Release Notes: Financial Planning

You can now customize and promote your own unique messaging and approach to behavioral finance within Orion Planning. This enhancement provides you a more flexible, personalized experience to support investor behavior conversations by enabling you to customize headlines, the number of buckets that will be displayed (2, 3 or 4), and the titles and descriptions of those buckets. In addition, you can drag and drop asset types across buckets and preview any changes before saving.

We’ve expanded the number of clients/accounts you can service by adding an input for you to model deferred compensation plans more specifically. This enhancement complements our current menu of deferred compensation account types e.g. 457, 401 (k), 403 (b) and better accommodates your retirement accounts that include this kind of asset.

Within Orion Planning, users can model up to four planning scenarios side-by-side to illustrate the impact of different variables on a financial plan. With this latest development, users now have the ability to display the compare plans results in our customizable, downloadable PDF report. 

We have enhanced our cash flow and balance sheet viewing experience. Regardless of the number of rows that have been expanded, users can always stay oriented to the rolling year and client ages while viewing these detailed reports.

Orion Planning’s client list has been updated so you now have an option to filter your plans between clients and prospects. The design of the list has also been updated so the names of your clients are easier to read. Both of these updates are based on feedback from our users and we expect to make more enhancements to the client list in the future! 

Clients have the ability to answer a risk tolerance questionnaire inside of Orion Planning and now the questions, answers and score are available to be added as part of the PDF you can generate to present a financial plan to your clients and prospects. These pages will be part of our default template and you can also add this page to your custom templates as well. 

As a part of our continued efforts to rebrand Advizr to Orion Planning, the Advizr app in Orion Connect has been renamed to Orion Planning.

Each new tax year ahead ushers in a host of planning changes and updates. Included in this release are updates to marginal tax brackets for earned income, standard deductions, retirement and HSA contribution limits, and social security earnings limits and bend points. These updates will occur in early January 2022.

Orion Planning has added JP Morgan’s 2022 forward-looking Long-Term Capital Market Assumptions. In addition to being able to customize these CMAs at the firm level, clients can still enjoy the ability to revert to the 2020 and 2021 assumptions. These updates will occur in early January 2022, followed closely by updates to historical return data. 

We have added a Roth Conversion What-If to our retirement goal. This will give advisors the ability to show clients the impact of converting up to a certain tax bracket, doing a recurring dollar amount conversion or a lump sum conversion. An output will also appear once the Roth Conversion What-If is applied to the plan. We have also added a Roth Conversion column to our Advanced Reports functionality. Please note, the Roth Conversion output is not available as part of our PDF yet and we hope to release that in the coming months.

Users will now have the ability to import their models from Orion Connect directly into Orion Planning to use for financial planning purposes. 

In Orion Planning you’ve always been able to use our What Ifs to create multiple plan scenarios. Now you will be able to highlight up to 4 plans on one page and show the clients how changing key assumptions will impact their overall plan success. Please note, the Side by Side Comparison will only be available for the Retirement Goal initially and we will look to add this comparison for other goals in the future. The ability to include this comparison page will not be available in the PDF but we will look to add this option in the near future as well.

In Orion Planning you have the ability to create custom outputs using our Advanced Reports functionality and then include these reports in your PDF output. Based on feedback we received, we improved the text color to be darker so that it is easier to read.

Orion linked accounts will now sync the custodian name as it appears in Orion Connect into the financial institution field in Orion Planning. For accounts with DST, DTCC, Fund Direct, Byall or Quovo listed as the custodian in Orion Connect we will now bring over the fund family field from Orion Connect to make it easier for clients to identify the financial institution their accounts are held at. 

Previously when updating a what-if in a retirement goal, the Monte Carlo result that calculated upon making the change would recalculate after clicking “Apply To Plan”. With this update, the result that appears after updating the what-if will remain even after applying to the plan.

As part of our continued integration of the legacy Advizr platform into Orion’s technology suite, we have updated the branding in the Planning web application to reflect the name “Orion Planning.” We will continue to make updates to other logos and verbiage over the coming months.