All client funds and accounts are held by a custodian.  Our trading platform is web-based and tied directly to the custodian for easy account access.  Access to the accounts is available anywhere there is an internet connection by assigned user name and password.  All client accounts can be viewed in a spreadsheet format and sorted by name, account number, money market balance or account balance.  Any account may be detailed providing a view of the current positions within the account, a complete history of transactions and any other account related matter.  All accounts are updated daily.

We assign a unique Financial Advisor number to new advisors that group all their clients for viewing, trading, etc.  We can trade a single account or use the block trading feature, which allows us to purchase a stock or ETF during the course of the day and then allocate to the appropriate accounts at the end of the market day, making it easy to buy and sell with ease and speed.  The more accounts you have, the more valuable block trading becomes.  We can view status to determine outstanding orders to keep track of buy or sell orders including “buy stop” orders and “sell stop” orders.

Also available is block trading for mutual funds, which allows for easy transactions.  With mutual funds, the accounts purchasing the fund must be identified and assigned an investment amount prior to purchase, which is different from the equity block trading method.  There are thousands of mutual funds available, including no load funds, and they are ranked by fund family.  Searches are available by fund name/symbol or you may view the list in alphabetical order. Each fund has a detailed information section identifying purchase cut off times and other fund-related matters including load structure information.

We can view all monthly and year end tax statements sent to client; these reports are organized by client and archived by year and month for easy access.

All forms needed to open up an account and/or service the account are also online and just a mouse click away for our Financial Advisors.

All custodial accounts are downloaded daily and reconciled by our home office.  We can use various custodians and still generate a consolidated statement.  This also allows us to be very flexible and not be locked into just one custodian.  Mergers, acquisitions and management changes can be very disruptive so we have taken the steps necessary to be able to add or change custodians without affecting our whole process.

We can customize and generate reports based upon an advisor’s preferences. As with any database, if there is a data field populated, a report can be customized to view the information.  Primarily, our preference is to see a global transaction report showing all incoming and outgoing transactions, a cash report, a portfolio statement for each account and a performance report showing each account in a spreadsheet format for quick viewing that identifies the returns for various periods such as year to date, quarter to date, month to date and since inception.  There are many additional reports available that may not be needed on a daily or weekly basis.

All reports may be accessed or can be sent via email in pdf format.

Our home office provides for all reporting related to performance and billing.  We can customize a fee schedule and incorporate that into our Client Engagement Agreement and our database for billing purposes.  We can debit client accounts for fees related to account management and transfer to our Sundry account located at the custodian.  All of this is already in place for our fee based money management services that we provide.  Our pay system is weekly for collected fees to our advisors.

Currently, we can customize all reports and provide advisors with access or email distribution.

We designed and developed a customized contact management program that is a web based, single user stand alone or multi-user SQL server program.  We use it exclusively in our firm for managing all our contacts, scheduling, notes, tasks, billing, email, documents, etc.  It was custom designed by a financial professional for a financial practice.  It has all the normal contact management features such as categorizing and search capability, but it also has a trade blotter, which contains the transaction purchases history for each client along with your compensation.  It makes it quick for an advisor or any staff member to click on a contact, then click on trade blotter to view a complete history of all purchases along with date of purchase, product or service identification and amount of the purchase.  It also contains fields for custodian names, account number and other miscellaneous information.  Many times we will have a client call and ask a question concerning a past purchase.  Prior to the development of the trade blotter feature, we would have had to pull the client portfolio file and search through file folders to answer their questions.  Now it is as simple as a couple of mouse clicks and is available to everyone in the office with access to Practice Manager.

Practice Manager has been in development for the past four years and we have a programmer that wrote all the programming code to support the program.  We can make adjustments to the program that would continue to add value based upon our daily usage and/or feedback from our advisors.  We want to continue to add features and functionality that is customized to our financial practice and makes life easier for our advisors and their staff.

Trackfolio is another program designed and developed by our firm.  It is an asset evaluation program designed to provide a real life consolidated portfolio statement.  It can list all the assets of a client that may not be held at our fee based custodial account and thus would not be in our portfolio reporting.  It may contain bank accounts, alternative investments that are not publicly traded such as non-publicly traded real estate investment trusts, limited partnerships, tax credit programs, oil and gas programs, equipment leasing, and/or fixed annuities to name just a few examples.  An advisor could quickly input the assets of a client and generate a Net Worth statement faster than using a spreadsheet.  It allows for classifying each asset for evaluation purposes.  It was also designed to provide a simple method of providing reports to our clients.  Each asset can be classified by custodian name and account number or by grouping all non-qualified accounts into a “Non-Qualified” category for a report that groups all assets and sub-totals balances by custodian and account number.  Since clients receive statements from each of their custodians, banks, etc., we wanted a consolidated report that listed the assets and provided a balance for each account.  It also helps us when comparing client statements with our reports for accuracy and completeness verification.

As mentioned in the Practice Manager section, if a client wanted to know about past purchases, we could simply access the trade blotter, but that only lists the past purchases and does not deal with current asset balances.  With Trackfolio, we can access the client current holdings along with balances.  If a client calls in and wants to discuss an investment, we can quickly access the client account in Trackfolio and immediately view all current assets and balances as of the last date updated; we generally update quarterly and provide a consolidated report to each of our clients.

If the client were inquiring about their fee based money managed account, we could simply access the account directly over the internet and view all assets and balances directly at the custodian, with the prices being current as of the previous day.  But many times, the questions come from assets owned by the client that are not part of the fee based service and thus Trackfolio provides the solution.

We generate reports from Trackfolio that include a Custodian Summary report and a Qualified Asset report (that totals all qualified assets by client).  We use the Qualified Asset report for generating required minimum distribution calculations, etc. for our clients.  We also include a Net Worth statement along with various other reports that can be generated.  Assets can be viewed by asset class, risk, liquidity, qualified/non-qualified, if qualified the type of qualified plan, tax, product type (LP’s, mutual funds, individual title, REITs, Insurance, etc.).

Trackfolio and Practice Manager are interfaced so that if I am talking to a client and viewing the note history, of our past discussions, in Practice Manager, I could click load assets and immediately be in Trackfolio viewing the client’s current holdings.  Trackfolio also allows an advisor to enter and retain assets originally transferred in an archive file.  It allows an advisor to enter assets in the initial analysis stage of the prospect meeting, then move those assets to the audit section of Trackfolio and alter the balance (sell it and replace it with a recommended asset-hypothetically) or reduce the amount, etc. then the completed audit changes can be moved to the proposed section of Trackfolio to view how the portfolio would look with the changes recommended.  The advisor may make adjustments until the proposed changes are completed.  The reporting function in Trackfolio allows for a Current vs. Proposed (side by side) comparison in order to view how the changes would affect liquidity or any other classification that may be of interest.  This could be helpful to the advisor in developing the appropriate recommendations and/or helpful in presenting to the client a comparison of existing assets vs. proposed changes to their portfolio.

Our IT person is a Cornel graduate, past general securities principal, and is Microsoft certified.  He has been affiliated with the firm for several years.  He is involved in supporting our IT efforts and helping with new advisor additions.  We have him constantly working on projects that can improve our support to our advisors and making life easier on everyone.

Our programmer has been with the firm for four years and has spent an enormous amount of time and energy in helping us develop and complete our firm software.  He is committed to continuous software development tasks and technology improvements that will keep our firm at the forefront technologically.  We feel that we are a small company with big technology.  Our clients and advisors benefit from our focused effort in the retirement market, our large custodians for holding client assets, our customized technology, and our small firm attitude of getting it done.