In the fourth of a series of six animated phone calls, John Gay of Frisco Financial Planning in Frisco, Texas, explains why he likes using Moneyscope.
Just like last month’s call with Phil O’Connor, what you hear is what was said. It’s an unscripted, unedited and unprompted one-take ‘open mike’ phone call.
Meet Phil O’Connor of Whitewell Financial Planning based in Bolton, Lancashire. Phil features in the third of a series of six animated phone calls in which users of Moneyscope explain why they like using it.
Just like last month’s call with Philippa Gee, what you hear is what Phil said. It’s an unscripted, unedited and unprompted one-take ‘open mike’ phone call.
Michael Kitces: Is our financial planning software improving our productivity or destroying it?
We really enjoyed reading this post by US financial planner, Michael Kitces, in which he asks whether increasingly complex financial planning software is:
- Consuming more of a financial adviser’s time than is desirable en route to the generation of a client’s financial plan?; and
- Deterring clients, who would like to work on the creation of their financial plan with their adviser, because the software appears so impenetrably complicated to the untrained eye?
Our own view is no secret because we’ve posed the question before about ‘Who is financial services technology for?’.
We’ve also talked about the irony that financial planning technology awards appear to measure the quality of technology by the number of features packed into it, rather than the usefulness or ease with which those features can be used (see: ‘We’re one year old today and are proud to have failed to win a single award’).
But we particularly like Michael’s point about software being designed so it’s easily used by clients and advisers alike.
We won’t pretend that we set out to design Moneyscope to be used by our users’ clients (because we didn’t) but it seems that Moneyscope users aren’t afraid to let their clients loose on Moneyscope on their laptop, iPad or tablet during meetings anyway - like this example or this one.
And, like Michael, we think that this can only be a good thing for both clients and advisers.
After all, the ability of software to enable clients and advisers to work collaboratively on lifetime cashflow forecasts must, surely, contribute to a greater sense of partnership and common purpose?
Just imagine if all financial planning software was designed so it was intuitively easy to use, regardless of whether you’re an adviser or a client working alongside an adviser - that’s bound to lead to software which aids adviser productivity isn’t it?
Late last year, we posted the first of six animations featuring Moneyscope users.
Here’s the second. This time we’ve recorded a call with Philippa Gee of Philippa Gee Wealth Management based in Church Stretton, Shropshire.
Just like the call with Gary Phillips, what you hear is what was said. It’s an unscripted, unedited and unprompted one-take ‘open mike’ phone call.
Problem-solving and other things
Recently we’ve been considering the problem of problem-solving with Moneyscope.
By problem-solving, we mean those occasions where a client’s forecast kicks up a cash-flow dilemma somewhere down the line - where cash runs out, for instance.
At the moment, you might have to turn to your own Excel spreadsheet - or a heavy-duty piece of financial planning software - to help solve the problem and remodel the forecast.
We’d like to fix that and we thought you might be interested to see what’s behind our thinking. So Richard has recorded the short screencast (above) to explain what we’re working on at the moment.
As you’d expect from Moneyscope, we’ll make sure that the addition of the problem-solving feature doesn’t dilute the speed and simplicity that we know advisers enjoy; we’re just eager to add an easy-to-use tool that we think users will really like.
All being well, we expect to put this change live early in 2012.
A few more things for the wish-list
We consider the addition of the problem-solving feature to be the final piece in the Moneyscope jigsaw, but we’re also thinking about a few small - but potentially useful - tweaks at the moment including:
- Enabling advisers to add their own logo to Moneyscope reports;
- The ability to apply varying rates of inflation to different items of income and expenditure;
- Negative values highlighted in red in Moneyscope graphs.
That’s what we’ve been thinking about but would you find those innovations useful? Let us know what you think.
Not so long ago, we asked for volunteers who would be willing speak to us - over the phone - and let us know what they like about Moneyscope.
So here’s Gary Phillips of Phillips Financial Planning in Newry, County Down; the first of six advice professionals who feature in six individual animations that we’ll occasionally publish over the next few weeks.
What you hear is what was said. It’s an unscripted, unedited and unprompted one-take ‘open mike’ phone call.
We let people like Gary know what we hoped to achieve by recording the call - to help people who don’t use Moneyscope understand why people who do use Moneyscope do - but, as far as the content of the call was concerned, well we left that up to Gary to decide.
We’d like to thank Gary for taking the time to talk to us, and for letting us use the audio from the call for this animation.
And, while we’re at it, we’d also like to thank Philippa Gee of Philippa Gee Wealth Management, John Gay of Frisco Financial Planning in Texas, USA, Paul Richardson of Concept Financial Planning, Phil O’Connor of Whitewell Financial Planning and Pete Matthew of Jacksons Financial Services - for kindly offering their time to contribute to the project.
By the way, if any of our featured advisers ever fancy a change in career direction, we’re certain that they could all cut it as broadcasters if they ever wanted to!
User experience: Moneyscope’s rising star in the Lone Star State
In a guest post by Moneyscope’s first registered user in the United States, John Gay (pictured right) of Frisco Financial Planning in Frisco, Texas, tells us how Moneyscope fits in with his financial planning and investment advice practice.
There are plenty of “heavy-weight” financial planning tools out there. Many use sophisticated statistical methods such as Monte Carlo simulations, historical back-testing, mean-variance analysis and the like.
Such tools have their place but they have several problems:
- they give the illusion of precision where none exists,
- they are awkward, slow, inefficient, and cumbersome, and
- the output is too voluminous and complicated to effectively communicate to clients.
Moneyscope is basic and straightforward. The output is concise, easy to communicate, and easily understood by clients. The two page deliverable avoids “financial planning by the pound.”
There are certain cases when a more thorough analytical tool is needed, but for the majority, I can apply my knowledge and experience in a way that gets the job done effectively without all the complexity involved with other planning solutions.
I use Moneyscope for retirement projections, life insurance needs analysis, and college planning projections. In short, any financial problem that requires projecting cash flows into the future, Moneyscope is often the right solution.
I’ve adjusted my illustrations and conversations with clients to make sure they are mindful of “sequence risk” (ie, I use a conservative real rate of return assumption, lower than the historical average, and one that equates to similar Monte Carlo and back-tested results), as well as tax considerations (since Moneyscope doesn’t explicitly treat income taxes, we have to use general assumptions such as “after-tax” going in and “pre-tax” coming out).
If you’re on Twitter, you can follow John at @johncgay or catch up with his lastest blog posts at Frisco Financial Planning’s blog.
Richard’s two-minute video shows you how to use the new scenario planning feature which has gone live today at http://moneyscopehq.com. (Tip: To view the video in full screen, just click the icon to the left of the screenr logo in the video frame.)
New scenario planning step-by-step
When you view the all clients page, it lists all of your existing clients, just as it does now, but with one important addition: it includes a new column showing the number of scenarios for each client.
When you click on the scenarios link, you’ll arrive at this screen
From here, you can see all the scenarios that you’ve created for a client and you have the ability to generate a new scenario (by clicking the button just above the table on the right).
If you want to create a new scenario, just click the ‘Add new scenario’ button and you’ll arrive at this page…
From here, you can either create a brand new scenario for a client from scratch, or copy information from an existing scenario (to save having to enter all the data in again).
Then you click ‘continue’ to move on to the next step.
This is a screen which regular users will be familiar with. Just tweak the variables as usual, save and - voila! - you’ve created a new scenario for your client without altering the original record that you set up.
And that’s it. It’s as straightforward as that. We hope you enjoy using the new scenario planning feature which is now live and ready to use at Moneyscopehq.com
New scenario planning feature’s just days away
Ever since we launched Moneyscope back in January this year, users have been able to easily add clients’ financial details, to make and model some straightforward assumptions about inflation, income and outgoings, and then settle on the most likely scenario that would inform a client’s financial plan.
What about Plan B?
Despite our obvious pleasure at the reaction to what we’d built, the ability to add one set of financial information per client inevitably meant that users could only moneyscope one scenario – Plan A. If you want to test other scenarios, then you have to create a whole new record for the same client.
Perhaps not surprisingly our users got in touch to say: “We’d like you to build a more straightforward way in which we can test Plan B, C or D without having to add a load of financial information over and over again.”
And we thought: “That sounds like a good idea.”
So we’ve built it.
In test now and live very soon
The new scenario planning feature will be available to use in the next couple of weeks. We are testing it as I type and - if everything goes swimmingly - later this month users will soon be able to:
- Easily create multiple what-if scenarios and outcomes using existing client information held in Moneyscope;
- Instantly generate a clear and simple visualisation illustrating the effect on lifetime income and expenditure of changes in personal circumstances and decisions;
- Help client more easily understand the likely consequences and outcomes of life events and decision-making on their long-term income and expenditure.
We’ll post some images of the new screens at the blog within the next few days.
