of disks and creates a mirror of your main hard drive.  When the primary drive fails, swap over to the mirrored drive image maintained by Acronis and you’re back up and running with a much shorter delay.

Acronis was mentioned by Steve Ryder of True North Networks, LLC back at the NAPFA Technology Conference in October 2008.

See my posts on Steve’s talk plus other technology resources for financial advisers from the conference:

• NAPFA Technology Conference Report: Day One
• NAPFA Technology Conference Report: Day Two
• NAPFA Technology Conference Report: Day Three

Part of what Andrew did was use a short survey to gather feedback from people who registered for the webinar 

Read Andrew’s blog How Advisors Are Responding to the Crisis.

Andrew listed many comments from advisers that feature all sorts of strategies and ideas.  It’s a lengthy list, and I must admit, I didn’t get a sense of what the majority of respondents were doing.

Enter the Tag Cloud.

You may have seen tag clouds on other websites.  Basically, a tag cloud is a block of text grouped together with frequently recurring words in large font next to occasional words in small font.  The cloud is a quick way to see what topics or words come up in some sort of text, online discussion, or review.

I previously wrote about the tag cloud featured on TwitScoop to get an idea of what the Twitter community is discussing.

So I took the responses to Andrew’s survey and put them in a quick tag cloud generator.  So to save you time of reading trough nearly a hundred individual replies, you can get a feeling of the common themes with the tag cloud below (click the image for the full-size cloud).

I used a totally awesome tag cloud generator called Wordle.  Click here to use Wordle.  I found out about Wordle by searching Twitter.

Related Posts

• Get the Buzz on Twitscoop
• NAPFA Technology Conference Report: Day Three
• Tibergien Podcast on Practice Management

I stumbled across a company called PersonalRIA back in September.  I found it through the TechCrunch50 Conference, a venue created where the best start-ups launch their ideas and proposals in front of the industry’s most influential VCs, corporations, fellow entrepreneurs and press.  Coincidentally, TechCrunch50 is where I learned about DropBox, the completely awesome and innovative file backup, sync, and sharing platform that I use all the time.

For more on TechCrunch50, visit their website:  http://www.techcrunch50.com

Below is the presentation of the PersonalRIA platform presented at TechCrunch50.

Click here if viewing this post in an RSS reader.

An RIA for the Middle Market

As PersonalRIA is still in the start-up phase, I doubt if any FPPad readers have come across this company.  From what I gather about the company, they’re designed to be a website portal intended to connect middle-market clients with Registered Investment Advisers, or RIAs.  Historically, middle-market clients have been unable to use the services of most RIAs due to the prevalence of minimum investable asset requirements enforced by many firms.

What PersonalRIA does is provide users with a list of participating RIAs that manage money so the user can choose one that will manage his/her money.  They don’t elaborate as to how users identify RIAs they want, but I would venture a guess that historical portfolio performance would be a statistic users would want to use (but we know how well past performance is as an indicator of future results).

Shadowing the RIAs Strategy

The benefits of this service model, according to PersonalRIA, are full transparency of transactions and access to a wide variety of RIA strategies.  Since the user continues to monitor his/her own TDAmeritrade or ETrade account, trades are displayed in near real-time and the holding and history are avaialble through the retial brokerage platform. 

PersonalRIA’s Business Model

Related articles:

• Advisers: You Will Soon Abandon AUM Fees
• Has Laborious Client Data Entry Met Its Match?
• OneVoiceRIA Promotes Public Awareness

The webcast will be held this Thursday, November 20 at 4:00PM EST/1:00PST.  Unfortunately our company has an all-day offsite staff retreat scheduled for Thursday, so I’m not able to attend the webcast.  I’ll look for a link to the webcast archive and post it here if one is available.

It features Heath Batz, senior manager of online trading tools at Schwab Institutional, and Michael Granger, Vice President of Implementation and Client Management at Advisor Software, Inc. 

This Webcast is scheduled to cover:

• Exporting and importing models to between other Portfolio Rebalancer users within your firm
• Adding, maintaining and rebalancing accounts held at outside custodians
• Creating a custom security equivalency group, leveraging rules-based equivalencies, and completing a rebalance using those equivalencies.
• Efficient trade file generation by leveraging block trading and trade allocations.

Click the image below to open the registration page to attend the Webcast.

Related articles:

• Schwab Portfolio Rebalancer Enhancements

Click here to read the PreciseFP press release on PRWeb.

What PreciseFP aims to do is simplify the data gathering and entry process advisers face when bringing a new client into the firm.  I don’t quite make the connection with the phrase “precise financial planning (FP)” to data gathering, but still, the application has promise in streamlining the potential volumes of data gathered by advisers and their staff.  PreciseID is a cooler name, but it’s already taken by Experian.

Bruckenstein Reviews PreciseFP

Included in the press release is a link to a review by Joel P. Bruckenstein on the Morningstar Advisor website.  Joel gives a decent overview on how the utility works, but I didn’t get a sense of how PreciseFP might be orders of magnitude better than a fillable PDF created specifically for clients to complete when signing on with a firm.

PreciseFP runs $489 a year (or $49/month).  To save PDF files locally, advisers will also need to buy Adobe Acrobat running anywhere between $149 and $499 depending on desired functionality.

Important Takeaways about PreciseFP:

• Two interfaces are offered: an Advisor Dashboard and a client site
• Customization of intake questions is limited, other customization appears non-existent
• It won’t prevent garbage data from being entered by clients.  For example, clients may not know if the state in which they married is a community property state
• Specific interfaces with popular CRM and financial planning software applications don’t exist, although data from PDF files can be exported to an intermediate XML file (YourSilverBullet, anyone?)
• It’s a version 1.0 product, so the user community is limited and more dynamic features are yet to be added

Nevertheless, PreciseFP is one of only a handful of applications targeted at simplifying the data gathering process.  It’ll be interesting to see how well the application is received in the adviser marketplace.

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.

If you want to run quick illustrations on how a lump-sum qualified plan payout or NQO exercise will affect the overall tax picture, this tool can do it.  As with most tax software, you need to know what you’re doing in order to make the right changes to yield an appropriate illustration.

Note that while the tool can be used to print a complete Form 1040 to mail to the IRS, I recommend that it be used as a supplement to professional software.  Glenn does an excellent job keeping it current with tax law changes and responding to bug reports.  Even so, taxpayers are ultimately responsible for the accuracy of returns, so I would use the tool as a way to check numbers with returns from other programs.

Give it a try and let me know how you like it.

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:

Isn’t it a tad bit ironic that your best clients are still receiving emails with the salutation “Dear Valued Client?”

Yes, I’m here to tell you that you can easily personalize bulk emails sent to clients. Here’s how to do it.

Bulk Email Providers

First, the easy way to customize email communication to your clients is to subscribe to a service like Constant Contact.  There’s a monthly fee of $15 for an email list of up to 500 clients, which is more than adequate for all but the largest of independent financial planning firms.

However, using a service like Constant Contact means that your email messages will have Constant Contact’s banner across the bottom of the message like the one shown below.  This may or may not be a bad thing (especially since there’s subscription removal information), but it’s one thing to keep in mind.

Using Outlook’s Mail Merge

So you decided you don’t want to pay $15 for the one or two bulk emails you may (or may not) send each month.  Instead, you can use Microsoft’s built-in mail merge feature.

First, there are two things to remember regarding Microsoft’s mail merge. Number one, you cannot customize the subject field to the recipients. When the final step in the mail merge is completed, a window pops up where the subject of the email is defined for all recipients (shown below). THIS is the subject of your merged emails, NOT the subject typed in the sample message in Outlook.

Number two, you cannot easily include attachments in mail merged emails. There are some Visual Basic macros that can make this happen, but they are beyond the scope of reasonable capabilities for financial adviser firms.  So the personalized message to your clients should not refer to any attachments to the email.

Mail Merge Wizard

The mail merge wizard walks through the process of generating customized email messages fairly well.  To begin the mail merge process, either open a blank document in Word or open a new blank email message in Outlook (provided that Word is your email editor).  Click Tools->Letters and Mailings->Mail Merge… to open the Mail Merge Wizard.

Walk through the steps in the mail merge wizard to select email messages, select the message recipients (you can use an existing list of contacts or even use an Excel spreadsheet of names and email addresses), and draft your message.  In Step 4 of the wizard you can insert the customized fields such as the Greeting line.  Note my image above; the <<Greeting Line>> field is shown, and it is here that all of the recipient’s first names are merged.  Step 5 will preview each message to be generated.  Click through the recipients to see that the greeting line is customized for each recipient.  In other words, each message has a custom salutation for your client rather than the generic “Dear Valued Client.”

Finally, Step 6 completes the merge and brings up the Merge to E-mail window shown earlier.  Type in the subject that all your clients will see, choose send to all records, and click OK.  At this point all the customized email messages are generated and sent from your address to all your selected recipients.

More Mail Merge Guides 

Since I didn’t address all the specifics of the mail merge process (such as matching the field definitions of contact information), I want to include a link to a knowledge base article at Microsoft that describes more of the details.

Click here to view Connie Miller’s mail merge article at Microsoft.  

Finally, you can search Google to find many other helpful articles on the subject.

One word of wisdom.  Test your merge by sending a message to your various personal email addresses with different salutation lines.  You don’t want to make a mistake with your first mail merge and accidentally send it to all your clients while you’re testing the interface.  Practice this one a few times before committing to your final message.

And thankfully, you’ll put an end to those generic emails to clients!

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)

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.

If I’m going to send out these updates, how can I do it while keeping Outlook closed?  Enter the new email message shortcut.

Creating a New Email Shortcut

Here is a quick and easy tip you can use should you want to keep Outlook closed for long periods yet still wish to send outgoing email messages.

Summary

For readers comfortable making desktop shortcuts, simply create a new shortcut with the following item location (you may need to use a different path where your Outlook.exe is located):

“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\Outlook.exe” /c ipm.note

The Nitty Gritty Details

For readers that need the step-by-step process of creating this shortcut, I’m including it below.  First, find the location of your computer’s Outlook executable file, outlook.exe.  For most Windows XP users, the executable is found buried in the Program Files directory.  The image below shows the full path of my outlook.exe location:

Highlight and copy the path in the address bar: this is what we’ll need to create the shortcut.

Next, minimize all windows to show the desktop.  Right-click anywhere on the desktop to bring up a menu list, hover the cursor over New and then click Shortcut (shown below). 

This brings up the window to create a shortcut (shown below).  In the item location, paste in the address where outlook.exe is located that was copied from the explorer window.  The address needs to be surrounded by quotation marks.

Before clicking Next, the following text needs to be entered to the right of the Outlook.exe path (known to me as switch options):

/c ipm.note

So the entire entry in the item location should be:

“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\Outlook.exe” /c ipm.note

Click Next > then type in a name for the shortcut (e.g. Outlook New Email Message) and click Finish.  Now you have a desktop icon you can click any time to open a new email message window.  You don’t need to bother opening Outlook and get distracted by the huge quantities of email in your inbox.

Shortcut Bonus

Here’s a bonus on using the shortcut.  If you want to use a keyboard combination (I use CTRL+SHIFT+M for my email shortcut, which is the default shortcut used when Outlook is running), right-click on the shortcut icon and then select Properties.  Click on the Shortcut Key field once and then press the keyboard combination to set this field (shown below).

Click OK to accept your changes and then try out the keyboard combo: CRTL+SHIFT+M.  How about that, a new email message window appears!

I hope you find this shortcut as useful as I have today.  I have a quick and easy way to open a new email window that I can use to send quick and appropriate messages.

Be sure to leave any feedback or suggestions in the comments below.

[tip: Brian Tillman]

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.

Cash Positions

Second, Portfolio Rebalancer is a bit smarter when it comes to dealing with cash positions.  Users may now specify “cash buffers” in one account or in all accounts.  In addition, cash-only rebalance activity is now supported, so users can utilize the Rebalancer to automatically generate a list of trades to invest cash across selected holdings in an account to bring it back into balance.  The same is true for cash withdrawals: cash can be generated pro-rata across the account’s allocation.

Security Locks and Allocation Bands

Lastly, security lock and allocation band features have been added.  The security lock allows users to identify securities that should not be used in the rebalance calculations, effectively “locking” the securities from the rebalance.  The allocation band, otherwise known as a tolerance setting for rebalancing, allows users to specify upper and lower percentage tolerance bands for specific securities within a model portfolio.  It is a way model designers can specify that when a security’s allocation is outside the allocation band, a.k.a. tolerance, it should be rebalanced.

I spent some time using the allocation band feature and am generally impressed with its functionality.  The first thing I tried was to specify fractional percentages for the bands which posed no problem for the tool.  However, determining how the bands affected trades was a bit more convoluted.

Bands are optional when creating a model allocation, but one is not able to see how the bands affect trades until the final screen in the rebalancer.  Essentially, securities with allocations outside of the bands show up with trades, while all the rest simply don’t show up.  One has to jump back and forth between screens to see which securities are over/under weight to verify that the proper number of trades anticipated appear in the final screen.

Clearly Identify Rebalancing Trades

I’d like to see additional improvement on the final proposal screen used to display required rebalancing trades.   The screen should summarize all securities shown with respective dollar amounts, % of portfolio weight, followed by the lower and upper tolerance bands.  Securities with allocations outside the bands could be highlighted with a color; THEN when I go to the next screen, only those securities outside the bands will show up with trades. 

Nevertheless, it’s good to see these enhancements to the Portfolio Rebalancer utility.  Although not as robust as dedicated rebalancers in the market (e.g. iRebal), Schwab’s tool simplifies the potentially laborious process of bringing accounts into balance with specified models.

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.

Still on my list of things to do is examine the power of Yodlee and its similar free application, Yodlee MoneyCenter.

Now that aggregation is becoming more readily accessible to the masses, one has to wonder what it might do to the perceived value of consolidated reports provided by most financial advisory firms.  Will consumers begin to show unwillingness to pay more than a 1% annual advisory fee due to the ability to receive consolidated reports for free elsewhere?  Maybe, maybe not.  Mint.com and Yodlee still require configuration and maintenance to some degree, so there still is value in avoiding the troubleshooting of free web-based software.

Click the link to view the Charles Schwab and Texas Tech University press release.

This is a fairly smart move for Schwab as currently there is no dominant portfolio management software platform in the independent investment adviser space.  According to survey results in Joel Bruckenstein’s 2007 Software Survey in Financial Planning magazine, Schwab’s PortfolioCenter platform captured just 12% of the adviser market space, trailing behind Morningstar’s Advisor Workstation (28.3%) and Albridge (16.3%).

According to a recent article in Investment News, Texas Tech’s financial planning program has more than 300 enrolled students.  That is a large group of potential users of Schwab’s new technology center who all will likely learn about Schwab Institutional’s platform and technology (namely PortfolioCenter).  

I would not be surprised at all to see Schwab’s penetration in the portfolio management software segment of the adviser industry increase steadily over the next five years.  Firms currently using Schwab’s tools will soon be able to hire qualified candidates that require little to no training on the existing platform, and firms using other technologies may be persuaded to change platforms due to the increase in supply of employees who know the Schwab interface.

How long will it take for Schwab’s PortfolioCenter to become the number one portfolio management program out there?  Albridge should provide PortfolioCenter a significant challenge, but I suspect that in less than three years, PortfolioCenter will overtake all other platforms as the most adopted program in the marketplace.

Let’s hope that I continue with this blog to review my prediction in three years time.

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.

To calculate TWR, the rate of return between two cash flow events must be identified, and all of the rates of return are multiplied together to find the TWR for the period in question. If there are no cash flow events during the period being examined, the TWR is simply the rate of return calculated using the starting price and ending price for the period. A good article with more information on TWR with specific formulas (and how it is different from IRR) can be found by clicking this link.

TWR in dbCAMS+

So where am I going with all of this? In order to calculate TWR, one needs price information for each cash flow event that occurs during the period in question. Again, if there are no cash flow events during the report period, only the opening and closing prices are needed. However, I found this concept doesn’t entirely hold true with dbCAMS+.

Deep down in the dbCAMS+ help file is a short sentence about TWR calculations (my emphasis added in bold):

The first sub-period runs from the begin date to the first cash flow point, the end of the month, or the end of the date range whichever comes first. The second sub-period runs from this date to the next cash flow point, the end of the month, or the end of the date range whichever comes first. This process continues until the last sub-period is determined. The last sub-period must have the end of the day on the last date in the date range as its end point.

The caveat here with dbCAMS+ is when the period of a TWR report extends beyond the end of any month (i.e. a quarterly report!). If a security does not have a price for the end of the month, dbCAMS+ cannot calculate a TWR. It requires that a price for the security exists for the end of the month, even if there are no cash flow transactions for the security!

Price Requirements

The need for monthly prices is typically not a problem for most advisers, as most data is obtained through the vendor interfaces which includes prices in addition to the transaction and balance information. But for those products that don’t provide price data through the dbCAMS+ interface, such as some no-load variable annuity products, what is an adviser to do?

The byproduct of the price requirement for TWR calculations means that advisers need to ensure that prices are added to the dbCAMS+ price table. This likely means additional staff time required at the end of each month to obtain price information and manually add it to dbCAMS+ (or by learning how to use the Generic interface to perform the task with some programmatic approach). Alternatively, advisers can utilize data aggregation tools such as ByAllAccounts or DST FAN Mail to obtain prices and import them into the PMS program.

The Takeaway

Keep this interesting byproduct in mind when evaluating PMS programs. Not all programs require a minimum of one price per month in order to calculate a security’s return. A monthly price requirement is not necessarily a bad thing, but advisers need to be aware of what data is required in order to generate error-free reports. So be sure to ask PMS vendors the price requirements in order to produce certain performance reports.

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.

To update a document, a user must first “check out” the document from the VCS. The program identifies who checked out the document and modifies the document’s permissions so that only one individual can modify it. All other users see that one individual has locked the document, preventing other users from making their own changes (well, not totally preventing changes, but we’ll address that later). The user then “checks in” the document to VCS after changes are applied to the document. The older version of the document is automatically archived by the software, the new changes are recorded, and the document becomes unlocked for all other users.

Why Financial Planning Firms Need It

Let’s face it; financial planning firms have lots of internal procedures, and if your firm is like mine, many of these procedures are tracked with internal forms (electronic tracking is a ways out at our firm, but it’s on my radar screen). The problem with these internal forms is that changes are often needed, but many times there’s no history of what changes were added or removed in the past. This is especially frustrating for new employees coming on board as they try to learn about the forms, but also question why certain procedures exist and why others have been omitted.

Adding the use of VCS for internal forms facilitates the management of said forms. Users can view the history of file updates, complete with the comments of what was checked in, who checked it in, and when it was last updated. Many software packages even allow document comparison and will highlight portions of the document affected by changes (note: this works well with software code files, but not so well with Microsoft Office applications, unless the VCS is Office-compatible). Now users can read the full history of updates and identify quickly the thought process that has evolved over the lifetime of the form.

Sandboxes

Here I had written a paragraph on the concept of sandboxes in VCS, but determined that it’s a bit beyond the needs for a financial planning firm. If you want to read more about the concept of a sandbox and best practices of multi-user modification, leave a comment below. Otherwise, on with our program…

Benefits

The use of VCS greatly enhances the integrity of all internal forms used by multiple users. For financial planning, one could conceivably create a VCS “project” that represents all templates of a written comprehensive financial plan. As updates and revisions are adopted by the firm (for example, rate of return assumptions, investment allocation breakdowns, safe withdrawal rates, etc.), changes to the templates can be checked in to VCS.

Users can update VCS to use the latest version of each file so they know that they are not using any out of date files with inaccurate assumptions. No longer would planners have to dig up past versions of a plan document to pull out certain sections when creating a new plan for a client. Even when past versions were found, how would one know (other than the date stamp, which is unreliable) which version is the corrrect one?  Sound familiar?

There are quite a number of VCS programs available, both open source and proprietary. A fantastic list of them can be found at Wikipedia. Personally, I have used MKS Integrity and Microsoft Visual SourceSafe  in a variety of capacities. Even Google Documents has a feature to compare different revisions of the same document; check out the Revisions tab the next time you’re editing a document. I hope to install a VCS program at my firm, but I first need to obtain a buy-off of this new process to manage internal forms. Let’s hope this happens sooner as opposed to later.

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.

I’m not terribly familiar with all the functionality in OneNote, but it seems straightforward enough that I could sit down without reading any user guides and get the basic functionality down.  But to get to the point of this entry, I want to focus on one killer feature of OneNote.

Rather than write hand-written notes on a pad of paper, advisers can adopt the use of a Tablet PC and OneNote.  Advisers can use a stylus to write in all the client notes that he or she desires, and the handwriting recognition software will convert the notes to text (I tried out the handwriting lexicon and it seemed to work very well with my printing; handwriting is a bit more temperamental.  Oh, and you can set a lexicon for each user that signs in to the Tablet PC, that’s pretty nice).  No more scanning of handwritten notes that subsequently can’t be searched for content unless you have a fantastically robust OCR package.

In conjunction with the OneNote software, advisers can set up a microphone and record the audio of a client meeting.  Why record the audio?  When writing notes into OneNote, OneNote records a timestamp of when the entry was created.  This timestamp can be used to effectively index into the audio recording.  So how can one realistically use this?

Say that a client wants to buy a sports car.  The adviser writes down that she wants a BMW.  Quickly the subject changes and the meeting moves on.  A few weeks later the adviser would like to send a follow up to the recent meeting and see if the client purchased the BMW.  But what models were she considering?  Colors?  Other brands.  All that was written down was the BMW.  But use OneNote and the audio recording and one can jump to the point in time of the conversation where the discussion of the BMW came up, and playback reveals the names of the two models she was considering and how she compared them to Jaguars with similar features.  Cool!

Not to mention that this can be a huge life-saver if one ever needed to retrieve dialogue from a meeting for compliance or discovery purposes.  Although this sword cuts both ways; the recording could, if the advisor acted untruthfully; become evidence in a lawsuit where damages were awarded to a damaged client due to what was said in the meeting.

Nevertheless, I was fairly impressed with the ease of which this feature works.  Add in video to the recording, and you have a full recreation of your client meeting.  All it costs is some initial setup, a disclosure so you’re approved to record a meeting, and lots of cheap hard drive space.  It could prove to be invaluable as advisers can quickly index to portions of any meeting where details were forgotten or interesting insights were not written completely.