If you excel at providing financial advice but struggle with customising your Xmerge functionality, coding may seem like a completely foreign topic. At Umlaut Solutions, we speak your language and can help you achieve the process enhancements you need through coding in Xplan, tailored to your unique advice business’s needs.

There is no need for a secret code to improve the functionality of your Xplan reports, advice documents, templates, and more. Keep reading as we uncover the benefits of Xplan coding.

Is custom coding in Xplan worth it?
Prudent financial planning professionals always assess the benefits of an exercise before spending time on it, so we understand if you are wondering, “is coding worth it?”

Regardless of whether you are looking to switch to a paperless office, build efficiency in your processes, or simply get the most out of your financial planning software, you are going to need to use Xmerge. Given that Xmerge is a type of code, there is no question in our minds about the benefits of having your templates, advice documents, and reports coded. At Umlaut Solutions, we can help leverage the most out of technology for your practice.

Coded Xplan can assist with multiple advice documents
Most advisers are probably already aware that Fact Finds, SOAs, and ROAs can be merged with their firm’s details and signature style—but there are many more advice documents that Xplan coding can enhance for your practice.

Almost all of the data that is entered into Xplan can be extracted via Xmerge. What this means for you is that if you can invest the time in coding, you can create a range of other documents, including:

• An FDS template.
• Fee Consent templates.
• Insurance schedules.
• Comparison reports that utilise your modelled WealthSolver or RiskResearcher Scenario.
• Management reports for your business that are run against a full client list rather than just against one client group of entities. This kind of reporting is particularly useful in managing aspects of your business, such as the breakdown of sums insured filtered by underwriter and category.

Spending time on getting your coding right across your advice process can mean not only better functionality for your team but also less time spent editing or creating manual templates when stepping through important documents with clients.

Create and integrate templates
Having your SOAs, ROAs, and Fact Find built to your practice’s specific needs is invaluable. However, the ability to build and integrate other business templates is another benefit of optimising your Xplan site.

Financial planning practices are no stranger to the myriad of forms and communication formats required to service a book of clients. Xplan allows you to create and integrate your business templates. The options are vast and can range from simple email templates to invite your clients to their annual review, to longer and more complex compliance templates.

The efficiency benefits of having templates set up through Xplan are obvious. However, having a robust, consistent, and predictable visual style for your documents provides the added benefit of integrating marketing for your practice into your system and processes.

Achieve efficiency through custom wizards
Businesses looking to enhance their workflow management through Xplan processes will revel in how customised wizards with an associated Xmerge template can improve time-consuming tasks. Usually, wizards are designed with two things in mind:

• Efficient data entry of information: being able to have a wizard pre-populate information for you saves so much time compared to jumping between pages. These small actions multiplied hundreds of times a week or even in just one day, can amount to serious time loss and inefficiency in your business.
• Efficient entry of information to achieve a desired report/template output: if you have ever laboured over data entry only to have it output completely blank, misplaced, or missing altogether, then you will understand the frustration and time sap this causes. Correctly coded custom wizards in Xplan get your data in the right spot the first time.

One of the lesser-known aspects of custom wizards is creating a system that costs you less time and helps service more clients more effectively—automation of actions. When you customise your wizards, you are able to automate what actions occur on completion of the wizards. This means that you can set the wizard to automatically:

• Save an output to an Xplan file note.
• Send an email.
• Activate a task/thread/case/lead/opportunity.
• Update a field value.
• Redirect to a certain page.

These small actions can deliver significant efficiency gains and make for a seamless Xplan experience for your entire team, which many practices value greatly.

Make meeting your FDS obligations a breeze
Templates have become standard practice when it comes to compliance within the Financial Services Industry. Did you know that coding your templates within Xplan can support your business in meeting its compliance duty around Fee Disclosure Statements (FDS) and FDS reporting, too?

At Umlaut Solutions, we have created a simple report for FDS Reconciliation which sources both live and historical CommPay data. This means that advisers can understand what transactional data is being included in their FDS, and what is being excluded. The report is fantastic at helping an advice business identify errors in their revenue types or in their data which affects the accuracy of their FDS output.

This is just one of the many ways that using Xmerge can support you in tailoring your Xplan to your individual business requirements, creating a system that helps deliver accurate compliance documents and means your business can better support and service your clients.

Finding the right support with Xmerge coding
At Umlaut Solutions, our best advice when it comes to coding is to plan, then test — and then test some more!

Some documents are simple and will not require a large amount of planning because they have minimal variations to consider. However, other, more complex documents will require you to consider numerous variables or pathways that might be required. If you or your team can identify this upfront, this will cost you less time than back-tracking and needing to redo your document to accommodate something that you failed to consider the first time around.

We understand that many Financial Planning practices will need some additional support to help them leverage the most from Xplan, which is why we are proud to offer professional Xplan consultations and coding services. Contact Umlaut Solutions today to discover the benefits of having an expert managing your Xplan site, helping you maximise efficiency and productivity for your financial advisory business.

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