Over the next several months, there are going to be a number of communications coming to our clients.  This is a small preview so everyone will know what to expect.  If you aren’t a client of ours, this may not interest you, but you might ask yourself what you are waiting for…

PFYT Planner Deployment

Over the next six weeks, you will see a half-dozen blog posts, and if you aren’t yet enrolled, you will get a few emails about the rollout of our Planner portal, including one that will enable you to create your own sign-on.  Each week, I will write up a small post about some features of the planner, and highlight a capability of the client-facing portal.  Each will have supporting documentation accompanying it.  Clients who have not yet been enrolled in the portal will have an opportunity to do so.  This is our “interactive financial planning” suite, and it offers real-time access to your financial planning data.  It also provides ongoing financial alerts, financial summaries sent to your email, and the ability to aggregate your account information from various sources into one convenient web portal, and it is mobile-ready.  If all you are interested in is a sophisticated tool for your own personal projections, you will be off and running.  If you are not yet using our financial planning services to create your own comprehensive personal financial plan, you will also get an email inviting you to look into comprehensive planning.  After all, at Plan for Your Tomorrow, we are all about the planning. 

For people receiving their invitation to the planner portal, they will receive a one-time use link which will allow them to access the portal and configure their login.  Be forewarned—some company security systems are designed to follow any incoming links, so if you try to log into the planner and it tells you that the link is expired, it probably means that you have one of those systems, and we will need to set you up with another email address the first time, and we can change it later.  Also, this link is only good for seven days, so if you don’t use it, the link will expire.  All you need to do is let us know and we will resend it.  Take a few minutes and poke around in there, and I am confident you will like what you see.

Integrating our Orion Portal and our new personal performance reporting

If you are already a client, you will also be getting an invitation to access our online performance reporting system, provided by Orion Advisor Services.  This portal will give you direct access to your account performance for any account under our care in real-time.  We need this, because although the planner we are introducing will allow you to see details on your accounts, it will not calculate your personal returns, or compare them to any relevant benchmarks.  I will be producing a video guide to using the portal, and writing up a few blog posts about the portal.  Although the information provided directly by the custodians that hold your investments is valuable, it is often inconvenient, especially in situations where you might have accounts at several different firms.  For example, we might manage accounts for you at Charles Schwab, LPL and Fidelity, and you might want to see the aggregated returns of all of them in one place.

For our Advisory Clients, we will also be introducing our new quarterly and annual account reports, which we will post regularly into your Orion Portal for you to retain and view at your leisure.  This eliminates the risk of emailing them to you, and prevents them from going astray in the mail.  This is a secure means of delivery.   I will be creating a short tutorial on reading these reports in a month or so, and these will also be posted on our site, and will be there for you to look at whenever you like.  Obviously, we will also be available to discuss these as you might wish.  Once we get past the initial rollout of the planner portal, I will write a series of blog posts about the advantages of Orion, highlighting some of the features that I think will make life easier.

The invitations to Orion will be handled in the following way:

1. We will send all clients an email letting them know to expect a secure message from us. The secure message will contain temporary login credentials for Orion.
2. We will send the secure message to the same email address that we sent the original message to, so check you spam filters if you don’t receive it within the hour.
3. We will be available to help with any login issues.
4. Remember that the secure mail system is not the login to the portal. You will need to open the email and then follow the instructions, which will be quite clear.  Again, we are here if you have any problems.  If we are helping somebody else, we will get right back to you, ideally the same day.

Once we get past those two  deployments, we will move on to the public company resources page.

Company Resources

Often, clients ask us for a certain helpful resource that we created at some point.  It might have been a life changes checklist, or a guide for “self-review” of your investment plan.  Maybe it is our list of “Critical Questions” or our home inventory guide.  Rather than make people wait to receive them from us, we are going to publish the archive of all of those resources, along with the back issues of American Lifestyle Magazine, in pdf format.  Did you misplace a great recipe we sent?  No problem.  By the end of the year (hopefully), we will have the public resource page up and running, and along with that, a series of blog posts about what you will find there, and some surveys looking for feedback about other kinds of content that would be useful.  Our objective with the resources page is not to provide investment commentary, or strictly investment information.  It is dedicated to the filling in all the little gaps that are left when you are investing and planning.  Our commentary will continue to be posted on the site, and shared through social media, and our thoughts on planning topics will continue to be posted on the blog and shared socially as well.  The resources page is where you will find other items that we think are useful and interesting.  I expect this rollout to take us into February, at which time we will be deep into the annual review period. 

Annual Reviews

A word here about annual reviews.  We have typically staggered our reviews throughout the year, in an effort to keep the process orderly.  We have solicited and received a lot of feedback on this process, and as a result of the comments, have decided to shift all of these reviews to the beginning of the year, and will do them in January/February as people’s schedules permit.  We also have historically divided reviews into two passes, where we reviewed investment in one session and financial plans in another, about six months apart, and it seems that people would prefer to have it all done at one time.  That means that going forward, we will be doing it all at one time, around the beginning of the year.   Given that this means we will have a spike in workload right before tax season, we decided that we needed to do some work to our Service Management system.

The Service Management System enhancements

The backbone of our service infrastructure is a client database, that we decided needed some significant customization in order to help us keep everything moving along smoothly, and to provide the level of convenience that our clients deserve.  We did a significant upgrade to it over the last few months, and hope that you will start to see a number of enhancements that will knock your socks off.  Everything from simple meeting reminders to web-based service requests to advanced automation around our service standards.  We have a big project underway to make this really work for our clients, and 2017 will feature a lot of enhancements, many of which will be “client-facing.” 

We are very excited about what’s in store.  We hope you are as well.  With our continued focus on transparency, objectivity, and creativity in the execution of our responsibilities, we hope to continue to embody our mantra: “Financial advice is only the beginning.”

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