I am a CPA. I started my firm in 2010. I always wanted to add financial planning and wealth management when the time was right. We have expanded tremendously since then. We started with about $4 million in AUM in 2016. We now manage about $130 million. Hopefully, we can maintain that trajectory.
CRM / Reporting / Portfolio Management / Trading / Rebalancing: Advyzon
In use Counseling area for CRM, portfolio management, rebalancing AND other applications. We have found it to be an extremely useful application that has greatly improved our efficiency and productivity.
It's not quite one-in-one like you'd get from Envestnet, Orion or Morningstar, but it has different uses.
We have been with them for almost a year. I'm not sugarcoating how positively the software has impacted our operations. We say it honestly. I am feeling the benefit of it and have been for a while.
Rebalancing goes hand in hand with trading. The rebalancing component of the software will generate trade files that you can easily upload to the custodian. We've found it to be a massive time saver.
Portfolio Analysis: Quantity
Advyzon interfaces with an investment analysis tool, Qantas, which we have used for about five years. It is efficient and good for productivity. It is easy to use and understand. You can create reports for customers in a relatively simple way. I don't spend much time on it other than reviewing what my team has compiled.
Financial Planning: eMoney / Envestnet | MoneyGuidePro
Financial planning is the center of our practice and the core of our work. Wealth management is not just investment management. It oversees a client's entire net worth and entire basket of assets and liabilities. This is financial planning.
We use two programs simply because specific clients are better suited to one software or the other. We find that certain clients are better suited to Envestnet | MoneyGuidePro, and we find that eMoney serves other customers better. We are trained for both. The software isn't terribly complicated either. Both are easy to use and understand. Both integrate well with the rest of the stack and with many other applications.
Document management: Microsoft Dynamics 365 / ShareFile from Citrix Systems
Our email and documentation is through Microsoft Dynamics 365. We use ShareFile from Citrix Systems as a portal.
Estate Planning: FP Alpha
We have reached the point where we are using FP Alpha for the last two months of the year. We are doing a revenue analysis. We use it as a tool to determine when it is appropriate to start claiming Social Security. One of the other key uses is determining whether and how much to do with annual Roth conversions. The trick is that you don't want to overreport income when a client suddenly has to pay more for Medicare supplements, moves into a different tax bracket, or what have you. FP Alpha is perfect for those applications. My tax director is now directly involved with using that software for this purpose. It integrates well with the rest of the stack. I'm not going to put a whole blurb on the FP Alpha, but suffice it to say that we have a particular use for it, and we find it outstanding for that purpose.
As told by reporter Rob Burgess and edited for length and clarity. The views and opinions are not representative of the views of WealthManagement.com.
Want to tell us what's in your fortune? Contact Rob Burgess at (email protected).