The big news today is about the rollout of Investment Policy Statements in Nitrogen, but we have three other improvements that are either live in your account, or are in the process of rolling out to you.
First, we designed the client profile to make managing portfolios simpler. We have a lot of features coming down the pike that rely on knowing which portfolio is which. We had introduced a way to “tag” portfolios as active, target or existing, but ultimately, that required work on the part of the advisor.
Today’s redesign eliminates that work by introducing a simpler structure. Your prospects can only have one existing and one target portfolio at a time. Your active clients can only have one active and one target portfolio at a time.
This will be a much easier way to manage client portfolios in the future. Our existing customers may need to make a few adjustments in the transition. Here are some tips.
- The most recent active, target or existing portfolios (by date) will be the ones that you see when you open the client profile. Any older ones are still there! Just click “Show History” and you can still access the older ones.
- If an older one should be the current portfolio, just duplicate it. It’s newer date will put it at the top of the list and make it the current one.
- You may have some portfolios that had no “tag” at all. They are temporarily under a section in that client profile called “Portfolios to Sort.” As you need to, it takes just a couple of clicks to sort those portfolios into the right section. We know there are some advisors who keep multiple active portfolios to track accounts separately (e.g. 401K, IRA, college savings). 90%+ of our advisors don’t follow that approach and household all of the accounts together before bringing them into Nitrogen for analysis. Ultimately, we had to make this choice to keep the product simple and easy to use. If you prefer to keep things separate, that’s no problem at all — just add a label to the client’s last name like (401K) — and then make a new client for (IRA), etc. Then, shoot us a quick email to [email protected] and we’ll help you move the portfolios from one client profile to another.
Simplified client profiles definitely make Nitrogen more delightful and easier to use, but we’re also excited about the features that we can build by understanding more about the data you’re putting into Nitrogen. Stay tuned.
Second, we’ve transitioned our reporting engine to PDF format. This was a big technical lift, but a very needed one. We had more than a few customers struggling with long portfolios that didn’t have very intelligent page breaks, etc. There still may be a few tweaks that we can make to improve each report, but now we have the technical framework to make it possible.
If you go to a client with an active or target portfolio and click the Print IPS button, you’ll definitely be seeing the new print functionality. It pops open a new tab and generates a PDF file that you can either print, save to your desktop or your CRM, or email to a client.
If you’re not seeing a PDF yet on the Portfolio or Risk Questionnaire reports, the upgrade just hasn’t rolled out to you yet. We should be at 100% by Thursday.
Third, we’ve added checklists. At the bottom of a client profile, you’ll see a simple, self-completing checklist for the common steps advisors do with Nitrogen for prospect meetings or client reviews. Every advisor’s process is a bit different, but this is a nice way to see at a glance what the typical next step is for each prospect or client.
The last step of the checklist is when you complete your meeting with the client, and it’s a quick simple way to update the client’s status and activate monitoring for the right portfolio.
We hope you love all of the new enhancements. There’s a lot more on the way, including some of your most-requested features. Stay tuned!