Today in our final session with Bill and Vicki Spicer, we are ready to move into the reporting phase of our planning. This 20-minute lesson will cover everything you need to know about building a client report from scratch, customizing that report, and saving your template so that next time, it’s an instant production of your ideal client report.
No extra work will be required to continue producing a customized plan report for future clients and projections.
Recap
If you’re just joining us today, you may want to do a quick refresher on how we got here.
Part 1: Build a base set of spousal retirement projections in 15 minutes
Part 2: Optimize retirement projections & improve client outcomes in 20 minutes
Now that we have built our base projections, and spent some time optimizing those projections for a better outcome, we are ready to produce a client report. Let’s go!
Watch the financial planning tutorial
Elements covered in the financial planning tutorial:
Report Builder
The Report Builder is where you will select and choose the high-level elements of your financial plan report. Once we’ve chosen our elements, we will conduct further personalization and customization under the Report Editor section.
By default, all pages that are available will be there for you. This results in a comprehensive financial plan but it’s ready for your customizations and preferences.
Once you know what you like, you can save your changes for all future projections.
You can click and drag to select and de-select which pages you’d like include, and there are numerous keyboard shortcuts for even more efficiency. You can select the order of the pages you’ve chosen, and there are additional settings available if you’d like to add a custom page, modify your report headers, or make changes to your printer settings.
You can select an English or French report, which is independent of your chosen language. Once you are finished, you can opt to generate a PDF or present the plan live to your clients using the Report Preview option.
Within your Report Builder, you have several options for your overarching theme. You can create:
- A one or two page SnapShot summary—this is your short report that clients love.
- A comprehensive, full financial plan report for clients who want all the details.
- A full report with your SnapShot summary serving as your Executive Summary, which gives your clients the best of both worlds.
Access samples of each type of report along with other financial planning resources in the Financial Planner’s Toolkit.
Once you’ve selected your pages and SnapShot elements, we can move into the Report Editor for customization of the report.
Report Editor
This is the area where we can review each page we have chosen in the previous section, to ensure a highly customized and personalized report. Most pages have a “Comments” section, allowing you to include additional context as needed.
Many Advisors are choosing to use just the SnapShots, so that will be the focus here today.
The SnapShot report template
This article breaks down the specific elements available to you in the 1 or 2 page SnapShot report.
This is a sample of the one page financial plan report summary. Click here to download sample reports.
The SnapShot report template allows you to choose from up to 10 cards, with 6 being the optimal one if you’d like to keep your report one just one single page.
The data pulls from the projections into the card automatically, which is why not extra work is required to produce this customized report after your projections are created. You have the option to further personalize with custom text, but that’s not a requirement. You can also use the templated variables, which are a simple drag and drop, so that as plans are updated in the future, your SnapShot report will be automatically updated to reflect the current information. You can continue to generate personalized, updated reports without spending more time.
Goal Status and Automated Recommendations
One card to highlight is the Goal Status (bottom right in the SnapShot report shown above) as this section will be populated from the Automated Recommendations module.
Answer clients questions instantly with the Automated Recommendations module.
When plans are either over or under-funded, you can use the Recommendations module to determine potential courses of action for your client. For example, if a goal is underfunded, we can run the Sustainable Spending feature to determine how much the client can afford to spend without running out of money. If the goal is over-funded, we can see how much earlier the client can afford to retire.
To have data populated automatically under your Goal Status SnapShot card, be sure to run the Recommendations module. All recommendations are personalized to the specific plan data, ensuring a highly personalized planning experience for your clients.
Next steps
Canadian Financial Planners and Investment Advisors are eligible to start a 14-day Free Trial of Snap Projections financial planning software.
