Rebuilding the plan before every meeting
A planner has a review next week and wants to update the client's cash flow plan. They open Voyant, CashCalc or whichever tool the firm uses, and start updating: current pension values from the latest valuations, ISA balances, the new salary from the fact find update, the mortgage balance, a new regular saving. Some of this is in the back office. Some is in emails. All of it is typed in again.
Then they notice the plan still has last year's state pension figure and the client's partner's pension is missing entirely. More checking, more typing. The meeting prep takes most of a morning.
Why the tools do not talk
Cash flow tools and back office systems are often bought separately. Some have integrations, and those help, but they rarely carry everything across, and planners do not always trust what arrives, so they check by hand anyway.
There is also no simple record of what changed. When the planner opens the plan, they cannot easily see which inputs are out of date and which have not moved since last year.
- Integrations that move some data but not all of it.
- Valuations in the back office that are more recent than the plan.
- Fact find updates that never reach the cash flow tool.
- No record of which inputs changed between plans.
- Each planner maintaining plans in their own way.
Couples and families make it harder again. The back office may hold each partner as a separate client, while the cash flow plan treats them as one household. Unless someone knows to look at both records, a pension belonging to one partner simply never reaches the joint plan.
The cost of stale inputs
| Input | Common problem |
|---|---|
| Pension and investment values | Taken from an old valuation |
| Income and expenditure | Not updated after the fact find refresh |
| Liabilities | Mortgage balance from last year |
| Partner's holdings | Missing or entered separately |
| Regular contributions | Changed at review, not in the plan |
Planner time is the obvious cost. The less obvious one is a plan presented with a figure the client knows is wrong, which makes them wonder about everything else on the screen.
The data link we build
- We map which inputs your cash flow tool needs and where each lives today: back office, fact find, valuations, or the planner's notes.
- Where the cash flow tool has an API or import, we send client data, holdings and current values across from your back office.
- Before a review, a comparison shows each input with its value in the plan, its latest value in your systems and the date of each.
- The planner accepts changes item by item, so nothing overwrites the plan silently.
- Inputs that could not be sent automatically are listed as a short manual checklist.
- A record is kept of which values were used in each version of the plan, and their sources.
We do not set growth rates, inflation, life expectancy or any other assumption. Those are your planners' choices, made in the tool as now.
What planners gain
Review prep starts with a list of what has changed rather than a blank check of everything. Accepting updates takes minutes. Partners' holdings and new plans stop going missing. And when someone asks which figures a plan was based on, the answer is recorded.
It also makes plans easier to hand over. When a planner is away or a client moves to a colleague, the plan carries a clear record of where each figure came from and when it was last updated, so the new planner is not left guessing whether the numbers can be trusted.
Does this sound familiar?
- Planners retype values into the cash flow tool before reviews.
- Your integration moves some data, but staff re-check everything.
- Plans are presented with out of date figures.
- You cannot easily see what changed since the last plan.
- Partners' plans are handled separately and inconsistently.