Once the data is all entered, advisors can view a scenario snapshot. This summarizes a client's net worth, his cash flow, his current holdings and the progress he's made toward his major planning goals-what he needs for retirement, asset allocation, insurance, education or his estate.
The retirement section is perhaps the most interesting. The pictures and charts show clients if they face a shortfall or surplus. In the summary section, the drop-down menus under the "vary account allocations" tab allow you to quickly change the view from all the retirement assets to only those that are taxable or nontaxable. The drop-down in the adjacent "what-if allocation" chart allows you to select a different model allocation and almost immediately view the effect of any change to it. You can also use a "vary retirement assumptions" tab that combines drop-down menus and sliders to adjust inflation, retirement goal percentages and survivor ratios.

The "strategies" tab allows the advisor to add strategies and alter the default sweep account. The "Savings" and "Income" sections operate in the same fashion, as does the Risk/Reward section. This last one includes a Monte Carlo analysis with a lognormal distribution. The default setting is 500 iterations for speed, but if you can wait a few extra seconds, the application will run 2,000 iterations on request.

While it is impossible to detail all of the new version's features here, there are some I should mention. The new client list screen is much better than it was in previous versions-it includes better search functions and displays more client information. A client profiler tool allows you to divide your clients by net worth, by AUM or by the securities they hold. For example, it is now easy to filter for clients owning specific assets or those with assets under management of more than $3 million.

A Roth conversion strategy has been added as well, and the Roth 401(k) views have been improved so that they allow clients to better handle beneficiaries. Spouses can now be treated as partial beneficiaries of a distribution, for instance.

You can now also assign priorities to your client's goals. The program can provide individual college costs, for instance, to your client's education targets. You can also determine how frequently the client would like to achieve certain goals, scheduling major purchases like automobiles, for example, every four years. The number of goals that a plan can accommodate are now virtually unlimited.

Though Morningstar categorizes assets such as mutual funds automatically, an advisor can override them and drill down to the holding level with Morningstar's X-Ray feature. You can also perform this analysis at the account level.

Advisors could also use Finance Logix 3.0 to model a guaranteed lifetime benefit for deferred annuities. And OLTIS has allowed advisors to better handle income-tax-related data by adding an "advanced tax mode" that closely resembles a Form 1040.

Pros
The dashboard is more functional and information-rich than the old home page was. Meanwhile, the opportunity finder should be a helpful business-building tool. If you are alerted to the fact that a client is falling short on her retirement goal, for example, you might want to call her and explore the possibility of upping her 401(k) contribution before the projected shortfall becomes insurmountable. If there is a large projected surplus, you might want to discuss lowering the risk level of her retirement portfolio or deploying some of the assets set aside for retirement elsewhere. One goal like education might show a surplus, for instance, while another one (say, retirement) shows a discount, which presents you with an opportunity to shift assets between them. The balances and projections update constantly, of course, and there shouldn't be a need to constantly shift assets. However, the program lets you track those figures to keep them within bounds-even if you never act on the information, you can pull it up when clients call and show them you are in command of the facts.

I previously criticized the calendar because it did not sync with MS Outlook. It does now. The vault is much improved, too: It is faster, and the encryption has been upgraded to 256-bit, making it more secure. You can now filter files and folders to find what you need quickly. File attributes and vault utilization information are welcome additions, too. Additional reports have been added and report generation times are noticeably faster than before.

In the past, I've also criticized Finance Logix for a lack of training videos, and the company now offers some decent ones, though I think more are required.