We're a pretty low-tech company, in general. We still carry some paper binders for our customers. We also have digital records for everything. Many of us still like to reconcile manually. We use technology for our tools, but we like to think of it more as a tool than a guide.
CRM/Portfolio Management/Tracking: Advises
We moved on It advises this year. We like. We are still working on using some of its capabilities and figuring out what we want to do with it. We had used PortfolioCenter, which was getting less and less support. It was getting worse and worse to use.
In particular with the move from PortfolioCenter, one of the big frustrations we had was that we felt like it was hard to find products that did what we wanted and met our ever-changing needs. PortfolioCenter was acquired by Tamarac from Schwab in 2019, and with that it changed. This has been disappointing for us.
I hope Advyzon doesn't go the way of some other services and suddenly disappear. It took us so many man hours to switch to this from PortfolioCenter because we were unhappy.
Financial Planning: ExecPlan Sawhney Systems, Inc. and Silver Financial Planner from Moneytree
Everything we do for our clients is so tailored to their family situation that we haven't found a mass market financial planning software to do everything we want. Everything is manual. This has worked for us.
For income tax planning and short-term cash flow planning, we use ExecPlan.
ExecPlan is great at what it does. It is also an extremely complicated, user-unfriendly program. But it's the only thing that does what we need to do. With the way we do comprehensive planning, we're looking at about five years with taxes. We highly value adaptability and programs that will continue to do what we want them to do without being overhauled with massive changes to their capabilities.
ExecPlan is old enough software that it's on its own island where we maintain it. We maintain separate plans for all our customers and manually enter some data. We program what we expect to happen.
For long-term cash flow forecasts, we use Silver Financial Planner from Moneytree.
We prepare investment performance reports at Advyzon.
We prepare balance sheets, additional cash flow summaries, long-term net worth summaries, asset allocation and many other additional reports in Microsoft Excel.
We also use Microsoft Word to create summary pages for all types of our clients' financial records, including loans, businesses, real estate, life insurance, legal documents, employee benefits, and more.
We do things in a relatively ordered way. When we have software that does what we like, we'll use it for a long time.
Especially for any software-as-a-service we're looking at, they're often trying to do the newest, biggest, and best thing. It feels like they are chasing new customers more than trying to keep existing ones. With that in mind, we don't want to spend all our time thinking about what programs we're using, how we're providing this advice to our clients, and how we're doing our analysis. We want to use tools and not think about what tools we are using.
Trading and Rebalancing: Custom, Microsoft Excel
All our investment portfolios are custom designed and managed for each client's situation. We do not do any bulk trading or bulk rebalancing and we do not have a software program for this.
We're often still putting together an Excel spreadsheet where we have everything tied together so that it pulls from a database that we have somewhere else. Then we have a spreadsheet that is being maintained and updated. We are trying to make everything work together and communicate well.
One issue we've run into a lot is, if everything is super connected in the background and we don't have any information, we feel like we're regularly getting burned by programs that change what they're doing. Then, it is no longer communicating properly with that program. Or, it changes and it's communicating properly, but it's communicating a little differently than we previously expected.
There is a lot of analog communication between programs, where we physically use spreadsheets and load a spreadsheet into another program to update data. Not very high tech.
Internal Communications: Microsoft Teams
We're trying to use Microsoft Teams for our internal coordination, keeping track of schedules and knowing what's going on. This is where we are curious. We feel like there are many good capabilities and ways to collaboratively track and keep databases up to date with memos.
We are also very cautious that any of these tools may be removed at some point in time because Microsoft decides it is not profitable enough.
Any tech company that's a big enough name that we feel confident won't go out of business the next day, we're worried that they'll then completely scrap this project that we've worked so hard on. using it as a tool.
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 possession? Contact Rob Burgess at (email protected).