With tax season stretching at least to July 15 this year and new rules and regulations governing retirement account withdrawals and taxation, Holistiplan has rolled out a new planning tool that can help advisors more easily optimize their  client’s tax planning.

The new tool, Solve For Max, looks across an end-client’s taxes to determine where additional income may be taken.

“2020 is gong to be a unique income year for a lot of people,” said Roger Pine, co-founder of Holistiplan. “We also see a lot of people looking at the income question when they’re trying to help clients efficiently draw down assets, seeking opportunities to bring income forward through moves like contributions to donor-advised funds.”

With a click of a button, Solve For Max helps advisors understand a tax-optimal way to generate income for their clients, said Kevin Lozer, who co-founded Holistiplan along with Pine. The tool takes into account a full range of clients’ tax implications, including ordinary income, capital gains, net investment income and Social Security. Pine and Lozer are also planning to add some ability to read state and corporate tax returns this year.

Unlike most other tax analysis software, Solve For Max can allow advisors to view a range of potential scenarios rather than inputting different sets of assumptions one-by-one.

“We felt like the process of tinkering with and plugging in different numbers to test outcomes was time consuming,” said Lozer.

Holistiplan allows an advisor to upload a client’s Form 1040 tax return into its system, and the tool automatically delivers a report with metrics and planning opportunities. Tax forms are read using the software’s character recognition capabilities, algorithms and heuristics. A client-facing report is also generated offering a clear, transparent of their tax return, including “hidden” tax numbers like marginal rates and effective rates.

“There’s a lot of good software for strategic financial planning, but a lot of what advisors do day-to-day is more tactical,” said Lozer. “While what I’m doing today has to fit within a larger strategic multi-year plan, the day-to-day activities are an area where there’s still a lot art in our profession. We don’t have normative practice sand tools that allow us to do them well. We hope we’re able to lay down some of those practices and automate them so advisors and firms of any size are able to do them efficiently.”

For example, Holistiplan might prompt advisors to recommend clients set up self-directed retirement plans based on the income information on their Form 1040.

Holistiplan also contains a scenario analysis tool that allows advisors to examine the potential impacts of plan tweaks before they are made. While Holistiplan’s tax return review can identify ideas and opportunities, the scenario analysis tool allows advisors to test assumptions.

Solve For Max takes those capabilities a step further, said Pine.

“The calculations we’re using aren’t a secret, they’re not proprietary for any company, all of us get them from the IRS,” said Pine. “Technically, anyone with a spreadsheet is a competing product. Ultimately, we have to differentiate on our design decisions and ease of use. Solve For Max eliminates the trial and error of planning around with numbers.”

Holistiplan has also moved quickly to keep up with changing laws and strategies involved in the passage of the CARES Act in response to the economic disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

“It’s our job to read through the CARES Act and update the software to handle that above-the-line $300 deduction for charitable giving and tweak the model on AGI limitations on charity,” said Lozer. “Not  only are the laws changing, but the strategies advisors are deploying are changing as well, and we have had to listen carefully to our clients to make sure we’re delivering what they need.”

Pine and Lozer both come from financial planning backgrounds, which they claim has helped them build out a product easier for advisors to use than their competitors.

“We built something we saw a need for in our own practices,” said Pine. “It’s typical for advisors to read a client’s tax return and do a tax return review, it’s a bread-and-butter thing they do this time of year. Our software can do it for them in 30 seconds.”

Holistiplan is offered on a tiered subscription basis, pegged to the number of returns an advisor desires to analyze within a given year.