Emerging Information Systems, Inc. (EISI) announced the official launch of Profiles Professional 9.2 and Profiles Forecaster 4.2. Both products have been pre-released to a limited number of existing Profiles clients in preparation for Friday's official launch. According to EISI spokesperson Cindy Bennett, the initial response from users has been favorable.
While the new Profiles applications include numerous enhancements, they fall into four major categories.
One category entails reporting and presentation enhancements that make it much easier for advisors to locate report elements and organize them into customized client presentations. A report search feature has been added to give advisors another method of selecting report elements. Once assembled, if an advisor wants to reuse the same report elements with multiple clients, the advisor can save the report elements as a template. As a result of these enhancements, EISI has substantially reduced the time required for advisors to create and deliver reports.
A second category involves the user interface, which has been updated to improve navigation throughout the program. Fields, buttons and other design elements have also been refreshed. Additional drop-down menus have been added to improve usability.
Elsewhere, a new Roth IRA conversion calculator has been added to Profiles Professional. The calculator addresses issues such as future cash flows and the advisability of employing the tax-deferral option. The calculator requires minimal data entry before producing a streamlined report.
Finally, the new version also includes integration enhancements. SmartOffice integration, formerly available exclusively with the desktop version of Profiles, is now available with the web version, too. This integration uses CRM data stored in SmartOffice to populate fields within Profiles Professional. Morningstar integration enables enterprise clients to export data from Profiles Professional to Morningstar Workstation Enterprise Edition.
--Joel Bruckenstein