Marc Fraser-Jones and I recently jumped onto Advisely to answer all your questions about managing client portfolios effectively in Xplan.
Here are some of your best questions that came out of this AMA:
Q: Has there been any code made available to allow for portfolio reports to include SMA Instrument (or similar fields) filter/grouping options for SoA and Reports?
We have published a set of new standard reports specifically for SMA, these should be in the Reports screen under the Valuation category:
- Portfolio Valuation - SMA
- Portfolio Valuation - Simple, SMA
- Valuation - Proposed Changes (SMA)
We've also made sample code available via the Community in relation to SMA instrument grouping, please note that there is still outstanding a performance data source with a corresponding standard report and sample code that will be coming very soon, which will be added to the existing article here.
Q: I'm keen to learn about setting up Alerts on Xplan Portfolio accounts that can notify us when certain activities happen on a clients account, for example, if greater than $50,000 cash is withdrawn or if a portfolio changes by +/- a certain percentage.
To help you get started, I recommend checking out the Practice Management eLearning course, which includes a section on ‘Alerts.’ This provides a step-by-step guide on creating alerts for various scenarios with examples.
Additionally, we have helpful community articles that outline best practices and common alert setups. You can access these resources here:
Q: There is so much functionality in Portfolios that can certainly get overlooked. One topic I recently spoke to our advisers about was model portfolios and setting up Target Sets in Portfolios. These can add some great efficiencies within practices. I'd love to hear your feedback on some common questions I have received:
- What is best practice when creating target sets and applying them against a client's portfolio?
- What Target Set functionality is underutilised but can add a lot of value?
- Are there reports that can be generated to show the client's current portfolio weight against the target weighting for the model portfolios?
Great questions, best practice when it comes to target sets and modelling will depend heavily on the business and how they choose to implement modelling for their customers. We built target sets and modelling with flexibility in mind, which often means there is more than one way to achieve the same or similar outcome, e.g. managing a single multi-asset class target set vs managing a target set per asset class and adjusting the ratio of each linked to a client to deliver the desired investment profile.
What I can say about best practice here is to ensure you keep it as simple as possible. An easy trap to fall into is to start with a basic target set, then, as some clients require slight variations on this, create a modified version of that basic target set. Over time, you will accrue many similar versions of the same target set, which can lead to a confusing user experience, complicated permissions and potential errors if a client happens to be linked to the incorrect version of the basic target set.
This does join nicely into point 2, a potentially underutilised function is the "Advanced" settings when linking a target set or sets to an account (see section F.3 in the Target Set Overview on Community). This function allows a user to make adjustments, exclusions or substitutions when linking a target set to an account, ensuring you can add these slight variations to a target set without needing to maintain multiple similar versions of the same.
In relation to the 3rd point, I'll need to come back to you, as modelling is an active process, I don't believe there is a standard report that can produce this output, there may, however, be a datasource that allows this.
Q: How do you pull a report showing the date a client was archived, with the report including entity ID and entity name? Also, how do you pull a report showing all products a client has e.g. risk insurance, medical insurance, investments?
To obtain a report of clients that contains their archived date, entity ID and name, you have a couple of options.
For the report showing all products a client has, I’ve assumed that you’re referring to this for a single client and not a report listing all clients.
The easiest way to achieve this is to use the existing code from your fact find template and pull out the syntax relating to products to create a one-pager. If you don’t have access to your templates to do this yourself, your site administrator should be able to assist.
If you want to know more about managing client portfolios in Xplan, head over to the discussion forums and ask a question—don’t forget to tag us at jason.zhang and marc.fraser-jones!
Iress Contributor
Iress Contributor
