As you move through the Have portion of the program, you go to the Work section and create a card for each job. A job card would include the family member linked to the job, the employment start date and estimated end date, annual income and other related information (including the logo of the employer). Pensions, other income, expenses, assets, insurance and liabilities all get similar card treatment in their respective sections. Since each item gets its own individual card, clients can more easily absorb the information.
The Wants section consists of cards and a time line. Many standard card templates are available. If you want to create a fund to purchase a boat, you select a boat card, flip it over, specify the amount needed, the frequency of contributions and the start date. You then drag the card onto the time line representing the date the money is required. If you do not have sufficient funds to pay for all of your wants, the time line will turn red. If you do have enough to pay for your wants, the line will turn green.
Let's assume you do not have sufficient funds to pay for your wants. When you go to the Needs section and click on a card, the application allows you to select a vehicle to fund any shortfall. For example, let's say you select a savings account. You would enter an interest rate, a start date and end date and the frequency of the contribution, and the program will calculate the payment required to address the shortfall. Perhaps meeting the goal requires a $500 per month payment but only $300 per month of cash flow is available. In that case, one can drag the goal to a later date on the time line, or you can put off some other goal by dragging it back on the time line, thereby freeing up cash for the goal you are working on. All calculations take place almost instantly on the fly, so you can see the impact of any changes on the graphical interface.
What Else?
Although setting up individual cards can work well for the self-service market or for adding a goal to an existing plan, it may not be ideal for professional planning purposes. As an alternative, when you set up a new client, Figlo provides a wizard that prompts you for typical client data and populates common cards for you. It can also create some typical scenarios for you that you might want to run for a client such as the death of one spouse or the other, disability, unemployment or critical illness. If you use the wizard, all of the appropriate cards are pre-populated for you and the various scenarios are also preconfigured.
Like some other online financial planning applications, Figlo allows advisors to share access with clients and prospects. When you set up a client in Figlo and provide the application with the person's e-mail address, Figlo sends out an invitation to log in. If you do not provide an e-mail address, no invitation is sent. If you want to add client/prospect access at a later date, or if you want to give multiple family members (or other authorized persons) their own log-in, you can do so manually with a few mouse clicks.
Figlo includes some other capabilities rarely seen in U.S. financial planning software. One is localization. You can choose a domicile from a long list of countries. If a client is domiciled in Japan, for example, you can choose to denominate all values in yen. Once you choose a default currency, you can still choose to value individual assets in another currency. So if you have a Canadian client that owns a house in the U.S., you can value everything in Canadian dollars with the exception of the house, which can be valued in U.S. dollars if you wish. It is also possible to change currencies for the whole plan on the fly. Exchange rates are updated regularly. You can view the rates being used and when they were last updated with a mouse click.
Figlo is also multilingual. Among the languages supported are English, Dutch, South African, German, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese and many others.
A Work In Progress
Although Figlo is very impressive, it is still a work in progress. Some of the functions that advisors need are difficult to locate. For example, when I wanted to leave a client and go back to the client list, I could not immediately figure out how to do so; there's a little "person" icon on the bottom right of the screen, but if you don't mouse over it, you don't know what it does.
While multi-language support is great, Spanish and French, two languages likely to be in high demand in North America, are missing. Figlo expects to have them added by the time you read this.
Client sharing controls are nonexistent at this point. If you give a client access to a plan, they can change anything you've done. View-only access or some sort of limited access is going to be necessary.