Our Q1 product release is right around the corner, so it’s time to check out all of the new enhancements, tweaks, and other updates that will make a difference for your firm.
Read on to discover your next favorite Orion Connect feature. Whether it’s leveraging our new employee trade monitoring tool to satisfy Code of Ethics obligations or prospecting business owners looking to sell their businesses in the near future, we’re sure you’ll find something to love in the notes below.
Advisor Experience
When you need to get something done in Orion, timeliness is key. This month, we’re updating some of our app names to make it more clear what each one does.
Highlights
- We changed the names of a few apps for an enhanced advisor experience: Rep Portal → Advisor Portal, Compass → Compliance, Integrations Center → Integrations, Project Management → Onboarding, Data Queries → Query, Interface Reconciliation → Reconciliation Status, Engage → Video Statements
How to Get There: Orion Connect Home Screen
- We added the ability to filter participants on the Plan Editor in the Firm Profile app.
How to Get There: Orion Connect > Firm Profile > Qualified Plans > Select Plan > Right Click > Edit Plan > Participants
Billing & Composites
Highlights
- We removed the stipulation that all billed accounts must be active. Although sleeves can be closed within a registration—in the event they should no longer be included with trading,—those sleeves still need to be billed.
How to Get There: Bill Generator > Live/Forecast Bills > Choose method from dropdown
- We updated the Billed Market Value (BMV) column in the Household Bills tab in Portfolio Audit to include only the individual HH’s BMV instead of the entire bill instance’s BMV.
How to Get There: Orion Connect > Portfolio Audit > Household Level Edit Screen > Household Bills Tab > Billed Market Value
Additional Billing Updates
- Advisors now have the ability to validate/invalidate a bill instance by right clicking on the instance in the Bill Generator. Currently, this process must be completed by the billing team using a data query.
How to Get There: Orion Connect > Bill Generator > Bill Instance - In the Posted Payments app, an Advisor will now have the opportunity to enter notes, which will help with tracking the status of an outstanding receivable.
How to Get There: Orion Connect > Post Payments
Compliance
Keep better track of your employees’ trade activity with the launch of Inform. This new compliance tool makes it easy for your firm to maintain its Code of Ethics obligations. Sign up for our upcoming Inform webinar here.
Highlights
- Inform enables compliance officers to automate employee trade monitoring, while leveraging the data already maintained in Orion Connect to efficiently and proactively identify potential violations*. What’s more, advisory firms can monitor employee trade activity with access to more than one thousand custodians. Inform provides an audit trail to confirm compliance with Code of Ethics obligations, which can be sent to the SEC upon request.
How to Get There: Orion Connect > Compliance > InformContact Compliance@Orionadvisor.com for more details. *Available for an additional cost.
Integrations
Your value-add services to clients are seriously growing with this month’s integration updates. A new partnership with BizEquity, which provides business valuation insights, can transform your client offering through your Client Portal.
Highlights
- BizEquity’s business valuation tools provide an opportunity for Orion advisors to provide this information to their clients to create a more comprehensive financial picture. BizEquity’s business valuation questionnaire and analysis are now available in Orion’s Client Portal. To enable the integration, toggle BizEquity to “On” in the integrations tab of your settings.
How to Get There: Orion Connect > Client Portal > Tools - We now provide advisors single sign-on into BizEquity’s lead generation platform to access business valuation reports and prospect private business owners.
How to Get There: Orion Connect > BizEquity - Orion’s integration with Tolerisk provides advisors with access to risk tolerance assessment tools that measure the end-client’s willingness and ability to take investment risk by incorporating their cash flows. All factors are combined into a simple, measurable, and actionable risk directive. With this integration Orion users can load clients from Orion into Tolerisk, send PDF reports from Tolerisk to Orion, and access the Tolerisk Score and Probability of Running Out of Money reports in the Client Portal. To enable the integration, toggle Tolerisk to “On” in the integrations tab of your settings. Orion users also receive a discount on Tolerisk services using code: OrionAdvisor.
How to Get There: Orion Connect > Client Portal > Tools
- Practifi is the business management platform for financial advice. As an integrated industry solution, Practifi was built to help advisors better connect with their clients, increase business efficiency and to give them the tools to grow. The platform combines clients’ financial goals, risk profile, cash flow, assets, debt and insurances into a single, unified view, while offering integrations with a wide variety of partners to help advisors strengthen their business ecosystems. By joining forces with Practifi, advisors can view all of their Orion Accounts and Holding information from within the Practifi client record and summarize account performance instantly in the Insights Dashboard. Additionally, Orion features standard to our Salesforce can be made available in Practifi.How to Get There: This integrations lives on the PractiFi platform.
- We added a single sign-on (SSO) to Nexa Insights to allow advisors to research client opinions and evolve their practices
How to Get There: Orion Connect > Nexa Insight
Recon & Dashboards 
Sometimes, it’s the little things that create the biggest results. With the addition of new information to track on securities and more columns to sort and filter by in various apps, we’re improving on your ability to feel secure in knowing that all your data is up-to-date and accurate.
Highlights
- We built a tool to allow advisors to import the master client list on their own with a wizard to walk them through any data that may need to be created prior to import (e.g. reps, custodians, reg types, etc).
How to Get There: Orion Connect > New Accounts Center > Tools > Master Client List Wizard - Advisors can now filter on securities—held as of a specific date—that are missing Risk Categories. This functionality is similar to how advisors can filter on securities that are missing Asset Classes in the Products and Prices App.
How to Get There: Orion Connect > Products & Prices App > Missing Risk Categories
- For the BNY Mellon Pershing interface, we updated the transaction file processing logic, allowing Orion to distinguish between share exchanges and share class interchange activity types.
Additional Reconciliation Updates
- We created Audited Date and Audited By columns for asset classes and asset categories to provide clearer and more actionable information in the Products and Prices App.
How to Get There: Orion Connect > Products & Prices > Asset Classes/Categories Section - We added the following new columns to the Tax Center App: Account Created Date, Custodian, and Qualified.
How to Get There: Orion Connect > Tax Center > Audit Pages - We added the ability to mark records as “Reviewed” or “Not Reviewed” for users to see which tax lot audits they have already previously reviewed.
How to Get There: Orion Connect > Tax Lot Audits > Custodian Realized > Status Column, Tax Lot Audits > Custodian Unrealized > Status Column
Reporting
Even though we released an all-new Report Builder last quarter, we’re still making improvements to our reporting solutions. Check them out below.
Highlights
- We created the ability to add a Table of Contents to your custom reports, allowing you to easily navigate through different sections of your reports.
How to Get There: Orion Connect > Reporting > Custom Reports > New Report > Layout > Table of Contents Entry
- Advisors can now change the Unmanaged Accounts title in the Client Portal, allowing them to align the wording in the Client Portal with their custom reports.
How to Get There: Client Portal > Admin > Portfolio > Unmanaged Accounts Tile
- We created a new Annualized Performance Table that includes activity and performance returns.
How to Get There: Orion Connect > Reporting > New Report Builder > Sub Report Tab
Trading
While we’re excited to share some big improvements to Eclipse™ trading next quarter, we still have an update for you now. Also, if you haven’t checked out one of our Eclipse™ trading webinars, we highly recommend doing so here.
Highlights
- In Eclipse™ trading, we have added the ability for equity/ETF trades to be created for a fractional share amount. This can be set by custodian, since certain custodians do not allow fractional shares to be executed.
How to Get There: Orion Connect > Eclipse™ > Administrator > Custodians
READY TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF ORION’S LATEST ENHANCEMENTS?
All of the improvements you’ve read about in today’s article, plus many more will be coming to you when the Orion software update rolls out on February 23rd.
To learn more about how to scale your firm with these new enhancements, sign up for our upcoming product release webinar on March 5th, 2018.
0144-OAS-2/20/2019