Tech Review: How can Intelligent Office help your business?

This week, Mark Loosmore of AT8 Group looks at the planning tools built into Intelliflo’s practice management solution, Intelligent Office.

We have reviewed a number of the leading financial planning offerings over the past few months and while many of these are best in class standalone solutions, they have been lacking integration to a wider advice process.

Other solutions are integrated to a number of third parties but there is an increasing tendency to provide planning modules within the holistic practice management solutions from vendors such as Avelo, JCS and Prestwood.

This week’s review focuses on IntelliFlo, one of the leading practice management providers and its planning tools within Intelligent Office (IO).

One-stop solution

The benefits of an integrated solution are clear. Data need only be entered once and is reused throughout the process saving time and removing some of the potential data entry errors.

When the practice management system has strong electronic contract enquiry links to keep the portfolio up to date (as Intelligent Office does), the reuse of data is particularly powerful as all financial planning is done on current, up to date information collated with minimal effort.

As well as the reuse of data advantage, having a consistent user interface across the IT infrastructure is a significant advantage.

Often, planning and practice management systems can be quite complicated and a consistency of approach can reduce the headaches that so often lead to systems being left ‘on the shelf’ or only part used due to user frustration and lack of buy in.

Useful extras

Intelligent Office has a number of useful additions to support the financial planning process. One such addition is the inclusion of fund research, which is powered by data from Financial Express.

The funds can be viewed by a basic set of filters designed to be quick and easy to use or a more in-depth set of criteria for the more analytical adviser.

The addition of basic filtering is a recent improvement resulting from user feedback.

Sometimes, tools that have sophisticated capabilities can be too complex for many to use and may be a barrier to user adoption.

Having a choice of a simple process and a sophisticated option should meet the needs of a broader set of users.

Within the IO fact find there is an attitude to risk (ATR) questionnaire and asset allocation tool.

The tool is a little hidden, being an intrinsic part of the fact find. We would prefer it to be more obvious and available as a standalone tool but this should not put off experienced IO users.