12th Feb AMA: I'm Courtney Youngblutt, Xplan Design Consultant & efficiency expert, Ask Me Anything!

Hi Brian! Agree that task descriptions are most useful if they are relevant to your practice - it sounds like you might be on a managed or licensee site and might not have full control over the threads and tasks you use.

For those who have their own threads or are on their own site, they can update the task descriptions in the template and have them flow through - this does come with an ongoing maintenance cost to the practice in terms of time and resources to maintain them (and the knowledge & willingness to do it).

Depending on how many threads and tasks you use, you could see if you can copy the existing workflows - then you would be free to update the descriptions. This would mean that you wouldn't get any updates that get pushed down though. (Pros and Cons to eveything).

I hope that helps a bit but let me know if you have further questions!

Hi sarah.burke38 , thanks for joining us! This is a text-based event so as long as you're in this forum thread you've joined the event. To participate, post a question here and courtney.youngblutt will answer it here and now!

Hey Bridget, thanks for posting. 

If the product itself actually changes asset allocation regularly, and you can source evidence from the provider that it has changed, you can raise this via IressConnect  and our WealthSolver Research team / FundData team will push through the changes. Their aim is to absolutely keep all product details up to date and accurate - so reach out.

If you are changing the Asset Allocation independently of what the providers publish, the only way to do this would be to change your Xplan site to use Portfolio (IPS) data as it’s source of truth rather than FundData (which is what is used in WealthSolver by default.) - it is possible to create custom products in WealthSolver, but this would result in alot of workarounds and increased manual intervention.

You could then manually alter the asset allocation via portfolio products. You can upload asset allocations in bulk if you choose to implement this.

The difference between using Fund data or IPS as the datasource is explained in Xplan, Navigate to Research > WealthSolver > Knowledge base > Reference > "IPS and FundData as a data source" This setting applies at a site level, so this may not be an option if you are on a managed or licensee site,

‼️⚠️Don’t make the decision to switch data sources lightly - consider all the pros and cons in the above document and any flow on effects - you may need to update SOA templates for example, to ensure fees etc are displayed correctly from the IPS datasource. ⚠️‼️

💡My Tip - use WealthSolver wherever possible and let the Fund Data team do the heavy lifting of keeping the research up to date.

Hi Jarrod, great question and happy to help. While you may not have a one-on-one Account Manager, there is a team of specialists who can help direct you to the right people for projects such as this - raise a request via Iress Connect initially - just say that you were talking to me on the Advisley AMA, and they will put you in touch with the right person.

Xplan has an open API so it is absolutely possible to push data from another system into Xplan. You generally need an API specialist on your end who can do all the heavy lifting of building out the API but once agreement are signed, you are given access to a developers forum to walk you through all the technical requirements.

We are absolutely happy to help you work through this.

Oh I love widgets Jackie! So easy to see where things are at, at a glance.

1. There are some great widgets you can use for tracking OFA (cc sally.hanley4, sarah.burke38 , felicity.eardley, sally.warncken). It sounds like you are all over it, but there are definitely some flexible options under the Opt-in Anniversaries and Status Change widget. 💡My tip is to add this widget to a dashboard multiple times with various settings - using this one widget you can see:

1. 1. Upcoming OFA Renewals (within whatever time frame you’d like to set)
   2. Pending OFA Renewals
   3. Overdue OFA Renewals
   4. Lapsed OFA Renewals
   5. Declined OFA Renewals

If you’re tracking key parts of the process and are using Cases/Threads, you could also look into some of the Task Widgets to see if they provide further insights for you.

2. Re: It would be great if the terminology in the widgets and opt-in fields could be updated - agree - I believe the product team may do a cleanup of this area at some point - I know they didn’t want to remove data or rename fields that people were already using during the change over.

Also keep an eye out for the Xplan BI tool, later this year, as more and more fields are added to it’s capability this is likely to become the goto for reporting such as this!

3. Search Criteria  -I hear you, as do others - see my comment to Susie below.

One work around that comes to mind is to run the report by month instead of days. You just might need to make sure you’re looking sufficiently far into the future to avoid getting a result that tells you an OFA is due tomorrow!

Note to anyone from Xplan who is following the issue Jackie mentions about the 3 digits for search criteria - this should have been resolved years ago.  It was raised as an issue when the first version of FDS and consent process commenced, and we needed to be able to search on 120 and 150 days post the anniversary date.  And it has been raised a number of times since and nothing has happened!

Hi Jackie, thanks for the question! When sending an email from Xplan, you can tick the ‘Return Receipt’ button in the email editor to get notified when someone opens an email. This is just when an email is opened though (like a read receipt), unfortunately Xplan does not track if an email is received and not read or if an email bounces.

Xplan does have an integration with external email campaign management software Mail Chimp - you can send a list of clients to MailChimp, design and send your email from MailChimp and have access to email events and email analysis back into Xplan.

But you are right - from a best practice point of view, it is better to use a Client Portal or secure messaging system, rather than using email when sending any communication that has personally identifying information in it. Adding a bulk file note would work well for a newsletter or when sharing generic information (when you add a note in bulk, the same note is attached to all clients so it shouldn’t contain any personal information.)

If you are wanting to provide an attachment such as a portfolio report to review fact find, you could set up the merge template to save to the client using a note template that is set up to enable access via the Client Portal and notify the client.

Hi Sally, thanks for your question!

With the option to bring the reference dates in line, rather than searching for each line item in the fee consent element, a more efficient approach would be to search for the Next Reference Date fields, assuming all your ongoing fee arrangement forms are due at the same time.

When setting up your search criteria, consider how often you want the schedule to run and the implications.

With the example below, I have set the criteria to look for a reference date between 29 and 30 days. If run daily, each day you would get clients who have a reference date 30 days into the future.  Alternatively, if you set this to look for a reference date between 0 and 30 days and ran it daily, each day you would get clients who have a reference date anytime within the next 30 days - so each day some of the same clients would appear on the list. Conversely, if run monthly, then on the 1st of the month you would get all clients with a reference date from today up until 30 days into the future - if the next reference date was today or tomorrow, you would not have a lot of time to get them to sign!

Your search criteria could look like this:

(Entity Status = Client AND (Is Partner = No OR Is Partner = Yes) AND Opt-in Required = Yes AND Next Reference Date is Between 29 - 30 days)

For Scheduler:

1. Your first step would be ‘Client Selection’ and then choose the saved search criteria we set up above.

2. Your next step could be any one of the following automations in the list below.

Did you want to send an email to the clients using an email template, add a task or thread/case, xport the list and email it to someone?

3. Once set up, run a few tests so you are comfortable that it is returning the result you wanted.

4. Next, select the recurrence tab and set when you want the Schedule to run. If running over a large client base or if you expect a large result, it is best to set the Schedule to run out of hours.

5. Finally, and almost most importantly, don’t forget to enable it!!! 😄

Plus, once the advanced report is run, what types of reports are people running to show the client, product, fees and the date?

This may not be up your alley, but I have always found it really difficult to report on the teams outstanding task list in an easy to view manner. Any tips?