Overview of Finances

The Finances area is where we capture your client’s financial information. We've broken this down into seven areas:

Income

The Income area is pretty straightforward, this is where we store your clients’ income streams.

We handle income differently from a lot of other planning tools. We don’t think day to day living expenses should be included in a plan - especially in the accumulation phase. We think planning should focus on bigger and longer term items, not budgeting.

So let’s take a look at how we do handle income. We have five different types of income:

• Payroll

• Social Security

• Pension

• Business

• Other

The first of these income types - Payroll, we exclude from plans. This gets back to our philosophy of what should be included in a plan. Since salary is mainly used to meet day to day living expenses we do not want to have it in plans. Your client’s savings should be entered as contributions to the appropriate accounts. We’ll touch on this when we talk about entering accounts.

The other four types of income are pretty straightforward. Enter the gross amount of the income, the start and end year, and the inflation rate for that income stream. Let’s take a look at an example. John has a rental income of $25,000 per year, and he intends to keep renting out the properties until he dies. He also assumes an inflation rate for that income stream of 3%, so here’s how we would enter it.

 

When we include this income stream into a plan, it will be taxed at whatever rate is current within the plan. It will then be applied to any goals for that year. If there is any money left over from the income stream, it will be invested in the taxable portfolio.

Accounts, Insurance, Properties, and Liabilities

The Accounts section is where you enter your investment accounts. There are two basic ways to do this. You can either import the account from your portfolio management system, or you can manually enter the information. We’ll take a look at the manual process here, but take a look at the relevant article if you have integrated your portfolio management system for instructions.

To create accounts, click on Accounts, select Add a New Account then Manual Account.

Now we’ll name the account, so let’s create a Roth IRA for John.

 

The tax category is Tax Exempt and the owner is John. We need to put in an account value. Let’s say he has $40,000 in the portfolio. Since this is a Roth IRA we don’t need to worry about cost basis. The Last Updated field defaults to today's date, but if we were looking at a statement from a client you will want to put the statement date there, instead of today's date.

The next grouping is the contribution section. When we talked about Income, you’ll want to enter your client’s savings as contributions to the various accounts. This will ensure that they are getting the appropriate tax status, and also that you are not double counting their income. In this case, John will be contributing $5,000 per year starting this year (2012) until he retires at 65. And we’ll assume that Congress does not raise the contribution limit, so we’ll leave the inflation rate at 0%. The last grouping is basically telling you where the money is. Also, you can leave yourself notes about the account.

Just repeat this process until you have all of their accounts in the system.

If you understand how to enter Accounts, then you will understand how to enter the information for the other three areas as well. Just walk down the fields and enter the appropriate information.

Note: If you want to find more information on how to import accounts using one or more of our many integrations, you can find support by clicking here.

Fees

This is where you can enter your client’s advisory fees. We handle the investment fees at the model portfolio level, but often each client will have different advisory fees. Any fee you enter will be automatically applied to all of your client’s plans. Because of this you need to be careful with Minimum and Flat fees - each plan will need to meet the entirety of the fee.

Let’s say we’re just doing a standard 1% advisory fee. We would simply enter 1 into the Blended Rate box, and now all of his fees will have a 1% fee taken out each year. For a more detailed explanation of the fees, see our article on Advisory Fees.

Net Worth

You can see the Net Worth report in two places. The Net Worth section, and the beginning of the Plan Report. They’re both pretty much the same. Essentially we’re just summing up all of the entries in the Finances section. You can see all of the information in the main screen here, but you also have the View Output button that will pop out the report so that you can download it to PDF to print out, send out, or do whatever you would like with it.